Dr. Mark Linenthal Jr.

1921 - 2010

Mark Linenthal jr., 88, much loved teacher, community builder, poet and hunter, died peacefully on September 5 surrounded by his family. Health problems made his last few years difficult but he will be remembered as someone extraordinarily alive. His own father said about Mark "I don't know anyone else who gets as much enjoyment out of life."
Born in Boston, Mass. Nov. 12, 1921 to Mark and Anna Linenthal, he was younger brother to Margaret and Michael. At 7, an award of Best Kiddet Camper at summer camp was an early sign that Mark was a highly social outdoorsman. Hunting trips with neighbors were his introduction to a life long passion. Mark's love of hunting was unusual in poetry circles but for him hunting made a connection with nature that was at the heart of his ecological beliefs. He went on to help found the San Francisco Green Party and to support ecological causes.
Mark graduated from Roxbury Latin School and then from Harvard University as a political science major. At Harvard, Norman Mailer was a classmate and Mark met and married Radcliffe student Alice Adams. They would divorce in 1958 and Alice later became a well known short story writer and novelist. Mark later served in the Air Force as navigator in a B24 bomber during WWII. Shot down over Germany on his first mission in 1944, he was held in a Prisoner of War camp on the Baltic Sea. Conditions were spartan, not terrible, but it was frightening when Mark and all the Jewish prisoners were separated from the others and held until liberation by the Russians. During his imprisonment, Mark was able to read in the camp's library and said that E. M. Forster's Howard's End changed his life. The book convinced him to return to Harvard and get a masters in English. Mark described Forster as "...a social progressive and a nature mystic. He wrote about people I knew, that I could believe in."
Mark and Alice moved to Paris. He took classes at the Sorbonne on the G.I. Bill. Norman Mailer arranged a trip to Spain for Mark and Alice. They brought money with them to help writers in the resistance, smuggling it over the border in a toothpaste tube.
Graduate work at Stanford University made for a move to California, a move he found crucial, saying "On the east coast you live in time; on the west coast, in space." At Stanford, he studied under the formidable Yvor Winters. Mark's son, Peter Adams Linenthal , was born in 1951. Peter remembers Mark as "...the best father in the world, and I think he was a great father to many, many people." Mark began teaching at San Francisco State College in 1954 and would teach in the Creative Writing Department there until 1992. He was an extremely gifted teacher, playful and serious, never pedantic, totally approachable, overflowing with lively examples, and able to help students discover what they were trying to say. He often recited his favorite poems in their entirety by heart in class, never tiring of Donne's Riding Westward, Hopkin's The Windhover, Stevens's Sunday Morning, and Oppen's The Little Hole, always finding something new to say about them. He really inhabited these poems. During the trial over censoring Allen Ginsberg's poem, Howl, Mark testified that the poem was not obscene and that it had "...changed the expectations of what a poem could be."
He was director of the Poetry Center at State from 1966-1972 and had important friendships with George Oppen, Stan Rice, Anne Rice,Kathleen Fraser,Beverly Dahlen, Jim LeCuyer, Rob Halpern, Herbert Blau, Anatole Anton,Whitney Chadwick, Peter Berg, Art Bierman, Bob Hass, Joyce Jenkins, Huey Johnson, R.G. Davis, Herbert Wilner, Mark Harris and many others. In the student strike of 1968-69, he sided with the students in protests that led to the creation of Black and Ethnic Studies Departments. While director, he worked with Julia Vose of Poetry in the Schools and Dr. Harry Weinstein of Mt. Zion Hospital in developing the Writer in Residence in the Community Program. For 11 years the program offered seniors and cancer patients poetry writing events. Poetry was offered as original art that patients could make of what they liked, rather than as a good-for-you pill. Mark worked with film maker David Myers on a film portrait of poet Theodore Roethke, In a Dark Time. Poet and teacher Kathleen Fraser remembers that in the 1970s "Mark was one of 3 guys on the 20 guy/1 woman Creative Writing Dept. faculty to give unequivocal support to the Women Writers Union in their polite but firm request to study more modernist women writers as Major Authors and helped us win this opening of dialog." Mark and philosophy professor Anatole Anton co-taught The First Person in Poetry and Philosophy, a class which found connections between two subjects not often paired. In 1987 at S.F. State, Mark performed in The Life of the Automobile, R.G. Davis' adaptation for the stage of Ilya Ehrenburg's socialist novel.
In 1959 Mark married Frances Pain and became stepfather to her sons Lincoln, Duncan and Louis Pain. Louis recently wrote, "Mark enthusiastically supported my highly questionable decision to become a musician. I won the lottery when Mark Linenthal decided to marry my mom." Mark and Frances' marriage was strong and dynamic. Frances met Mark as a devoted student, then grew to become an eminent poet and feminist scholar, writing under her maiden name, Frances Jaffer. She was co-founder of the magazine HOW(ever). Frances challenged what seemed patriarchal in Mark's assumptions. Their marriage survived and deepened. Mark took great care of Frances during her many years of declining health. They welcomed a wide social circle to their home in San Francisco, and later to the glass walled weekend house they built on piers over Tomales Bay at Marshall. Mark began playing saxophone at 52, Lester Young his constant inspiration. He had formed a jazz club at Harvard and loved to play favorite jazz records for family and friends. Mark liked to tell students "Everything I learned about poetry, I learned from jazz." After he retired, a salon formed around him, meeting in his home over lox and bagels to talk about poetry and everything else.
Mark edited a textbook, Aspects of Poetry - Modern Perspectives (Little Brown & Co. 1963) and wrote two books of poetry, Growing Light ( Black Thumb Press 1979) and The Man I Am Watching ( e.g. books 1987). Here is one poem from Growing Light -

Spring Melt

All winter waters
gushed under the ice

The fish slept
they grew thin

Now as spring comes on
we keep turning away

to those rich rivers
like language

to enter the rivers
to dance fine lies

through the foam
to drift over real fish

They are there
terse serious in the riffles

They flicker naked
at their ease

in the green pools

Survivors include Peter Linenthal and Philip Anasovich of San Francisco; Lincoln Pain, Carol Lourie and Celeste Pain of Berkeley; Duncan and Cindy Pain of Los Angeles; Louis and Tracy Pain of Vancouver, Wa.; Graham Kiple of Emeryville; Cara Sperry of El Cerrito; Jennifer Turner of Fort Collins, Co. and Bryan Turner of Gresham, Or.

You can see and hear Mark reciting ribald limericks and explaining the difference between comedy and tragedy on Youtube at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yq2FVSnM_aQ
Mark's family wants to particularly thank Catherin