SPOKEN PLEASURES CATCH FIRE AT POETRY READING

It is a very warm Friday night in early May. Across the street the customers are already lined up at the ticket window of a country-western nightclub. Down the street in the other direction the crowds are making choices in front of a bifurcated movie house.

Here, in a deep, narrow store called Be Bop Records and Fine Arts on Reseda Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley, there are half a hundred metal folding chairs (those unyielding testers of loyalty and endurance) set up beyond the record racks at the back. Most of the chairs are already occupied, and before the evening is over there will be standees filling the aisles the length of the shop.

Maybe a hundred payees, at $3 a head, come to listen to four poets read their work. One of the four is a former student of mine from Loyola-Marymount. Pamala Karol was into film criticism then, and wrote very well and originally. But that was more than a dozen years ago. The world has spun a few times for everybody since then. She is into poetry, calls herself La Loca (The Crazy One), and thought I might be interested to catch another facet of the Los Angeles scene.

The three men who would be reading with her, she wrote me, “are the veritable deans of the art in Los Angeles. They are heavily anthologized and have resounding national reputations.” The evening has a title, “Lovers Lain,” Pamala said, and the readings would include works “altogether risque, morbid, gonzo and sublime.”

There are offers you really can’t refuse.

Darrell Vienna, who lives in Sierra Madre and breeds horses, reads first: gentle poems, so I think, evoking a somewhere past. “Most of my poems are set in a place I’ve never been,” Vienna tells us. He speaks of old people on a porch, the first sounds of radio, the evenings of summer.

Ron Koertge, the second reader, runs a poetry workshop at Pasadena City College. He also evokes a past, his set specifically in Collinsville, Ill. There is a very funny piece about touring the creches at Christmas time. Perhaps, because this night’s selections are to be heard not read, they are, from all four reciters, lit with humor, sly and slapstick and occasionally self-mocking.

Gerald Locklin, who teaches at Cal State Long Beach, is a powerful reader with a grizzled beard. He has published more than a thousand poems and pieces, including reviews in this newspaper. He has been praised by Charles Bukowski, who is probably Los Angeles’ premiere iconoclastic poet.

Locklin’s poems are personal, outspoken, pointed. He writes about the Angels (in disappointment) and automatic bank tellers (“I was getting sick of humans anyway”), about beer and an Oregon Cure Hotline, a geographical deprogramming center for people who have been thinking about moving to Oregon.

La Loca concludes the evening. Hers are the most acutely autobiographical poems of the night. It becomes clear that she is a survivor (a recovered casualty might be more like it) of the Berkeley ‘60s and the indulgent ‘70s when anything worked except commitment. Her tone is boisterous, the language and the confessional candor of the life revealed are jolting. But beneath the bravado, as it seems to me, the sounds of pain and despair are only too easy to make out.

More than with the other readers, listening to La Loca revealed the act of making poetry as its own kind of healing. The craziness becomes a badge of stability regained, and the toughness fools no one as a cover for the eggshell fragility that was.

Perhaps, because I came of (student) age in a time when new poetry had gone hopelessly cerebral, cryptic and private, I had long ago retreated to the accessible poetic past, up to and including e e cummings.

One night’s sampling on Reseda Boulevard can’t prove much. Yet here are four poets who have comprehensible things to say, and say them. They write out of our shared and frequently bizarre lives, and they are bittersweetly moving and ironic about loves lost and found, about large worries and small pleasures.

Things don’t rhyme much any more and you can’t keep time to the rhythms (losses, both) but the economy and the cut-to-the-bone truth are still central to the franchise, and so is the shock of recognition.

You could almost forgive those relentless folding chairs.

Remembering on Memorial Day that night of poetry, I reread the last stanza of one of Gerald Locklin’s recitations, titled “An Anti-Vietnam Memorial”:

in our willingness to sympathize

with those who suffered over there,

let’s not begin now to tell the lies

we wouldn’t tell then.

Poetry can still jolt.