Poetry Performance Offers a Raw Reading on L.A.

A few months ago, when snow fell on Malibu, one Eastern newspaper ran the headline: “L.A. Sees a Different Kind of Flake.”

Hey, it’s crazy. But it’s crazy with everything. Crazy with money, crazy with Crips, crazy with energy, crazy with projects and concepts and treatments, but most of all, crazy with art.

Spurred on by public support and lots of young, hip, rich consumers, art is everywhere, from the muraled walls of the barrios to the boutiques of Melrose Avenue. You walk by a shop that you assume is an art gallery. In the window are seven mangled baby dolls covered by a blue rayon shirt. But it turns out to be just another men’s vintage clothing shop with Picasso doing the windows.

I got a chance to infiltrate the goofy (and Mickey Mouse) L.A. art scene when I was asked to participate in a reading about love and passion at a Santa Monica art gallery. I shared the bill with novelist Carolyn See and two poets--Wanda Coleman and Michelle T. Clinton.

I sure didn’t expect much love and passion from a Southern California poetry reading. When Wanda Coleman got up to read, I thought I’d call my story “100 Serious White People Politely Sitting in Folding Chairs Listening to a Black Woman Recite.”

But again I underestimated Los Angeles. The town that gave us Korean pastrami was now putting together something completely new in the name of poetry as performance. People laughed, clapped and even gasped as Wanda Coleman mesmerized us.

An austere woman in her early 40s, dressed all in black except for a colorful African-style headdress, Coleman’s soft, rhythmic voice became inseparable from her words. As someone said later, “Listening to Coleman was like listening to music. You don’t remember the words; you remember the way she said them.”

Swaying and chanting, she moved from “the lady with bougainvillea in her eyes” to a “life full of been done wrong.” The subject was Hollywood’s favorite--sex--but not as scripted for Meryl Streep. In poems such as “They Came Knocking on My Door at 7 a.m.,” Coleman describes “coitus interruptus LAPD.”

Imagine T. S. Eliot’s words delivered with the raw physicality of Eddie Murphy. Or Run DMC doing the Kamasutra. But from a take-no-prisoners woman!

I’d never seen anything like it--a stand-up poet adding show biz to aesthetics.

And just when you thought no one could follow an act like that, Michelle Clinton got up. A bouncy woman in harem-girl pants and a cutoff shirt, Clinton is in her 30s. She describes more contemporary scenes, such as a California Women’s Higher Consciousness Gynecology Clinic and dinner in the ultimate yuppie restaurant and a date with “the hundredth boyfriend.” The subjects were “thirtysomething,” but the voice was of a childhood survivor of the Watts riots.

Like Coleman’s, her poetry was as good as the best rock ‘n’ roll. “Good Golly, Miss Molly” segued into “When to the Sessions of Sweet Silent Thought.” But where Coleman is cool, Clinton is manic.

Lighting candles to illuminate the room, biting an apple in between poems, flailing her hands around so hard that at one point she almost knocked her pants down, Clinton turns an “attitude problem” into an intellectual workout.

One 20-year-old man in the audience said, “I actually became conscious of my heart beating while Michelle was reading. I never felt that way at a poetry reading.”

In a telling statement about the L.A. art scene, one of the event’s sponsors said Clinton was discovered when she won a Poetry on the Buses grant.

“What’s next?” I asked. “Poetry in the Toilets?”

“Oh, it’s been done,” she said.

I’m not sure why this exciting poetry/performance art is happening only in Los Angeles, this experience somewhere between Eddie Murphy and nirvana. Maybe you have to be surrounded by freeways to write this way. Maybe you need to be near the crazy coast. Maybe you need to eat kosher sushi. Maybe, like Michelle Clinton and Wanda Coleman, you have to grow up in the shadow of all that funny L.A. money.

Both Coleman and Clinton toil at day jobs to support their art habit. Their determination reminded me of something I had seen scrawled on the sidewalk that morning across the street from the ocean. It was 7 a.m., and rivers of joggers and mountain bikers and skateboarders in chartreuse Lycra were flowing down from the canyons. There, between the cliffside mansions and the homeless beggars on the beach, someone had written: “L.A. I ain’t quittin.”