The Fresno Poets’ Association

The Fresno Poets’ Association was founded around 1980 by the poet Chuck Moulton. Initially its purpose was more social than literary; it provided an excuse for local writers to gather once or twice a year for a picnic. When the Bixler brothers opened the Wild Blue Yonder night club in the Tower District, they wanted to host occasional poetry readings, and Chuck Moulton began to promote members of the FPA as readers at the club. Eventually Jacquelin Pilar, the curator of the Fresno Art Museum, also became involved in the FPA, and some of the readings began to be held in the Bonner Auditorium at the Fresno Art Museum. After a change in ownership of the Wild Blue Yonder, the FPA reading series made the Fresno Art Museum its permanent home. Since 1994, the reading series has been directed by the poet C.G. Hanzlicek.

C.G. Hanzlicek

C.G. Hanzlicek was born in Owatonna, Minnesota, in 1942. He received a B.A. from the University of Minnesota in 1964 and an M.F.A. from the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1966. He is the author of eight books of poetry: Living in It, Stars (winner of the 1977 Devins Award for Poetry), Calling the Dead, A Dozen for Leah, When There Are No Secrets, Mahler: Poems and Etchings, Against Dreaming, and, most recently, The Cave: Selected and New Poems, which appeared in 2001 from University of Pittsburgh Press. He has translated Native American Songs, A Bird’s Companion, and poems from the Czech, Mirroring: Selected Poems of Vladimir Holan, which won the Robert Payne Award from the Columbia University Translation Center in 1985. His work has appeared in over a dozen anthologies and in many journals, including Poetry, Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Southern Review, North American Review, Hudson Review, and Iowa Review. In the summer of 2001, he retired from California State University Fresno, where he taught for 35 years and was for most of those years the Director of the Creative Writing Program. He has been the director of the Fresno Poets’ Association reading series since 1994.

Colophon

This web site has been lovingly hand-crafted using nothing more than a text editor and Photoshop. While it’s only been around a short while, the Fresno Poets’ Association web site is now in its third iteration. Version 1 was mostly quick and dirty; the idea for the website was only hatched a short time before the season began and so what appeared was a stripped down, albeit functional and elegantly simple, web site with a focus on simply establishing an internet presence. It was with Version 2 that we got the chance to think more about design and a balancing of form and function. It was described by some as “elegant” and “sophisticated,” and with the core being totally rewritten using strict XHTML and CSS, it was a vast improvement, technology-wise, over the frame-based original.

It was not, however, without its flaws. While the javascript it used to make some of the magic happen was fairly minimal, those viewing the site with javascript disabled were at a distinct disadvantage. Also, the entire site was composed of static, HTML-based pages. With the explosion of blogging, dynamic Content Management is the new name of the game, and it is primarily for this reason that we now have Version 3.

With this new version the entire site has been again completely re-designed and re-aligned. Site navigation has been reworked (and simplified) and the entire site makes use of PHP and MySQL databases, allowing for easy, dynamic updates via the Content Management System.

Of course, the look and feel has changed dramatically as well. While Version 2 was a pleasure to look at, with Version 3 we attempted to make the site’s aesthetic more closely match its content and mission. The FPA is, after all, about books and words and the people who create and shape them. This is not a new endeavor, to say the least. In fact, in terms of production and technology, almost nothing has changed since the first poets stood and recited their poems to whomever would listen. A reading is beautifully and unapologetically low-tech.

With this in mind, we took our design cues from what many consider to be the golden age of American poetry, from the late 19th to the mid 20th Century, from the days of Whitman, Dickinson, Eliot, & Frost through Roethke, Lowell, Berryman, & Bishop, from the waning of the Victorian to the birth of the Modern. We sincerely hope you enjoy your experience at fresnopoets.org.

Tools Used

• Made on a Mac
• Hand coded with skEdit
• All graphic elements produced in Photoshop
• Published with Textpattern
• Site hosting by Dreamhost