What’s the Good Word? : Culture: Ignored by TV and film, lovers of the spoken word are finding an explosion of readings by authors and actors.

Why, right now, should the comfort of the spoken word be flourishing the way it is? It’s been possible to hear first-rate authors in the city for years, from nurturing-ground readings at Beyond Baroque to Los Angeles City College’s City Works program, with way stations in between. Those programs still thrive.

Yet this fall the list seems fatter and brighter than ever: last week William Styron in his first-ever Los Angeles reading; yet-to-come appearances by the country’s outgoing Poet Laureate Mark Strand; by recent National Book Award winner Amy Gerstler; by Ireland’s Seamus Heaney, its most celebrated living poet, whom some compare to Yeats. Then there’s the interesting hybrid: actors in tandem with authors and poets, reading stories, poems and sections of novels.

And the audience is obviously there, crowding poetry readings to overflowing, selling out evenings with visiting writers far in advance. With television and movies turning their backs, in the main, on adults, these readings seem to fill the requirements of a civilized evening, as a place where people can come away having felt something. Three closely involved in the process suggest what that something may be.

“Human beings touching one another,” says Douglas Dutton of Dutton’s Books. At the store’s readings, he finds both authors and audiences parched for shared communication.

“People are looking for a more altruistic experience; art that’s not geared to bottom-line mentality,” says Michael Silverblatt, KCRW’s Bookworm and interlocutor of the Lannan Foundation’s upcoming readings and conversations.

“People need a break from images, images, images,” says MET Theater member Darrell Larson, director of its current Great Writers Series. “It’s a return to the appreciation and craving for the word.”

At the MET, Larson has been, to no small degree, a conduit for that word. He also directed the poets and actors in the new series of readings that the Poetry Society of America, West began in September at the Chateau Marmont.

His choices for the new MET readings--put on during nights when the 99-seat theater on Oxford Street is dark, as an additional way to bring it revenue--are fresh and unstaid, without a hoary classic in the bunch. His choice of writers is cutting edge: Denis Johnson, Joy Williams, Don Delillio and Jamaica Kincaid, among the many. And in a series whose correctness and delicacy lies in the pairing of author and reader, Larson, an actor himself, seems to possess perfect pitch.

Last week, the graphic darkness of the first chapter of Eddie Bunker’s novel in progress was made bearable by the palpable decency of actor Brian Kerwin, who gave its scabrous moments almost mournful tenderness. (“Straight Time,” one of the least sentimental movies about cons and ex-cons, was based on Bunker’s first, autobiographical novel.) It was paired with magnificence. Paul Winfield gave the proper voice and full majestic weight to the final chapter of the book he calls his favorite, “The Confessions of Nat Turner.” Larson’s current pool of actor readers includes Bonnie Bedelia, Arliss Howard, O-Lan Jones, Holly Hunter, Forrest Whitaker, Richard Masur, CCH Pounder, Eva Maria Saint, John Glover, Alfre Woodard, and more.

Watching Larson, warm and assured as he hosts these readings, requires a real shift of gears for those who can’t ever forget his menacing drug-trafficker in “Mike’s Murder.” It’s as if Tommy Udo were suddenly one’s “Foundations of Poetry” prof. This chameleon is the kid who found books when he was 6, not encouraged--but not discouraged, either--by his family. As a teen hauling hay in Ely, Nev., or Sacramento, at smoke break time, Larson would pull the book instead of a cigarette from his back pocket. Today, he can call himself a voracious reader; back then to his family he was a foreign animal.

“Darrell knows actors, he knows the streets, he knows literature,” says Michael Ontkean, whom Larson paired with Amy Gerstler at the Chateau Marmont readings. Ontkean, “Twin Peaks’ ” soulful sheriff, may be happier to be known as the author of four books of poetry. “But more than that, Darrell has an uncanny ability to have read something years ago, kept it in his head and thought, ‘Harry Dean Stanton would be exactly the reader for this story.’ ” And of course, he would. It’s a talent unique to Darrell’s brain.”

Larson shrugs off such words, though not without a pleased grin. “Basically,” he explains, “the challenge is to see what it is in the story that needs to be voiced, whether it’s the narrative or a major character who is the heart of the story, then find the perfect person to embody it. It’s an acting task, but an unusual one. The main job is the presentation of the language. Then there is the characterizing, the naturalizing of it.”

“Every story has an aim or an objective. In ‘Shadrach’ . . . a very little-known Styron story, the aim is to memorialize Shadrach, a 99-year-old ex-slave, so that people see the kind of man he was, and to talk about death, which is a hard thing to do. The story’s high point is Shadrach’s trip to the mill pond on his ‘family’s’ land, as he re-lives the possibly one pure moment of happiness he had in his life. As for the right reader, once John Glover could find the time (between rehearsals of Alan Ayckbourn’s “Henceforward” at the Taper) to do it, it was easy.”

That reading was poignancy itself; the power of the words swept over Glover as well as his listeners--shattering both. To watch Glover, and at the same time remember accounts of Dickens (professionally lachrymose and theatrical though he was) who could not read his own characters’ deaths without weeping, is to understand how much more vulnerable an actor is when he reads than when he’s in a play, where there is at least a character to pull around him.

The prose on the MET’s current bill sticks to the ribs and in the memory. For the power of poetry, there is Seamus Heaney, the first artist in the Lannan Foundation’s series of readings/in-depth conversations, which begins next week.

And as off-putting as poetry can be for some, intimidating or a too-private pleasure, there is William Carlos Williams’ “Asphodel,” which gives it exactly its right weight:

It is difficult

to get the news from poems

yet men die miserably every day

for lack

of what is found there.

This winter, at least, it seems there will be no lack of nourishment.