POETRY: IS THERE A LOS ANGELES SOUND?

Sylvia Rosen describes San Fernando Valley mornings, drug-addicted newborns, the delicatessen her parents owned in Brooklyn.

Elliot Fried writes about owning cars, guilt, masculinity, faculty parties, condos.

Ron Koertge praises Roy Rogers’ horse Trigger and his father.

Ann Stanford details Southern California’s Mediterranean climate, heat waves and chaparral.

Robert Peters is fascinated by Countess Elizabeth Bathory of Hungary, who believed that bathing in the blood of virgins would keep her young.

Nan Hunt is inspired by Cinderella, California bikers and her travels in India.

Suzanne Lummis writes about Marilyn Monroe, failed love, her breasts.

All are poets who live and work in Los Angeles. There’s also David Del Bourgo, who writes about the Fairfax district, Tim Hardin and coming to terms with Jewishness . . . Janet Grey with her poems about typing and hummingbirds . . . and on and on.

Like the city itself, there is diversity in the voices. But is there a poetry style or voice or sound that one can label as “Los Angeles”?

Yes, says Bill Mohr, publisher of “Poetry Loves Poetry,” an anthology of work by L.A. writers published last year.

No, say others like poet and translator Clayton Eshelman. “Los Angeles poets want to be known as a school in order to increase their visibility,” he says, “to have an identity larger than any one of them could possibly have individually. No one has done for Los Angeles what William Carlos Williams did for Paterson, N.J., or Charles Olson did for Gloucester, Mass.” Eshelman refers to the book-length poems tracing the history and geography of those two cities.

Eshelman, who refused to be included in Mohr’s anthology, says: “There is no Los Angeles poetry. Los Angeles is a suitcase city. I just happen to live here.”

L.A. is different from any other international city. It’s a city without a major navigable river, adequate public transportation or a central meeting place. The Southern California area has a Mediterranean weather system, characterized by fire, flash flood and scrubby chaparral, which its residents, mostly urban transplants, seem to ignore. It has smog and sprawl, but people still emigrate here in pursuit of a dream. Some take root, become an integral part of the city’s culture, others seem to remain perpetual visitors.

The context in which Los Angeles (or Southern Californian) poetry is practiced includes several university writing programs, organizations such as the Women’s Building, the Valley Cultural Center, the Laguna Poets and Beyond Baroque in Venice.

The realm also includes Santa Barbara’s John Martin, publisher of Black Sparrow, Helen Friedlander of Poetry L.A., Roger Suva of the newly expanded Electrum magazine, John Brander and Marine Robert Warden of the Southern California Poetry Quarterly, as well as new magazines, such as the Blue Window, published by Christine Palmer Allen and Henry Morro.

There are also a host of readings series, large and small, enduring and ephemeral, from Marta Mitrovich’s nationally oriented Laguna Poetry Festival to the open mike at Al’s Bar in downtown L.A. to Joyce Schwartz’s Venice Sculpture Garden readings.

It’s so diverse, nothing could possibly sum it up.

“So you move to El Lay/to make money and become a star,” poet Michael Lally writes. “So you lived in New York City/to make art and smart sexy friends.”

Lally’s poem, “The Lost Angels,” is included in Mohr’s anthology. The compilation of 390 poems, by 62 poets, purports to define a unique Los Angeles aesthetic, one dictated by the city itself, its special situation among large cities, its geography and the fact that many people--including its poets--are lured here by the glitz and promise of Hollywood.

Mohr, in an introductory essay called “Self-Portraits in Los Angeles,” defines Los Angeles poetry as a kind of “Existentially Romantic” stand-up comedy. Los Angeles poetry is narrative, first person, vulnerable.

Mohr argues that it is different from confessional poetry in that it is funny. Its rhythm is speech, as opposed to song or the written sentence, though there are exceptions to this in the anthology.

Mohr makes much of the light in Los Angeles, and of the intersections--Peter Schjeldahl’s “To Pico” is the lead poem:

“You are, late afternoons, almost beautiful, light soaked/You are destroyed by twilight/You are dead in the night of your feverish street-light,” writes Schjeldahl in a paean addressed to one of “El Lay’s” ugliest east-west streets.

Mohr, a Navy brat born in Virginia, came here in the mid-’70s, hoping to work in film, but he now works as a typesetter. His undergraduate work was in theater. He was also a poet and gravitated toward Venice and the Beyond Baroque Workshop. He has a special affinity for poets like Harry Northup, who came here from Texas via New York to advance his acting careers.

In his poem, “The Actor,” Northup pokes gentle fun at “the tragedy/that it is chosen/the life of an actor.” He poignantly bemoans his fate, accepting money from his family, waiting for residuals, getting the “all clear” from his answering service. According to Mohr, fully one-third of all Los Angeles poets have acted, written a script or performed in a rock ‘n’ roll band.

The existence of an anthology that purports to define the poetry of a city raises many questions. Is there an L.A. poetry? Is it defined in “Poetry Loves Poetry” or any anthology? Is it useful to talk about poetry in terms of any one locale or is poetry bigger than that? Do poets themselves want to be seen as locals or as belonging to the world?

Mohr, who has been publishing both nationally known and local poets for about 10 years in his Momentum Press, feels there is definite discrimination by the East Coast literary Establishment against Los Angeles poets, a “deliberate ignorance,” he calls it. Mohr hopes to redress the balance, to gain more recognition for work emanating from the city, but even he has reservations about his would-be achievement. “Is this profound?” he ponders. “You might ask me if this is really deep.”

L.A. is associated with pop culture. This association is well represented in “Poetry Loves Poetry.” Amy Gerstler’s “Dear Boy George” is an example:

I almost died when I read in The Times how you saved that girl

from drowning ... I’d give anything to be the limp, dripping form you stumbled from the lake with . . .

in a grateful faint as your mascara/ran and ran.

David James’ “The Fourth Confrontation With Tina Turner,” is another example:

& from Ike she took her proper name

and began the history of her own

substantial fabrication the deliberate framing

of a being more intense in which to live

an act replete with arrogance and risk.

But Mohr, in his introduction to “Poetry Loves Poetry,” fails to discuss many of the more universal themes of his contributors. Michele Clinton summarizes racial/sexual tensions in “Tween a Mammy and a Stud.” She writes about “those white girls with limp hair in barrets (sic),” easy to frighten, “& when they cried, all the men & nigguh/women in the room wanted to put an arm around ‘em.”

Clinton talks about competing with both black and white “studs” for their favors, and, with the vulnerability and personal honesty that marks a lot of the work here, she questions the rationale of it all.

A concern for the future of the English language is reflected in the anthology. Nichola Manning, a transplanted British tennis player currently residing in Long Beach, writes “The English Language was still . . . /obsessed with the idea of doing some-/thing on a grand scale, like murdering/some whores in Salt Lake City.”

There are also many poems about poetry, such as Bob Flanagan’s “Fear of Poetry.” Flanagan takes a comic view of the poet’s task: “I’m afraid I won’t be able to start/this. Or once having started/I won’t get through it.” Paul Vangelisti writes about the insatiable need for poetry: “ . . . the appetite that we are/a hunger for not remaining alone.”

The universal themes continue in Peter Levitt’s work showing Oriental, Jewish and classical European roots. “The red camellia we bought/and planted beneath our bedroom/window (because it knew/how to live beside the pine)/has proven the classical/ beauty we hoped for after all.”

Martha Lifson is another contributor whose larger themes, particularly about the nature of art itself, are never discussed: “I’ve always seen those things/in abstract paintings but was embarrassed to say so,” she writes.

Mohr’s essay fails to account for the epic dimension of Lee Hickman’s “Tiresias” poems, Laurel Ann Bogen’s lush dream imagery in “Havana” and Dennis Phillips’ concern with subtle alterations in consciousness.

Mohr also neglects the variety of ethnic minority viewpoints in the L.A. melting pot. Though he includes Latin poets such as Max Benavidez, black poets such as Michele Clinton and Jewish poets such as Peter Levitt and Austin Strauss, he doesn’t mention the influences these diverse cultures have on the literary life of the city. There are no native American or Asian poets mentioned, either.

On balance, Mohr’s collection and his essay dwell on the surface, rather than the depth of Los Angeles literary life. The essay particularly tends to confirm an unfortunate stereotype: There’s nothing here but Hollywood and rock music. That’s not to say that Hollywood and rock music are to be dismissed--Mohr believes they are important aspects of Southern California culture.

“Los Angeles Poets Survey,” a series of articles published some years ago in Poetry News (by the Beyond Baroque Foundation) and reprinted as a pamphlet by Bombshelter Press, reveals the difficulty of pinpointing a Los Angeles poetic. Fifty Los Angeles poets were asked to name five books that influenced them.

The survey shows Los Angeles poets as extravagant loners, equally entranced by the colloquial and the surreal. Charles Bukowski is mentioned, perhaps more often than any other living poet. Robert Peters writes “When I happened on (Bukowski’s “Crucifix in a Deathhand”), it was a revelation to me. Drenched as I had been for years in academic poets, I was stunned and had no idea that poetry could be written so straightforwardly. . . . he taught me that I didn’t need all that academic poetry lingo and lace on the poet-jockstrap.” Peters said he learned to write courageously about his own life without needing to pretty it up.

Both men and women cite Ann Sexton as an influence. “She succeeds in a tenderness which escapes sentimentality,” Hunt says. “Her poetry has . . . nakedness which stirs us to the core--she is painful. (Yet) her poetry is not pathologically self-involved. She is piquant, humorous, teasing.”

Writes local poet/teacher/actor Jack Grapes about Sexton: “It was the beginning of an influence by other women writers whose work I found more personal than lots of . . . male writers who seemed to build poems as if they were office buildings with strange elevators. Women poets were writing as if the poem grew out of them, flesh and blood and I wanted to write like that.”

Artaud is mentioned a great deal, as are Rimbaud, Blake, Hardy. Los Angeles poets seem to look for models that expand their sense of possibility, whether they’re looking to the great masters of the past or to their contemporaries.

The language in which influences are described suggests a desire to go underneath the surface of things. Poet/teacher Deena Metzger writes of W. S. Merwin’s “The Carrier of Ladders”: “The most confident and eloquent rendering of the real worlds under the world we live in, the mythic, the shamanic, shadowed universe.”

“How is this going to save the planet?” she challenges when asked to define her aesthetic. In her poetic play, “Dreams Against the State,” Metzger unites politics and myth, the inner and the outer life. The play takes place in a society where dreams are forbidden. A group of people meets to secretly discuss their dream-life. Out of this exploration, a revolutionary consciousness begins to emerge. The play enjoyed a modest run here.

Metzger has a hard time talking about herself as a Los Angeles poet. “The people I feel connected to are Lessing, Griffin, Nin, people whose work feeds me and feeds the world, the great hearts. I feel gossamer threads of caring connecting me with people like Claribel Allegria, a Salvadoran poet, as well as Meridel LeSeuer. It’s as if we all live together.”

Metzger, who grew up in New York and spoke Yiddish before she spoke English, feels closer to the great writers of Europe than to Whitman or Williams, poets whose concern with speech influences most Los Angeles writers. Her rhythm is chant-like.

She concedes though, that living in Southern California allowed her to write differently and go further than she might have otherwise. “I would never have written so much about the land, trees, my ‘Letters to Demeter Poems’ (a sequence of nature poems) are all made possible by Los Angeles.” Metzger also credits the plethora of California-style psychotherapies for giving her “permission” to go much further than she might have in exploring her inner life.

A city of dreams?

Sylvia Rosen, who recently guest edited a special edition of Electrum magazine devoted to dream work, and whose “Dreaming the Poem” was published by Human Sciences Press, feels that the dream is a characteristically Los Angeles theme.

The presence of Anais Nin, the number of dream teachers in this area, the explosion of varieties of consciousness work dependent on the dream, and the number of poets in some kind of Jungian therapy conspired to make Los Angeles a fertile field for dream-based poetry, Rosen maintains.

Rosen studied a form of dream work evolved by the Senoi tribes of Malaysia, which involves re-dreaming frightening or apparently negative dreams until a positive outcome is reached.

She writes: “Dreaming the poem/reading the words and seeing through/age openings in the shape of an eyelid/these images moving behind words.”

This poem without a title describes the poet as a 3-year-old, watching her mother mop floors: “curious about her pendulous breasts/over the mop handle.” The poet works through to an image of herself “with daughters of my own watching me and wondering.”

Robert Peters feels that proximity to Hollywood has allowed him a more fluid, possibly even bizarre sexual take on things. Suzanne Lummis feels that Los Angeles poets haven’t delved deeply enough into The Hollywood Story.

Rosen believes the city’s poets are much more concerned with the performance value of a poem than with its substance on the page. Poet/publisher John Crawford, who is moving his West End Press to Los Angeles, feels that poets and publishers in this city need to spend more time studying critical theory and developing critical viewpoints.

Perhaps the last word belongs to Ann Stanford. A native of California, Stanford lived and worked in Los Angeles long before there was any talk of a Los Angeles poetry. “I believe in the West,” she says, though her own reputation is national and she was published by Viking for many years. “The poets of the West are more open, experimental, more willing to look at things outside the current fashion.”