Poet’s Work Focuses on AIDS, Blacks

Keith Antar Mason often speaks through the “personas of angry black men who do harm in the community” when he tries to give a different twist to what he calls “black myths.”

But what he is really writing about in his poems and plays, Mason said, is “how black men relate in this society, or how they don’t fit in.”

And in his new, 10-minute work, “Pieces Reconstruction DOA,” which the 30-year-old writer will perform tonight in Laguna Beach, Mason said he examines “how AIDS is affecting the black community in America.”

The awarding-winning writer will also read several works and appear in some performance art at the 8 p.m. meeting of Laguna Poets, held at the Laguna Beach Public Library, 363 Glenneyre St.

Many of the myths addressed by Mason in his poems come from “stories my grandmother would tell me, and my understanding of Ifa (a West African religion)--those myths that make you a better person,” he said. “There are bits and pieces of our history that need to be examined. Artists need to make it accessible.”

His first book, “Gunge Tomorrows,” won the Harvard Book Award in 1975. Some of his poems were also included in the well-received 1979 “Anthology of St. Louis Black Poets.”

Born and reared in St. Louis, Mason left Missouri in 1982 to travel around the country before settling in Los Angeles in early 1985.

“Instead of bumming around Europe, I bummed around America,” he said. “I went anywhere I thought there was a black theater community--Washington D.C., Milwaukee, New York--but I’ve fallen madly in love with Los Angeles.”

He now lives with two actor friends in Westchester, a stone’s throw from Los Angeles International Airport. “We stay on a runway at LAX,” he joked during a telephone interview in which passing planes at times drowned out his voice.

Although he has published his works, Mason said he prefers performing and recording them to seeing them printed. “I come from an oral tradition” of poetry, he explained. “I don’t think books effectively communicate my work.”

He made three studio recordings of his poetry (“Rivermen,” “Three Lost Men” and “Black Box: A Solid Voice”) before leaving St. Louis.

In his home town, Mason also won the Midwest Black Playwrights Award from the Midwest Black Theatre Alliance in 1982 for his play, “For Black Boys Who Have Considered Homicide When The Streets Were Too Much,” which was produced at the African People’s Art Continuum theater.

That play, which was written as a series of poems, was inspired by Ntosake Shange’s earlier and more celebrated “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow Is Enuf.”

Shange’s play, which explored “black women’s lives and intimate moments and passionate times . . . inspired me to write a piece about black men’s humanity,” Mason said.

While some of Mason’s poems tell stories clearly, others seek to evoke feelings through a kind of word-collage, as in the title poem of “For Black Boys”:

Sweat and strain muscle and bone/

boxes and fences/

fancy trips and covered by night/

the blues and pain/

and yellin rollin down a pictorial/

taut/

it’s tight/

movement/

it’s hilarious/

a black boy’s moan.”

“I’m not an angry black man, but I am angered by the inhumanity in the world,” Mason said in a recent interview. “My work very seldom deals with myself. People say I’m a mirror, I will show them what I’ve been around . . . If I couldn’t write, I shouldn’t be alive, that’s how important writing is to me.”

Mason said he was encouraged by his teachers in St. Louis and by activists to learn about black history when he was growing up. “I just picked up on my own spiritual journey and it led me to study cultures and their myths and universal truths.”

A graduate of St. Louis’ Webster College, where he earned degrees in both political science and literature, Mason actually earns his living as a part-time business service agent for a Federal Express office in Century City.

“It’s two different worlds--the writing world I live in, and Century City,” where, he said, the lawyers who are frequently his customers “are smug, contemptuous and very much in demand.”

In contrast, Mason said he finds that “the people who are really dedicated to writing, who are really dedicated to making art to be shared with the rest of the universe, they’re very giving.”

Tonight’s reading is free. Donations, however, are requested.