Around Town: Bookstore lines up a poetry event
It’s hard to remember the good old days, when the commute to Downtown Los Angeles took 20 minutes and a trip to the Westside consumed less than an hour. The downside was this: no poetry in La Cañada. Not so long ago, poetry-lovers were forced to trek to venues in West Hollywood or Venice to get their poetry fix.
Today, the crosstown traffic is terrible, but the Flintridge Bookstore at 1010 Foothill Blvd., has brought the literary world home to La Cañada Flintridge. The bookstore collaborates with several groups, including Rattle, the Red Hen Press and Moonday.
The Red Hen Press is a nonprofit literary organization that publishes poetry, literary fiction and nonfiction. Red Hen publishes the Los Angeles Review, which, “was established in 2003 and reflects the divergent literature emerging from the West Coast.”
Tonight, Nov. 12, at 7 p.m., the Red Hen Press and the Los Angeles Review will present a poetry reading at the bookstore. The poets include creative writing teacher Sean Bernard, UC San Diego creative writing teacher and “social arsonist” Melissa Chadburn, and poet Siel Ju.
Don’t hate me if I’m jealous of Ms. Ju, whose poems and stories have appeared in the Missouri Review, Drunken Boat, and ZYZZYVA. My pile of rejection letters from ZYZZYVA was so big that burning them would have decreased my gas bill by 12% per annum.
That’s why poetry is a better investment than a new car. A car depreciates the minute you drive it off the lot, but a poem lasts forever. Case in point: Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “Driving a cardboard automobile without a license at the turn of the century my father ran into my mother on a fun-ride at Coney Island...” Google it. You might like this poem.
Poetry is also associated with longevity, unless your last name is Shelley. Lawrence Ferlinghetti still lives in San Francisco. He’s 96. In the 1950s, Ferlinghetti co-founded a bookstore, City Lights, as well as a press, City Lights Publishers. Both the bookstore and the press anchored an entire generation of San Francisco’s Beat poets.
Bookstores, journals and publishing houses are a form of poet activism.
The Flintridge Bookstore also collaborates with Moonday. This Sunday, Nov. 15, at 2 p.m., the bookstore will host the Moonday Poetry Reading Series, featuring Michael C. Ford, poet, playwright, recording artist (“what these foothills left us got lost in the dark. now time goes around a corner without signaling for a right turn...”), and amazingly, the internationally known writer, Aram Saroyan, whose work includes a new detective novel, “Still Night in L.A.,” and “Last Rites,” about the death of his father, William Saroyan.
We are lucky that the Flintridge Bookstore has stepped up to become a prime venue for writers and poets. Let’s support our California poets. Right here in La Cañada.
--
ANITA SUSAN BRENNER is a longtime La Cañada Flintridge resident and an attorney with Law Offices of Torres and Brenner in Pasadena. Follow her on Instagram @realanitabrenner, Facebook and on Twitter @anitabrenner.