POETRY READING REVIEW : Personal Moments With Alice Walker

Alice Walker is unexpected--simpler, smaller and far more understated than one anticipated.

Her works are so strong in their convictions, so self-assured and direct in their statements, that to find them emanating from an imperturbable slender woman, her corn rows lightly brushing girlish shoulders, comes as a vast surprise.

Yet that was precisely the impression received Monday, when this poet and novelist, who won a Pulitzer Prize for “The Color Purple,” put in an appearance at the Los Angeles Theatre Center as part of the center’s ongoing poetry series. Making it happen, said series producer Alan Mandel in his introduction, took three years of relentless pursuit.

“It took three years,” Walker said when she came on, “because some things take three years.”

The statement was not facetious, defensive or playful, but evenhanded--a key to the woman before us who, in the next 80 minutes offered not only poetry and prose from her own collections (published and to be published), but just such tempered wisdom as well.

Unfazed by the bombed-out set for the center’s current production of “Stars in the Morning Sky” on which she stood, Walker diligently, but without hurry, set about the task at hand. Within seconds, the background was forgotten. Her informal mix of earthiness and ethereality flooded the room.

By way of introducing herself to the packed auditorium, she read the only poem printed in the program: “How Poems Are Made/A Discredited View.” It was as much a personal credo as a springboard from which the evening would take off, with its other poems, prose passages and candid sharing of selective information (“poetry is so difficult, but at the same time, I was saving my life when I wrote”).

Walker took her audience through excerpts from her “Revolutionary Petunias” (a collection of poems), spoke of growing up in Eatonton, Ga., with her brothers and sisters and making a choice in her late teens between going to West Africa or moving to Mississippi. “On the morning that I was going to Senegal, I went to Jackson and stayed there for seven years,” she said, important years, during which she became a woman and began to see this different South with new eyes.

She invited us to share her losses with the same curious mix of passion and detachment that she had applied in writing (and now reading) about them, telling us of her sister, Molly, “who, in the ‘50s, left us . . .” and the burial of her father’s grandmother (“Not pretty, but serviceable, a hard worker,” who mothered seven children). “I cried,” she said, reading, “not for the dead, but for the memories . . . seen from the angle of her death.”

There was humor in a light poem about the challenge of exercise and, among other work, fleeting but telling references to herself (“. . . me, destined to be wayward . . .”) or the larger womanist self (“I am the woman dark, repaired, healed . . .” who brings two flowers with twin roots: Justice and Hope, Hope and Justice.)

Walker’s selections, much like her books, seemed made to instruct by indirection. There were statements that half-qualified as confessions but never went too far. “Expect nothing,” she had read from another poem. “Live frugally on surprises. Be nobody’s darling. Be an outcast. Be pleased to walk alone. Uncool.”

This is an artist who values her insularity and carefully guards her mystery. She tells enough to startle, never to satiate.

Her poem “The Mornings of Rain,” for example, was written, she confessed, to celebrate the rebirth of her ability to create poetry after a longish period of drought; “First They Said,” an amusing litany of complaints against all black people with a serious twist ending, is Walker’s own humorous but sober comment on bigotry everywhere.

For a change of pace and tone (and dialect), she read from “The Color Purple”: Celie’s letter to her sister Nettie about giving up writing to God. The evening ended with two passages from her just-finished novel, “The Temple of My Familiar” (to be published in May), which Walker described as covering 500,000 years of history and mystery, a book “about remembering and trusting your own innate ability . . . .”

The first segment was a wife’s seriocomic effort to divorce her husband while still wanting to remain with him in an unmarried state that she considers “more fun.” The second picks up on “Color Purple’s” Shug after Celie’s death. It seems Shug found religion and wrote a “Gospel According to Shug.” As Walker dispensed its meticulous, eloquent invocations, it became clear that this was also a gospel according to Alice.

Why do people love to listen to poets reading their own works? Is it because the poet, like the groundhog, tends to remain elusive? Is it a quest for demystification? Some poets--though not Alice Walker who reads her work like an angel--don’t even do it very well. It boils down to something simpler: Knowing the words and wanting to know the person; loving the words and wanting to “touch” the person.

When the late Joseph Campbell wrote about “finding your bliss,” he was being neither coy nor deliberately obscure. He knew it was a thing one would innately recognize--either in oneself upon achieving it, or when one came across it in someone else who had.

The lucky people who saw Walker on Monday were in the presence of a woman who, at least momentarily, had found her “bliss.” She stood at the radiant epicenter of her being where everything becomes possible--and touched us all.