Well-versed : Popularity of Poetry Proliferates, Bringing Rhyme and Reason to Many

Bud Paine, the singing cowboy poet from Arizona, had just finished his musical interlude at the monthly poetry reading in a Santa Ana restaurant when Los Angeles street poet S.A. Griffin stepped on stage. Assaulted is more like it.

Ignoring the microphone, which he dismissed with an expletive, the boisterous poet set his mug of beer on the nearest table and wasted no time in living up to his reputation as a member of the “hard-mouth” school of poetry.

Wearing a long overcoat, black T-shirt, blue jeans and sandals--his hair slicked back and a hint of anarchy in his grin--Griffin looked like a street-corner prophet as he unraveled a floor-length computer print-out sheet and proceeded to read.

“Here we are,” he said at one point, “a nice little love poem--’I Ate Fig Newtons Until I Puked’ ”:

back when I was a kid

sitting in the pantry

I downed three or four pounds of the gooey things.

never ate them again.

in fact

I can’t stand the thought of them.

did the same thing with meat loaf and pizza.

when we are together

she and I

we just can’t seem to get enough . . .

From his front-row vantage point, poet Lee Mallory, the reading’s co-producer, grinned with delight as Griffin read--and sometimes shouted--his way through such varied subjects as the vagrant who wandered into “the Xerox place in West LA,” the “LA Woman of the ‘80s in her lips pink Corvette” and assorted sexual escapades and fantasies, some of them leavened with gutter-level sexual terminology and that most infamous of four-letter words.

Whispered Mallory during a brief lull: “It’s hard to believe this is happening in Orange County, isn’t it?”

Such no-holds-barred poetry readings are not only happening, but as Mallory told the crowd of 90 poets and poetry lovers at the outset of the recent reading, “poetry is alive and well” in Orange County.

From the weekly Laguna Poets readings at the Laguna Beach Public Library to the twice-monthly Poets Reading at the Fullerton Museum, poets’ voices--ranging from the broken-glass edge of Griffin to the more romantic vision of Mallory--are being heard throughout the county.

But it’s only at the monthly Factory Readings at Hankey’s, an Italian restaurant on 17th Street in Santa Ana, where the blank verse and exotic imagery are served up with lasagna and garlic bread.

And the monthly menu of pasta and poetry is drawing some of the county’s biggest poetry-reading crowds.

Call it poetic justice.

When Mallory, who teaches a poetry class at nearby Rancho Santiago College, proposed doing monthly readings in Santa Ana a year and a half ago, he was told that he would be lucky if 10 people showed up.

“I was told the same thing when I proposed the poetry class two years ago: You couldn’t make poetry happen in Santa Ana,” he said. “The nay-sayers said Santa Ana didn’t have the right kind of crowd and there wasn’t that interest in literary writing.”

Mallory’s college poetry class is not only full, but the Factory Readings (so named after Hankey’s previous incarnation as the Chicago Pizza Factory) has drawn up to 110 people and seldom fails to generate an audience of at least 70.

They’re people--from the shorts and T-shirt set to the black-turtle-neck-and-beret bunch--who thrive on listening to the linguistic gymnastics that result from the creative chewing of what Mallory calls “poet’s meat”--”The world of experience . . . of bills, and broken motors and babies and love affairs and good times and bad times and diapers and good luck and bad luck. . . . “

At Hankey’s, where the readings are conducted in the crook of an L-shaped indoor patio, the poets must compete with the noise of bar patrons in an adjoining room watching Monday night football.

“I think the spirit makes up for all the complications of setting,” said first-time audience member Robert Putman, an instructor of philosophy at Rancho Santiago College. “It’s a communal spirit. . . . This is the ‘50s all over again, this is the beat generation.”

Marianne Gillispie, an accountant from Orange who writes poetry, said she enjoys the informality of the restaurant setting.

“It’s more intimate,” she said. “It makes it closer, more tightly knit, when people can table hop and be together.”

The ongoing success of the Santa Ana, Laguna and Fullerton readings--and others such as Metaphorgasm in Orange, Coliterus in Newport Beach--are indicative of the robust health of the poetry scene in not only Orange County but in Southern California as a whole.

Poet Griffin, who makes his living as a Hollywood actor, describes the poetry scene thus:

“It’s huge, man,” he said, seated in a booth before his reading. “I mean, it’s like there’s just so many little self-interest groups. That’s the only reason I wanted to come down here. I’m trying, in my own way, to kind of connect the coast. If these little groups of poets could get together and help one another as opposed to doing their own thing, then it would give some real focus to what’s going on.”

Sipping his beer, the poet from Santa Monica added: “I think, in a political regard, there’s a real need for poetry in Orange County, and I think people really dig it. I mean there’s good poets down here. There really are good poets everywhere. Poetry, like everything else, has no breeding ground.”

Since starting Poets Reading in Fullerton in June, 1988, Michael Logue and his fiancee, Tina Rinaldi, have had no trouble lining up featured poets.

“There’s a tremendous number of Orange County poets,” said Logue, himself a poet. “Since we started, we’ve probably had 60 poets read for us and I’d say 45 to 50 are from this area.” And, he said, that doesn’t include the 10 to 20 members of the audience who sign up for the open poetry readings at the end of the evening.

Marta Mitrovich, director of the 17-year-old Laguna Poets, theorizes that poetry readings are proliferating throughout Orange and Los Angeles counties because they provide “a free forum and if you express what you truly feel and think, then you might get to the truth of things, which helps understanding, compassion and growth in every sense.”

“There is a lot of openness now, in our country and maybe everywhere,” added Mitrovich, whose group also sponsors three poetry festivals a year featuring such stellar names as Allen Ginsberg, and Pulitzer Prize winners Galway Kinnell and W.S. Merwin.

As Mallory sees it, the time is ripe for poetry readings--particularly in Orange County.

When he and co-producer Jana Kiedrowski of Santa Ana started the Factory Readings at Hankey’s in early 1988, “we said we’re going to put this reading on the map because there are new voices that need to be heard, and poetry is a way of modern man coping with the alienation that he feels in the high-tech age.”

“Here we are in the middle of Orange County with its affluence and with its high-tech and with its leisure, but some people in the midst of all that may tend to begin to feel spiritually empty. So I believe that poetry, with its emphasis on universal themes--love, alienation, a yearning to get back to nature--is filling the spiritual gap that some people may feel.”

In years past, Mallory said, the traditional forms of poetry were meant to be read on the page “and it was not really accessible to the common man because so many of the forms were archaic and tedious, and I think that tended to turn off a wider audience.”

But now, he said, “the forms are more basic and more open and there is a resurgence of interest in poetry in this country that I see has to do with the fact that now the trend is to perform the works and to get them out of that print mode which they were in before.”

Poetry today, he said, has a freshness of vision and an appeal to the senses, and it comes without the “traditional baggage that the forms themselves carried before.”

And because it “comes out of the mouth of the poet,” Mallory said, launching into something of a poetic riff, “it becomes more than one dimensional:

“it becomes exciting,

“it becomes entrancing,

“it becomes erotic,

“and it becomes accessible.”

The increased accessibility of poetry may explain why 33 students signed up for Mallory’s poetry class at Rancho Santiago College this fall. He describes his students as “eager and wide-eyed, and they represent an incredible cross-section of county residents.

“You have traditional youthful students;

“You have an aeronautical engineer, who has escaped the daytime, high-tech world to free-flight poetry at night;

“You have the female accountant, who keeps her ledgers by day but returns to the real ledger of emotions at night;

“You have the senior citizen lady who brings a wealth of experience to the class;

“You’ve got everybody.”

Mallory said the United States “has a very young poetic tradition.”

“Readings like ours are commonplace in Europe and have been for hundreds of years,” he said, adding that to the French, “their poetry is as important as their politics. Poetry for the French people--in fact, Europe in general--has a long heritage, and it’s a mainstay in their lives.”

Mallory believes that this country is beginning to follow suit. He said Bill Moyers’ current PBS series on poets, “Power of the Word,” “is just more evidence that poetry is kind of catching fire with Americans. And there are more people meeting in small poetry settings, sharing their written and spoken hopes and dreams.

“Obviously, we’re not going to replace TV, but I think Americans are hungry for something new, something beyond the banality of television. What poetry audiences are seeing is ‘life stuff’ that goes right to the heart of feelings and hopes and everything deeply human that we still have going for us.”

Mallory said one of his biggest gripes is the way poetry is taught in junior high and high school. He said the traditional approach to teaching poetry--of forcing students to memorize poems and dissect a work of art rather than focusing on what the poem says and rejoicing in it--”turns people off on the joys of poetry and what it can provide.”

As he sees it, “Poetry should be a basic touchstone of our lives, where we become introspective and truly aware of the world around us.”

Poetry readings provide the forum where people can get in touch with today’s poetry, and it’s not just the “featured” poets who get a chance to strut their linguistic stuff.

At Hankey’s, and at other readings, a portion of the evening is devoted to open readings whereby, as Mallory says, “any aspiring writer--anybody coming in off the sidewalk--can sign up and spit out his unique message.”

“The reading is very democratic, and that’s a part of the new movement of poetry,” he said, adding that in the past, “poetry tended to be very elitist, (something) read in the tearoom over crumpets.”

“And now,” he said with a laugh, “people are listening to poetry with their elbows in pizza. Poetry thereby becomes public and a commodity to be shared and enjoyed.”

As Mallory says in his tongue-in-cheek poem, “The Poetry Reading,” which he read during a recent gathering at Hankey’s:

” . . . I liked your stuff.

And I liked what you said about

trains

Barry Manilow

1000-island dressing

lynch mobs

the Shroud of Turin

I liked the woman crossing and

uncrossing her legs.

I liked your stuff.

I liked your stuff.

I liked your stuff. . . . “