Riding the Ripple : Poetry Is Breaking Out All Over as Writers Throughout the County Gather to Read and Rhyme

Let us now praise local poets.

In the past two years, Ventura County has quietly come alive with hints of creeping poesy--readings, publications, a rise in rhyme-related sales at the Ventura Bookstore and a host of other clues.

“There’s really something kicking in here,” said John Landa, co-owner of Island Print & Copy and co-publisher of “X: Ten California Poets.”

“Sometimes I think people doing their doctorate theses in 2015 are going to come back and ask me about these people.”

“If we were a baseball team, we’d have a strong lineup,” said George Keenen, proprietor of the City Bakery and organizer of local publications and readings through the Arcade Poetry Workshop since 1988.

At the Portside Gallery in Oxnard, free verse has taken over the answering machine. “Schools of brine tingling my face/I know this is the way/As whiskers remind me,” intoned the recorded voice of gallery owner Michael Racine one recent day. Then came the beep.

At Moorpark College, organizer Jan Straka is still marveling over the laser show that accompanied the reading there Nov. 3. “It was so cool,” Straka said. “We had the physics department help us.”

And at the Ventura Bookstore, which carries one of the county’s largest poetry selections, owner Ed Elrod’s records show $8,443 in poetry book sales in 1990--not a king’s ransom, but twice the income that poetry brought the year before.

“There has been a proliferation of small-press things,” said Elrod, pointing to a shelf of slim volumes near his cash register. But with local publications ranging from the genteel rivertalk (published in Ojai by retired college instructor Joan Raymund) to the high-schoolish Nation of Freaks (“the underground publication that gestures rudely at your elderly relatives”), it’s hard to keep track of them all.

“The image that comes to mind is the La Brea tar pits,” said Jackson Wheeler, a social worker and poet in Ventura. “You’re standing there this long time and nothing happens. And then suddenly these bubbles come to the surface.”

“I’ve written myself for 20 years, but I didn’t know about any groups (in Ventura County) until the last two years,” said Elizabeth Cain, a teacher who lives in Oak View and reads regularly at the Ojai Art Center’s poetry workshop. “It’s a real life-changing thing when you can find a group like that.”

Dixie Adeniran, the county’s director of library services, said she has been “quite amazed at the resurgence of interest in poetry here locally, and throughout the state too. . . . Maybe part of it is just that there are some very interesting local poets writing.”

In 19th-Century England, poets had Percy Bysshe Shelley to comfort them with the pronouncement that they were “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” In New England at about the same time, they had Ralph Waldo Emerson to call them “as inevitable as a crop of violets or anemones.”

Poets have not always been so prized in Ventura County. And even now, some suggest that the current boom could be spillage from the sudden burst of celebrity poetry in Los Angeles in the last couple of years. Once Justine Bateman took her act from the set of “Family Ties” to the weekly readings at Helena’s, one could argue, the world was forever changed.

But most trace this county’s advances to the efforts of local poetry pushers such as Keenen and Sandra Smith, until recently the publisher of the poetry quarterly Pangolin.

“When George provided the venue, all these people showed up and met each other,” Wheeler said. “And then Sandy showed up with the magazine.”

In the east county, the names of Ron Reicheck and Jan Straka arise often. Reicheck, who lives in Simi Valley, publishes the poetry quarterly Verve and stages frequent readings in Simi Valley and the San Fernando Valley.

Straka, from Moorpark, oversees publication of the twice-yearly Irrevocable Void at Moorpark College and collaborates on readings offered through the Portside Gallery in Oxnard.

For their parts, Keenen, Reicheck and Straka are quick to attribute the energetic atmosphere to the bravery of fledgling poets, the volunteerism of printers and the adventurous nature of new poetry audiences.

To be sure, the versifying life in Ventura County is still a scramble against long odds for subtle rewards. Nobody makes a living at it. Pangolin died when Smith moved to Santa Cruz in August, and it has not been replaced. The Thousands Oaks branch of B. Dalton Booksellers stocks just 25 to 30 poetry titles--not enough to fill a long bookshelf but apparently plenty for its clientele. Mona Locke, assistant director of the 10-year-old Simi Valley Poetry Series, confesses that “it’s just a battle all the time” to keep people coming.

And Raymund, publisher of rivertalk and leader of the Ojai Art Center’s poetry workshop, recently lamented that “poetry--good poetry, that is--is not a part of mass culture. And I doubt very much that it ever will be.”

Yet she and dozens of others carry on, pausing regularly to stand and read and sometimes even rhyme.

* At Ventura’s Momentum Gallery, Keenen and the poets of the Arcade Poetry Project gather for readings on the second Saturday of every month.

The readings began at the City Bakery in 1988 with about 10 semi-regulars and now include about 25. Audiences have reached three figures. (For information on upcoming readings, call 653-0828.)

* At the Ojai Arts Center, Raymund runs a Tuesday night workshop, drawing as many as 15 people to the 7 p.m. gatherings, and stages three or four public readings a year.

The workshop participants bring copies of their latest work, circulate them, read, “and then everybody has at it,” Raymund said. “Everybody knows each other, so there isn’t any defensiveness . . . . There’s a rapport.” (For more information, call 646-0117.)

* In Simi Valley, Locke and director Marilyn Hochheiser run their poetry series in cooperation with the city library, holding about five readings a year.

The most recent program, on Jan. 12, included Dane Baylis, a poet and photographer from Oxnard; Charles Webb, a Cal State Long Beach professor whose poetry, fiction and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, Southern Poetry Review, Wormwood Review and elsewhere; and Cecilia Woloch, a poet, teacher and Los Angeles coordinator for the California Poets in the Schools program. (For more information, call 526-1735.)

* At the 4-year-old John Nichols Gallery in Santa Paula, owner John Nichols made his first move toward poetry in May, 1989.

“I was doing poetry readings once a month for over a year--the first Friday of every month,” said Nichols. “When I first started it, it was standing room only. But it kind of tapered off . . . . I’m now doing it once every three or four months, as someone approaches me with a good idea.”

At the last reading on Nov. 2, Joan Raymund and two collaborators turned up in white costumes and filled the evening with Emily Dickinson poems. (For more information, call 525-7804.)

* At the Portside Gallery--located in Port Hueneme until this month--owner Michael Racine has been featuring monthly readings since January, 1990.

The “Poet’s Corner” presentations, sometimes incorporating dance, mime and music, are held on the third Saturday of every month.

“We got about 30 or 40 people to start with, and then 60, 70, 80 at a time,” Racine said.

This month, the gallery moved to a new site on Pacific Avenue in Oxnard. Racine said readings will continue. (For more information, call 486-1623.)

“I understand the torch is being carried forward,” said Sandra Smith, speaking by phone from Santa Cruz recently.

But publishers and reading organizers should work hard to recruit new talent, she said, or face that day “when you start hearing the same voices over and over again. Then I think the movement will start to die again. I think that’s something to watch out for.”

For now, the poetry people say, their voices are plenty varied.

Jackson Wheeler, 38, moved to Ventura from North Carolina in 1975. By day, he works as a social worker with developmentally disabled people.

But by nights and weekends, he writes. He has been published in St. Andrews Review, Cellar Door, Pangolin, Carolina Quarterly and the Ventura booklet “X: Ten California Poets.” For the last two years, he has also been a regular at readings at City Bakery and elsewhere.

“Before the City Bakery,” Wheeler said, “the last reading I gave was at UC Santa Cruz in 1980.”

Mona Locke quit writing for 20 years to raise five children. Then she took a class at Moorpark College in 1986 and found herself carrying around a new poetic sensibility.

Before then, “I used to think ‘Trees’ (“I think that I shall never see/A poem lovely as a tree . . .”--Joyce Kilmer) was the most beautiful poem ever written,” she marveled recently. “I really did.”

Ali Liebegott, a 19-year-old community college student in Newbury Park, got excited about poetry in high school and started going to monthly readings in Ventura last February.

She remains a regular, despite the demand of school and her part-time job at Baskin-Robbins. Three of her poems appear in “X: Ten California Poets.”

“I just decided that this was it,” Liebegott said. “This is what I’m passionate about.”