Renaissance Men of Rhythmic Composition

Every few months, Eric Lyden and Kevin Bartnof rent a suite at Le Bel Age or the Warner Center Marriott or sometimes at a San Francisco hotel. They set up pots of coffee and two typewriters.

Poetry gets written nonstop, all night long. Friends drop by to type in a few stanzas. At sunrise, Lyden and Bartnof say they usually throw furniture around the room like a heavy metal band and stagger home with a bundle of verse.

Some 50 pages have been filled by such compulsive creation. Lyden and Bartnof call it “The Caffeine Chronicles,” and maybe they’ll try to sell it as a book someday. Or maybe they won’t.

“Poetry just is,” Bartnof says.

It is difficult to figure these two men. Lyden is a 28-year-old youth counselor, Bartnof a 30-year-old sound-effects man for the movies. Their conversation flows in manic banter, shifting at breakneck pace from philosophical to pragmatic to wise-cracking.

Both are poets, though neither seems moody or obsessed, as you might expect. They attend evening readings, sipping espresso, sometimes bored with the people they meet and the poetry they hear.

But the two men say it’s a good time to be poets in Los Angeles. Verse is weaving its thread into the city’s cultural fabric as the likes of Charles Bukowski and Henry Rollins attain pop status. Readings draw audiences in such places as Venice’s Beyond Baroque bookstore, Reseda’s BeBop Records and the Anti-Club in Hollywood.

And somehow, inexplicably, Lyden and Bartnof have become leading benefactors of this renaissance.

Working from Lyden’s Woodland Hills home, they publish “The Moment”--an irregular journal of poems, articles about poetry and occasional pictures of semi-nude women. They have also begun a “poetry hot line” that offers recorded listings of Southern California readings and a short poetry selection.

“The Moment” is one of a handful of small poetry journals in the city and reaches only 1,000 or so people with each issue. Yet, it is receiving attention--Lawrence Ferlinghetti has sent notes of congratulation, and Bukowski and Sean Penn have submitted poems for upcoming issues. The poetry hot line, only a few weeks old, receives as many as 15 calls a day.

“Our goal is to bring poetry to a wider audience,” Lyden said. “To the guy who works at 7-Eleven or the accountant who writes occasional poetry.”

“No,” Bartnof said, “we do it to meet chicks.”

“It is a great tax write-off.”

“And it keeps us off the streets.”

“I was wondering,” Lyden said, “if this is an obsession or a hobby. I guess it’s a habit.”

There’s a woman to blame for it--Lyden and Bartnof both dated her several years ago. The two men met and discovered a mutual interest in rhythmic composition. In those days, the fledgling poets were shy about their work, and Lyden wrote under the pseudonym “Lou Sofa.”

Fast becoming friends, Lyden and Bartnof decided they wanted to offer Los Angeles an alternative-poetry journal: one that would accept many different types of poetry, one that would give young poets a chance. Perhaps most important, one that would publish their poems.

“The Moment” first appeared 2 years ago. That inaugural effort was photocopied, folded and stapled, just 12 pages thick. It featured cartoons, interviews the two men conducted with homeless people and, mostly, poems by local poets.

“It’s difficult for poets to have a forum,” said Richard Bruland, owner of BeBop Records. “A lot of times, large periodicals start reflecting a certain type of poetry, either by well-known poets or from a certain school.

“ ‘The Moment’ tends to be more experimental and tends to encourage a wide variety of poetry,” Bruland said. “They are on a smaller scale; they are able to be a lot freer.”

From the outset, “The Moment” has dedicated itself to printing almost every poet who submits work. About the only criterion for acceptance is sincerity, said Bartnof, who lives in West Hills. If a poem is heartfelt, it will probably get into print. That leaves room for a wide range of quality.

“We’re used to getting rejection slips from other journals,” Lyden said. “We don’t tell anyone their poetry is bad.”

Subject matter among the poems varies greatly. A recent issue included the poem “Catholicism” by John W. Hart III:

Martin would get plowed

walk through the dormitory naked

‘cept wearing a fishing vest and boots.

jump on couches and spit tobacco

till 3 or 4 in the morning.

7 o’clock

while others were sleeping

he snuck out

on Sunday mornings

in a suit and tie

come back before anyone was awake.

Another issue featured a poem about a pet, “Spotted Box Red” by Marty Chambliss:

I am just a turtle;

I guess you could call me

Spotted Box Red.

I plods where I please

And there is no one alive who can

Bring me to my knees

“It’s a rhyme-y little kid’s poem,” Lyden said. “A lot of people thought it was crap, but my niece liked it, so who’s to say?”

Recently, a man submitted a poem that consisted of the same one-word, scatological obscenity typed over and over again.

“We didn’t print it,” Bartnof said. “But we did like it.”

While “The Moment’s” content has remained consistently diverse over 2 years, the journal has grown more sophisticated, with slick covers, professional printing and more pages.

Lyden and Bartnof publish from a small den that is crowded with books, a drum kit, a giant can of Tecate beer and a picture of James Dean on the wall. The two men drink endless cups of coffee, punctuated with doses of Maalox.

Working this way, they turn out a new issue of “The Moment” every other month or so. Only 150 people pay the annual $10 subscription for home delivery. Remaining issues are loaded into a pickup truck and dropped off at a dozen bookstores in Los Angeles that sell the journal for $2 a copy. Lyden and Bartnof drive to San Francisco stores and deliver bundles to three bookstores there.

At this point, “The Moment” costs $10,000 a year to produce and makes only $4,000 of that back. The publishers figure $6,000 isn’t too expensive, as habits go. The hot line cost $100 to set up--the price of the telephone answering machine in Lyden’s hallway and the specialized number (818) 992-POEM. It doesn’t bring in any money.

“We recognize, in some way, the nobility of this act,” Bartnof said. “We spend the rest of the day trying to make money. This is a clean act. It’s pure.”

“I guess we’ll keep doing it,” Lyden said, “as long as it’s fun.”

As for the future, Bartnof said he would like to see “The Moment” on magazine racks in every 7-Eleven in the country.

“Right next to ‘Music Connection,’ ” he said.

“I see a Moment Building, a MomentLand, paperweights and coffee mugs with the Moment insignia and parties with Tom Waits,” Lyden said. “And the Moment fan club, the Moment jet.”

“Seriously, . . .” Bartnof said.

The partners are trying to get more copies of “The Moment” out to the world. That means selling more subscriptions and getting more stores to put the journal on their racks. Lyden also wants to open a beatnik coffee house, a “cappuccino hangout with a bookstore attached and a place for poetry readings.”

Beyond that, Lyden and Bartnof insist that they are planning a cable television show. It will be called “Poets Who Fight,” and each episode will open with a group of men wrestling, punching each other and bouncing off the walls. After this overt display of masculinity, they will sit down and read poetry.

“Poets are not all wimpy,” Bartnof said.