“It really was a dark and stormy night, though nobody dared say so.”

‘ ‘Abook of verses underneath the bough,

a jug of wine, a Christmas cookie and thou . . . “

Not exactly the way Omar put it, but a better fit for a Christmas party with the San Fernando Valley’s writers of modern poetry.

Christmas with the contemporary poets is more intense than cheery. Forget the mistletoe. Scratch the chestnuts roasting on an open fire and God rest ye merry gentlemen.

What about incest and abortion? What about 3 a.m. in the dark night of the soul?

Not that the poets were depressed, or even depressing. They were having a rollicking good time, wrenching out their bleeding psyches. Poets just eat up that stuff.

The poets had gathered--it really was a dark and stormy night, though nobody dared say so--in a back room at a savings and loan office on Topanga Canyon Boulevard in Chatsworth, as they do on the third Sunday of each month, under the sponsorship of the Valley Cultural Center.

Ordinarily, poets of some stature--published poets, perhaps with a university base--are brought in to read to the group, after which the aficionados get to deliver their own compositions. Because little time remains after the main speaker, members usually must sign up for brief time slots and move on before the moderator tells them to stifle the next stanza and hit the road.

But this night was a Christmas party, with no featured poet, allowing the subs from the end of the bench to run riot, reveling in loquaciousness like satyrs loosed in a WAC barracks.

There were home-baked cookies, coffee, four jugs of wine and some chunks of cheese on a table in the back of the room. Fluorescent lights reflected off the cream-colored paint on cement block walls, decorated with posters advertising Checking Plus accounts. A piano was swathed in quilted green padding. Flagstaffs topped with brazen eagles held furled American and California flags in one corner. Against one wall were stacked chairs in the nauseating shade of chartreuse that scarred the 1950s.

Six men and 18 women sat in rows. They appeared to fall mainly in two age groups--the fiery youths under 30 and the experience-laden ruminants over 50. There were only a few representatives of the generations between, who perhaps are busy hewing wood and drawing water at this stage of life.

One of the few was David Del Bourgo, 41, a Woodland Hills computer salesman in checked lumberjack shirt and jeans. Del Bourgo, who ordinarily gives verbose comrades the hook, told everyone how glad he was to be free of the policeman’s burden for a night “and let you people spread your wings for a change.”

He led off with “an immature poem, written when I was a student at Berkeley in 1968, the kind of poem I don’t write anymore.” The lengthy poem, written in movements imitating those of a symphony, was testimony to the fever of young love, even in Berkeley. (“ . . . I love you, I love you, I love you . . . I will take you by force . . . “)

Fourteen people read during the course of the evening, including one duet and one trio.

There were poems of gentle nostalgia, poems of excruciating intimacy, and poems of the crudest political agitprop.

There were poems to dead movie stars and lost loves, poems to the insufficiency of Social Security payments and the gracefulness of a cat. There was a poem to Ronald Reagan and nerve gas, one to the snowballs of a Brooklyn childhood, and poems about how difficult it is to write poetry.

There was a poem to a friend wounded in Vietnam, one to nuclear plant meltdowns, and a poem to the women’s movement (“I am a sponge, saturated . . . . “)

Three women’s poems involved abortion (“ . . . today I want you back inside me more than air. I want you in my shopping cart with your little pink legs and white shoes . . . “), and two were about sexual abuse by fathers (“I am not whole . . . I am beyond your reach”).

Sylvia Rosen, a Studio City legal secretary and director of the program, delivered a poem inspired by the observation “that the climate is different in different parts of the Valley, that the weather is different in Encino than it is in Northridge.”

A Canoga Park manicurist in a red silk blouse and spike heels wrote a poem to dieting, being sick and trying to study for college courses, with “a pickax feeling behind the head.” Part of the poem was sung, to a blues tune (“We got the bubonic blues, and I think we all might die”).

A tall, black woman wrote about the pain of a small, black girl convinced she is ugly, and about women gulled by men with expensive cars, “men who drove the fastest thing around, as if they themselves were the car.”

A woman with a mustache wrote about how guilty she feels for having, as a little girl, made fun of a woman with a mustache. A single mother opposed to the military wrote about how hard it is to raise a son with her ideals, how she dreams of him growing a beard, turning into Rambo, his skull becoming steel because he wants a toy gun. She chanted a chorus that went “uuuuugggh, peanut butter . . . uuuuuuggggh, peanut butter.”

An intense college student, with glamorous blonde starlet looks and ears dangling jewelry, wrote of rape and patricide and her dead lover’s motorcycle rusting in the rain.

One poem was in Spanish. The duet was in English and Hebrew, a man in a prayer shawl revolving as he spoke while his woman partner stood still. The trio read a poem to Duke Ellington.

Catharsis flowered.