Ben Pleasants

Ben Pleasants (born August 6, 1940) in Weehauken, New Jersey is an American poet, playwright and literary historian, notable for being an associate of Charles Bukowski and Steve Richmond, two of the seminal figures in both the "Meat School" of poetry and in the small magazine "mimeograph revolution" of the 1960s. Bukowski helped both Pleasants and Richmond break into print when he recommended them to Worwmood Review in the mid-'60s.
Pleasants met and befriended Richmond in 1964 when both were students at U.C.L.A.. Pleasants was a graduate student in literature and Richmond was getting a law degree. He met Bukowski the following year.
Early Life
Pleasants was raised in Farmingdale, Long Island, New York. He attended CW Post College from 1958 to 1960. There he met Jules Olitski, who taught him art and introduced him to the New York art scene. He graduated from Hofstra University with his B.A. in 1962, and supported himself teaching. He moved to California with his wife and daughter in 1963, to take a job at the University of California, San Diego, where he worked at the library. In the fall of 1964, he began graduate studies in English at U.C.L.A.
He worked for the Los Angeles Times, starting in 1967, where he worked the wire desk as a copy boy. He eventually reviewed books for the Times Book Review and began reviewing plays. He built up a reputation in Los Angeles and his reviews were also published by the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, the Los Angeles Free Press and other newspapers and periodicals.
As a reviewer, Pleasants had tried to get reviews of Bukowski's work into print at the L.A. Times Book Review. In 1969, he finally got a review of Bukowski into the Times, when he reviewed the poetry collection The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills. However, books were assigned the Book Review editor, minimizing Pleasants ability to prostelytize for his friend in print. He also reviewed Bukowski's prose collection Notes of a Dirty Old Man and Penguin Modern Poets 13, in which Bukowski was featured along with Harold Norse.
Pleasants worked for the L.A. Times up through 1984. He was fired from his job there after attempting to review Noam Chomsky's book, The Fateful Triangle. The book was reviewed by Pleasants in the Herald Examiner in 1984 with the help of the book editor, Digby Diehl. For thirty years Pleasants worked as a hospital teacher for the Carlson School of LAUSD. There he met his current wife, Paula Fay. Pleasants has a daughter, Alexandra Costa and two grandchildren, Victor and Martin Costa, who live in San Francisco. He is currently working for Malibu Magazine and The Persian Book Review.
Works
In the late 1960s, his first produced play The Gluttons, was staged by the actors showcase Company of Angels. It ran for one week. Other Works include the critical histories Visceral Bukowski: A Walk Through the Sniper Landscape of American Letters; Rexroth, Bukowski and the Politics of Literature; and the novel Spearmint Leaves. Plays include Contentious Minds: The Mary McCarthy/Lillian Hellman Affair; The Hemingway/Dos Passos Wars; and Lenin in Love and Ghosts of Pumpkin Park."
Between 1978 and 1983 he conducted a series of interviews with John Fante, later collected by Beat Scene and 3:AM Magazine (Pleasants has also contributed a number of interviews and features for the latter). Publications written for include the L.A. Times, Herald-Examiner, L.A. Free Press, L.A. Vanguard, L.A. Reader, and Los Angeles Magazine. Pleasants is the author of two novels: Spearmint Leaves published in 2010 and The Victory of Defeat published in 2011. Both are available on Amazon and Kindle. A film on his play The Hemingway/Dos Passos Wars' is available under the title "Making The Play." Pleasants has also published extensive interviews with the poet Steve Richmond on 3 AM Magazine. He continues to write to this day.

Main Menu

See Also

Main Menu