Poetry in the Spin Cycle : Lifestyle: They recite works in a Silver Lake Laundromat over dirty clothes and humming washers. It’s one man’s idea of bringing poetry to the people.

This is a story of love and lint, of social outrage and stubborn stains.

It is a story of poets in a Laundromat.

Once a month--with last week’s laundry and this week’s poems--they gather at the Launderland in Silver Lake to wash, dry, fold and read. They come together because, as organizer Gabriel Baltierra says, “Everybody has poetry inside them. The trick is getting it out.”

Over the hum of 22 Speed Queens--and to the great surprise of innocents who’ve come simply to wash their clothes--the poets climb atop the folding tables to bark and sing and stomp out their verse.

A young actress in overalls rails against “the violence of war, the violence of stepfather.” A Latina lawyer laments another needless death in the barrio. A young man recovering from a motorcycle accident reveals how life is changed because “Dizzy Gillespie Likes My Hat!”

This is the kind of poetry that, as Robert Frost once said, “takes life by the throat.” And, in this case, even spins it a bit.

More than a few of the poems are X-rated. A long-haired man in black reads a love song of determinedly four-letter words to the hoots and howls of the audience. But don’t look for censorship here; if anything, this event may be the ultimate exercise in free speech.

“That’s how this all began,” said Baltierra, who has a goatee and a 9-to-5 job as a clerk at Los Angeles County Superior Court. “When the National Endowment for the Arts controversy was raging last fall over what was art and what was pornography, I felt moved to do something.”

So Baltierra, 25, brought together some friends and friends of friends to wax poetic in different public places, including Launderland at 3903 Sunset Blvd.

One weekend a month, he also organizes poetry readings on the Blue Line, a few hours of verse for and by mass transiteers. (The next reading is set for May 12 on the train departing for Long Beach at 4 p.m. from Grand and Washington.)

Many of the poets gathered this night are also Blue Line poets. They have been asked to bring their dirty laundry, as have members of the audience. (And those who are shy about washing their dirty linen in public are invited to bring clothes to give to the homeless.)

And so, with Clorox in the air and sheets in dryer, 30 young men and women await a turn to share their titled and untitled thoughts on life.

I miss you.

I know it’s hard to believe.

You always thought it would be easy for me

Since I was the one who left.

--Tina Demirdjian

A little boy rides his bike through Launderland, but none of the regular patrons seems to notice. They’re all nervously watching the poets read.

A tall girl with safety pins in each earlobe and a silver hoop through one nostril shoves a soggy blanket into a dryer as a blonde in a gingham dress stands to read. “This poem,” she says, “is for the Kurds:”

. . . So, my angels,

What do you think of

As you evaporate on the mountainside?

Do you think of us?

--Lisa Moreno

“I use poetry as therapy,” explains Moreno, a 28-year-old puppeteer. “But sometimes it is hard work. I do struggle.”

Deborah Sanchez, 31, grew up with poetry; her mother is a published poet. Sanchez is a lawyer in the Los Angeles city attorney’s office. “Poetry really helps me express some of the frustration I feel in the world. Sometimes there is so little you can do. Maybe just by commenting on things, it’s easier to bear.”

My conservative navy blue suit, white silk blouse, and sensible shoes

Do not fit her image of me--the rebel, the one who defied authority, reason, and danger.

As she smoothed the leather on my briefcase, she whispered,

“You can take the girl out of the barrio, but you can never take the barrio out of the girl . . . “

I would always be her homegirl.

Law was a tool I used for survival.

Now I know what they know . . .

The barrio, it’s true, lives inside me.

--Deborah Sanchez

Some of the dryers at Launderland are called Loadstars. The poets like that. A young man in a beret sighs poetically, “How lovely to say these words as the Loadstars spin and whirl our worldly vestments. . . .”

Halfway through the readings, a cabdriver looking for a fare named John interrupts the reverie. “SO, WHO CALLED THE CAB? WHO CALLED FOR A TAXI?” Getting no response, the cabbie leans against a Loadstar for the next hour, listening. “A long time ago, I wrote poetry myself.”

Iris Tessieri, a professional musician, was waiting for a bus outside when the readings began. “I heard this great commotion. And when I first came in, I thought , ‘Oh my, what is this, some craziness?’ I see now it is poetry. And poetry I love.”

The madness of poetry and its makers has been debated for centuries. As one 18th-Century bard put it:

We poets are (upon a poet’s word)

Of all mankind, the creatures most absurd:

The season when to come and when to go,

To sing, or cease to sing, we never know.

--Alexander Pope

As Launderland poet Lyvonne Klingler, 22, put it on this cool April night:

I brace myself for a twisted spring.

According to Baltierra, “More and more people realize they too have poetry in them as they meet us and hear us. My next idea,” he says, “is to have some readings at a bowling alley, where each poet would read a poem before they bowl. . . .”