John Oliver Simon is a fifth-generation Californian born in New York City in 1942. His maternal great-great-grandather, Henry Perrin Coon, was Mayor of San Francisco from 1863 to 1867, and his great-grandfather, Emil Kehrlein, was arrested in 1899 for maintaining a house of ill repute, the Hotel Nympharium, the largest whorehouse on the Barbary Coast. His grandfather Oliver Kehrlein was a mountain climber and long-time director of the Sierra Club who has a Minaret in the Sierra Nevada named after him, and his mother, Frances Adler, a life-long radical activist, was arrested at age 78 for protesting against apartheid.
John Oliver Simon wrote his first poem at the age of 14 under a full moon and has dedicated himself to poetry - writing, then teaching and finally translating it — for over fifty years. He was encouraged in his early poetic effusions by teachers Jeffrey Campbell at The Putney School and Daniel Hoffman at Swarthmore College. He arrived in the Bay Area to study English Lit at UC Berkeley in September 1964, just in time to sit down on Sproul Plaza in the crowd surrounding the police car with Jack Weinberg in the back seat in what would become the Free Speech Movement. He dropped out of grad school, drove taxi in Oakland, backpacked around Europe and the Middle East, and returned to Berkeley to work with Charles Potts, Richard Krech and his then-partner Alta, among others, in the momentous Berkeley poetry events of the spring of 1968.
John began teaching poetry to young people in a California Poets In The Schools (CPITS) workshop at Oakland High School in the spring of 1971. When he gave the students a deck of word-cards and got the line "I'm the Neanderthal Man. I spread my wings and make things happen," he came to believe that poetry was in everyone, only needing permission to burst into flame. Ninth-grade juvenile offender Patrick Nersesian was stuck in his poetry class at Mount Diablo HS in Concord in April 1974 because he was cutting everything else. That first day, he wrote "I know who I am and it's not the postman's son." Patrick learned to read in order to decipher his own writing, participated in the PW for two years, got his B.A. from New York University and today is at work on a memoir of his lock-up days.
John served 1978-81 as CPITS Statewide Coordinator, training poets to work in classrooms and communities from San Diego to Humboldt and tripling the program's budget for poetry workshops in the three years after the passage of Proposition 13. In 1982, he dreamed up an art, history, and natural science poetry curriculum with a California focus based in the Oakland Museum's three galleries, taught over a four-year run by a crew of poets whom he recruited including devorah major, Opal Palmer Adisa, Dorianne Laux, Carolyn Leilani-Lau, Judith Tannenbaum and Tobey Kaplan.
John fell in love with the Spanish language at age 39, and began a travelling and translating odyssey that has lasted for over two decades. He became fluent by talking with the poets, who never shut up. It was a natural extension of the Oakland Museum collaboration to propose a series of poetry workshops in the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City. In 1986 John and Chicano poet Roberto Bedoya worked with nine local poets in area schools and the galleries of the Museo. His greatest thrill as a teacher was giving 60 chilango sixth-graders the assignment of writing poems about the recent devastating earthquake, standing under the Stone of the Sun with its deep meaning of the destruction of worlds.
John has published over 400 translations of work by Latin American poets, and is well represented in the important anthologies of contemporary Mexican poetry, Light from a Nearby Window (City Lights) and Reversible Monuments (Copper Canyon), as well as the recent New World/New Words (Center for the Art of Translation). He was awarded an NEA Literature Fellowship in Translation in 2001 for his work with the great Chilean poet Gonzalo Rojas. Red Dragonfly Press in Minnesota released Velocities of the Possible, a letterpress hand-sewn edition of twelve Rojas/Simon poems, in 2000. From the Lightning, a generous Rojas collection, is due out any day now from Green Integer, while Ghosts of the Palace of Blue Tiles, a chapbook of translations of the wonderful young Mexican poet Jorge Fernández Granados, will be published by Tameme in January, 2008.
Wanting to get his hands dirty, John taught second/third and then fifth/sixth combination for nine years at La Escuelita in East Oakland in a portable that leaked in December and roasted in June. He had seven different primary languages at a time in the classroom, most of them Spanish. He brought important poets as Alberto Blanco and Jorge Luján up from Mexico to perform at the school before hundreds of kids. Several times in recent years, young adults have come up to him in Oakland, saying "Mr. Simon, you don't remember me, but I'm Erica - or Miyesha or Catarina - and I just graduated from U.C. Davis - or Hayward," higher education never a given in that neighborhood.
John left his teaching post in Oakland in 1995 and took a year travelling down through Latin America by second-class bus and one-star hotel, meeting poets, giving over 30 readings of his own work in Spanish (including the Festival at Medellín, Colombia, where he read to over 5,000 people in an outdoor auditorium, listening patiently in the rain). Across this voyage he wrote a book-length poem, Caminante, consisting of 131 eight-line poems, each with a prose commentary. Pulitzer Prize winner Gary Snyder calls Caminante "a major poem, gritty and elegant, hard-earned, oriented by stars and late night conversations on the long road. John O., like an old time Chinese poet, weaves through history, politics, poverty, geography, poetry, spirit, friendship, love, learning, style and deep mind; while travelling a continent. Terse drifting lyric poems of eight lines each, and each one in a compelling contra dance with its own 'comentario.' The commentaries also are poems of sly lyric turns - the realism of magic - the illusions of information. I was held almost breathless by this sequence from start to end. 'Playing ball in the underworld, circling the fire according to the rhythms of the stars.'"
John Oliver Simon now works as Artistic Director of Poetry Inside Out (PIO), a project of the Center for Art in Translation. PIO is the first program - and still the only one on the planet, as far as we know - that teaches literary translation to young people with the goal of furthering their own poetic creativity. In the last six years, twenty-four PIO students have been selected as finalists in the national River of Words contest, including two Grand Prize winners.
One of John's poems, "Caffe Mediterraneum," is engraved on a bronze plaque on the sidewalk of Addison Street, in the Berkeley Poetry Walk. His daughter, Kia Simon, is a prize-winning filmmaker, and he has partnered for eighteen years with poet and domestic violence counselor Rebecca Parfitt of De Kalb, Illinois. John lives with his gray cat Dusty at the end of a long virtual dirt road under a redwood tree in the heart of Berkeley.
John has had over 700 poems and translations published from 1965-2007 in journals in the USA and abroad including Abraxas, Agni, Alcatraz, Aldebaran Review, American Poetry Review, Americas Review, Anemone, Approach, Arsenic Lobster, Avalanche, Artful Dodge, Bastard Review, Berkeley Poetry Review, Big Bridge, The Bitter Oleander, Blue Window, Buckle &, Cafe Review, La Cachora (Mexico), Caliban, California Poets In The Schools statewide anthologies (several), California Quarterly, Catalyst, Centering, Che (Argentina), Chelsea, Chelsea Hotel (Germany), Cimarron Review, Circumference, City Lights Review, Comala (Mexico), Compages, Contact II, Crab Orchard Review, Crazy River, 400 Elefantes (Nicaragua), Deepest Valley Review, Dirty Goat, Drumvoices, 89 Cents, Elysian Fields Quarterly, Epicenter, eXchanges, Exit 13, Factor (Mexico), Five Fingers Review, Folio, Gaceta Literaria (Argentina), Galley Sail Review, Great River Review, Green Integer, Guadalupe Review, Haight-Ashbury Literary Quarterly, Hand to Mouth, Hanging Loose, Heartlodge, Hojas de Utopía (Mexico), Imaginari, International Poetry Review, Interregno (Colombia), Jack, La Jornada (Mexico), Kasandra (Costa Rica), Kyoi/Kuksu, Lactuca, Leanfrog, Luna, Lyric, Mandorla, The Magazine of Speculative Poetry, Mindprint Review, MIPOesias, Modern Haiku, Molodaya Guardia (Russia), Monserrat Review, Mount Aukum Review, NEW, Nimrod, Obligatory Hug, OntheBus, Owlflight, Parthenon West, Passport, Periódico de Poesía (Mexico), Piel de Leopardo (Chile), Pikestaff Forum, Poet News, Poetry Flash, Poetry Motel, Poetry Now, Poetry SF, Poetry USA, Poets On, Poly, Prairie Schooner, La Prensa Literaria (Nicaragua), Processed World, Puerto del Sol, Rain City Review, Red Dirt, Redstart, Reed, Review of Latin American Literature, Rhino, River City, Rohwedder, Runes, Salamander, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Santa Clara Review, Sculpture Gardens Review, El Semanario (Mexico), Shocks, Shock's Bridge, Slow Motion, Solo, Sonoma Mandala, Speechless, Starline, Temple, Término, Terra Incognita, Thirteen, Thunder Sandwich, Tiempo Fuegio (Tierra del Fuego), Tight, La Tribuna (Nicaragua), Turnrow, Two Ages, Two Lines, El Universal (Mexico), Unomásuno (Mexico), Velvet Wings, Virtual Roc, Velocities, Visions, Voices of Mexico (Mexico), Wandering Hermit Review, West Sonoma County Paper, Windhorse Review, Words Without Borders and Zyzzyva.