POP! : GO SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA’S POETS

“Walt’s Parties”

I became a Disney character

palling with Mary Poppins.

The three little pigs

doffed their hot costumes.

We drank beer near the kingdom.

To my innocent dismay

I found out through Mickey

Alice has been around

and so has Snow White.

Oh blue sea come rescue me.

--Paul Trachtenberg, “Making Waves,” Cherry Valley Editions 1986

“Making Waves” is a sequence of poems whose territory is the sea, Disney and Laguna. The time is the ‘60s and ‘70s, or actually, the ‘50s turning into the ‘60s and ‘70s. The narrator dreams of Annette Funicello, envies the Beach Boys, becomes a flower child, resists the draft, measures social transition by the Beatles “shooting a different tune.”

Paul Trachtenberg, who wrote the Disney-image-filled poem above, is one of a number of Southern California poets making high art out of pop culture. Their cumulative message is that the life of one’s time, not the art of the past, forms the imagination.

Born in Lawndale in 1948 and educated in horticulture at its community college, Trachtenberg has lived in Southern California all his life, though he has traveled extensively. “Write about what you know,” Trachtenberg was told in poetry classes, and so, after his first book (“Short Changes for Loretta,” Cherry Valley editions, 1982) he felt more confident dealing with his pre-literary life.

“I’m an expert on Disneyland,” he says. “I worked at the Candy Palace, the Market House near fantasyland. I also worked as a sweeper and I liked that best because I could end up almost anywhere. It’s really a Peter Pan syndrome.

“Warhol felt it necessary to document soup cans, and I think he’ll be known in the 21st Century,” Trachtenberg says. “And look at Liberace--someone should write poems to Liberace--I grew up reading comic books, Mad magazine, watching television and going to the movies. I have to admit I wouldn’t know Lewis Carroll if it hadn’t been for Disney. I can’t deny that part of my life.”

There are many other Southern California poets finding their central metaphors far away from the ivory stages of traditional “high culture”:

Poet Dennis M. Dorney explains that his early education in literature consisted of Classic Comics and Cliffs Notes. Movie stars, rock stars, comic book characters, characters from movies, television shows, have formed the imaginations of a generation of poets and they are not afraid to tell the world.

Amy Gerstler is disarmingly vulnerable about her crush on “Dear Boy George”: “. . . Not to embarrass you with my raw American awe / . . . but you’re the plump bisexual cherub of / the eighties.”

David James writes about Tina Turner: “She continuously relives / the opportunity of Annie May Bullock / naive in St. Louis and 17 / . . . for her reality will always lie / in a confrontation with Tina Turner.”

Godzilla haunts the dreams of Dean Clark: “One hundred million year old antediluvian / Slumber, awakened / Just in time for the ‘80s.”

Robert Peters writes lyric poems in the form of obsessive fan letters to Robert Mitchum.

Actor/poet Harry Northup’s “john voight poems” attempt to document Hollywood’s neurotic competitive fear.

Paeans to Marie Osmond, Mae West, Houdini, Tonto, Roy Rogers, Marilyn Monroe, pepper L.A.-based journals and anthologies like “Poetry Loves Poetry,” “The Webs We Weave” (an anthology of Orange County Poetry), “The Southern California Review of Poetry,” “Electrum Magazine” and “Asylum.”

Pop-oriented poetry may be seen as part of a larger trend in the arts to validate the impact of pop art on the formation of the imagination.

The recently deceased Warhol, with his pictures of soup cans and Dick Tracy, is probably the best known of the pop visual artists. Film Critic David Thomson wrote a novel, “Suspects” (Knopf, 1985) whose characters are all characters from movies. There is a museum of advertising artifacts in San Francisco, the star item of which is the model for the Jolly Green Giant.

Is it useful to distinguish between Pop Art and high art? “Art,” said Warhol, “is a man’s name.” Yet, in the way it originates, its purposes, its impact, its market function, in the way artists relate to it, in the way the public relates to it, Pop Art is significantly different from both high culture and folk culture.

Probably the most useful differentiation is in degree of self-consciousness. Folk culture is the least self-conscious of the three forms. Fairy tales are folk culture when grandmothers recount them to little children. When they are gathered into volumes by the Brothers Grimm and others--to be preserved for eternity (however long that is) they are high culture--work usually created with posterity and the history of art in mind. Pop culture is usually intended to make lots of money in its own time. Fairy tales are pop culture when Disney makes them into movies and theme parks.

Some poets use Pop Art imagery to treat high art’s aspirations to immortality ironically. This irony is clear in Ron Koertge’s “Ozymandias & Harriet”:

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings,

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and . . .”

“Ozzie, the Thornberrys want us to make

four for bridge so stop standing around

in that pile of sand you call a back yard.”

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings,

Look on my works . . .”

“Ozzie, David and Ricky just called

from the malt shop. Do you really owe $11

for banana splits? No wonder you’re such a

colossal wreck.”

“My name is Ozymandias, king of . . .”

“Ozzie, now the grass is dying in front, too.

What will the neighbors say? Can’t you do

something. It’s not like you held down a

regular job, you just sit around the house

in your cardigan.”

“Ozymandias” is the name of a much-studied 19th-Century poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley. The poet/narrator ponders the remains of a bygone king with great claims to immortality. Of course, by the end of Shelley’s poem we are clear that it is the poet’s works, not the monarch’s, that will last forever. In Koertge’s poem, lines from the Shelley poem are counterpointed with an imaginary Harriet Nelson harangue. As the poem opens, Ozzie/Ozymandias seems to be boldly demanding Harriet’s respect. By the end, as Harriet verbally demolishes Ozzie’s lawn-mowing abilities, his breast-beating has fizzled to feeble protest.

Koertge seems to be telling us that the artists’ claims on eternity might be just as futile as the rulers’. Koertge, who also has poems for Tonto, Superman, Lucy and Ricky, Snow White, Roy Rogers, Dale Evans and Trigger, Bambi in black leather, Tarzan, various and sundry monsters and dragons, believes that the attempt on the part of “high culture types” to control immortality is ludicrous and pretentious.

“I never think about immortality,” he says. “I just follow my nose and enjoy my talent.” A writer is much more likely to enter the canon by plodding along and writing regularly and systematically than by politicking for eternity.

“People don’t think of poetry as a vehicle for humor,” Koertge adds. “They think it’s a heavy goblet to pour burdensome emotions into.” He blames high school methods of teaching poetry.

“Students enter my classes at Pasadena City College with the notion that poetry has to be something they can’t understand.” Koertge tells them that “Whatever you bring into the workshop is a poem. I can’t talk about poetry in the abstract anymore than I can talk about food in the abstract.”

Though he is a widely published and nationally known poet (his “Life at the Edge of the Universe” collection was published by the University of Arkansas Press in 1979), Koertge claims he had lots of trouble in grad school at the same university where he almost flunked his prelims. Then poet/friend/fellow grad student Gerald Locklin gave him a copy of Ed Field’s “Variety Photoplays” (Grove, 1967). Fields’ book inspired Koertge to experiment with humorous, loosely narrative, pop-oriented poems.

The opening section of “Variety Photoplays,” “Old Movies,” consists of 11 poems with titles like “Curse of the Cat Woman,” “The Bride of Frankenstein” and “The Life of Joan Crawford.” In their introduction to the 1972 reprint (Russ Haas Press, Long Beach), Gerald Locklin and poet Charles Stetler (a professor of English literature at Cal State Long Beach) discuss pop culture poetry as a return to the oral tradition. The ‘60s, they feel, marked the end of the Guttenberg Era, the end of the printed page as the most powerful mode of communication.

A continuing sense of the imminent destruction of the planet through nuclear war or ecological disaster, a recognition of how what was once thought great is now forgotten, and a feeling that TV is replacing print as the dominant means of communication, all contribute to a sense of impermanence in contemporary pop-oriented poetry.

Critic Neil Postman (“Amusing Ourselves to Death,” Penguin, 1984) feels that the new electronic culture is significantly different from either the oral or print one. He is concerned with what he sees as the damage to rational thought brought on by perpetual assimilation of information that can only be transmitted by staccato bursts of energy.

Poet Michael C. Ford transmutes his disgust with the fried brains of young TV addicts to a jazz poetry that seeks to immortalize movie stars like Clara Bow and Dorothy Dandridge, and that resurrects such musical greats as Charles Mingus and Charlie Parker.

Ford feels that by becoming addicted to current TV programming, young people have missed out on a whole class of legendary greats, and he hopes to bring jazz musicians and movie stars to life in his verse.

“If what I do could be translated into a saloon-singer persona,” Ford has written, his poem “Clara Bow” would be “his torchy ballad.” He was in a hotel lobby in Arizona and “Call Me Savage,” a film made in 1932, came on the television. “I was knocked out,” Ford says. “I wanted to know ‘who’s she?’ ”

“Clara Bow”

Clara Bow you never knew I know

may never know how now I see

you like in a dream last night

tell me you are as you were

on late late show TV

when they’d call you “savage”

in 1932 epic West how your

troubles compounded with tears

how you began to mean more to me

than my own life how I wanted to

tell you this now it’s too

late somebody said yesterday

the way you died alone

in Culver City in 1965 no it can’t

be too late you’re still alive

I’ll be able to see you touch you kiss

your spangled hair drive your car backwards

to a compatible year all this although I

know you must know I know everything

is still okay know you’re really

only a few miles away because I

believe what I see in the movies

--Michael C. Ford (“Ladies Above Suspicion,” Illuminati)

Ford wants the young people “who fry their brains in front of the television until oatmeal comes out of their ears,” to know “how the truth got put down with beauty and clarity.”

He has poems about Rita Hayworth, Natalie Wood, Jim Morrison, Art Pepper, Janet Leigh, Cleo Moore, Gail Russell, Marie Windsor, Marilyn Monroe, Gene Krupa, Bobby Troup and others.

Born in Chicago, Ford moved to Los Angeles when he was 3. “Formative images copt in 1950s Altadena/Pasadena atmospheres,” he writes in his bio notes. “The pop culture, billboard art, signs, cars have a hammerlock on my imagination.”

Because his family could not afford a television, Ford listened to the radio a lot. “I presided over the death of radio,” he claims.

Ford, like Koertge, wears his troubled formal education like a badge. He boasts of failure to qualify for the “university madhouse” and says his real education began at age 15 at Jack Hampton’s L.A. Jazz Concert Hall, where he hung out with Art Pepper, Shorty Rogers, Cal Tjader and where poetry and jazz were integrated in 1959 when modern poets such as Rexroth, Patchen, Perkhoff and Nordine showed up.

His first poem was published in Germany in 1962, and now Ford is a widely published poet and established teacher of poetry workshops.

A musician for television and film, Ford eschews the label jazz poet. He examines the immediate past to redefine the present. “I use poetry to expose. I don’t want to intimidate people or confuse them. . . . What chance does a kid in the ‘80s have to learn anything about radio except how to be a robot? . . . When I was a kid I ran and climbed fences, there was action. Now kids sit in the dark and listen to records by Ozzy Osbourne, who is accused of being a satanist by women in Washington, D.C., who are married to men far more satanic than Ozzy Osbourne will ever be.”

Harvey Kubernik, who produced “Language Commando,” a recording of Ford’s jazz poems on Freeway Records, is considered by some to be the spearhead of the spoken word performance art scene in Southern California. He feels that Ford and poets like him are an important source of “infotainment.” “It’s important that many spoken word performers are SAG artists. They work behind the scenes in Hollywood. They aren’t university professors. They entertain, and they document a landscape that is perpetually in danger of being lost.”

Poet/critic Robert Peters feels that pop poets are trying to make poetry more democratic. “They’re trying to reach an audience that doesn’t read books--perhaps even to thumb their noses at Establishment poets.”

Perhaps, though, something deeper than reaction to academia is at work here. Poetry doesn’t come out of abstract ideas. It is an expression of the nature of the imagination.

Trachtenberg, Koertge, Ford and others who draw on television, the movies, billboards and amusement parks are making a statement about what really forms the imagination in our time. They are saying that Disney, MGM and J. Walter Thompson form our imaginations at least--if not more than--as much as Homer, Dante and Shakespeare do. That the horse of our dreams is Trigger, not Pegasus, as Koertge shows in a poem dedicated to Roger’s famous horse. And, as Koertge writes, that out of that recognition, “language rises like steam.”