Tired of being overlooked, L.A. poets are pushing their way into the public eye. How? They use high-tech hybrids, Hollywood hype, do stand-ups that lead from page to stage. : Poetry in Your Face

By IRENE LACHER

Jan. 21, 1993 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

To have great poets, there must be great audiences, too. --Walt Whitman

Poet Doug Knott might have preferred a Greek chorus or a string of girls in bubble ‘dos, but it didn’t look as if life would be that kind tonight. Indeed, his back-up for the evening was infinitely more annoying.

The mutter and clatter of coffeehouse business was everywhere as Knott stood fast on the Big & Tall bookstore’s rickety balcony. His poet’s passion vying with the satisfied hiss of the cappuccino machine, Knott declaimed a work fabulously titled “A Sensational Hollywood Sex-Murder Trial.” Then he faced his intrepid listeners.

“Do you guys like these longer ones I’m doing?” Knott said plaintively. “They say attention spans have grown short these days.”

It’s a tough world out there, and even the relatively rarefied world of poetry has entered the competitive fray for the nation’s attention. With Maya Angelou’s inaugural poetry reading for the new Clinton Administration--the first since Robert Frost’s address for J.F.K. 32 years ago--the poet has descended from the aerie onto the aggressively accessible pages of People magazine.

And nowhere is the poet’s quest for a great audience greater than in Southern California, home of the biggest audience-makers in the world. Take the current copy of Out Loud, which notes poetry events around town: The January issue lists more than 100 open and featured readings in venues as varied as universities and Laundromats, not to mention the Blue Line to Long Beach, where commuters are captive to the muse one Sunday a month.

Last year ushered in thousands of dollars in new L.A.-based poetry prizes, not the least of which was the Claremont Graduate School’s $50,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award (in addition to the existing $40,000 Lannan Foundation awards). And the L.A. Poetry Festival, which turns the town into a blizzard of readings, is happily anticipating its fifth year this October.

“Poetry is important to Los Angeles, not just to the poets but to the actors, to the screenwriters, to the directors, the musicians,” says David St. John, poetry editor of the Antioch Review and an English professor at USC. “These readings wouldn’t be thriving the way they are if it were just the poets. It’s fascinating and heartening as well.”

Add to that the poetry/music hybrids and the video and laser disc projects that are enabling poets to grab the public’s lapels--this in an age when the unembellished printed page is being elbowed out by MTV and other fancy-pants visual attention-getters.

Poetry in your face is the thing now, and L.A. poets, perceiving themselves to be shut off from traditional rewards and audience access, are hunting their own public by performing their work. And in the path from the page to the stage, poetry is finally doing its postmodern best to hammer down the walls that distinguish it from other disciplines. In so doing, the art form of trouble is coming into its own.

“Poetry has always been the voice of the unconscious and the voice of the one who struggles, and it’s not the voice of the well-fed or the dominant culture,” says poet Jim Krusoe, editor of the Santa Monica Review.

“It certainly makes perfect sense that in times of economic trouble and in times of trouble, period, poetry emerges,” he said. “People don’t write novels on prison walls. They write poems.”

But to some, the cornucopia of poetry performances in Los Angeles is literally an embarrassment of riches. The rash of coffeehouse and bookstore readings without benefit of curatorial winnowing or a critical eye has produced a noisy stew with varying degrees of success.

“When you remove the critical apparatus,” says poet Kate Braverman, “you’re working in a diseased cul-de-sac. How can you have an art form if no one will give you any critical feedback?

“I think it’s degrading after you’ve accomplished a certain amount to read for $11 at a bar no one has ever heard of much. People get involved because somehow they think they’re going to be discovered. That’s a way the whole movie mystique has cast a shadow over real Los Angeles writers.”

‘The Music of Language’

Still, some are intrigued by the popularizing effect that occurs when poetry links arms with the city’s Performance Imperative. What’s more, the burst of poetry performances since the late ‘80s brings the art form full circle to its oral roots. After all, poetry began as song.

“Poems are pieces of human voices, and poetry is not difficult for people when they hear it,” says St. John. “The music of language is what makes poetry unique.”

But it wasn’t until the ‘50s that the spoken word took off in this century with the arrival on these shores of Dylan Thomas, a great poet and reader who mounted massively successful performance tours.

And in San Francisco, the City Lights Bookstore became the headquarters of beat poets like Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whose impassioned readings often punctuated by jazz helped define that era’s counterculture.

In Los Angeles, a handful of coffeehouses kept up the beat until the last of the breed, the Venice West Cafe, closed in 1962.

Meanwhile, other forces were indirectly conspiring to produce poetry performances--a big one, ironically, was poetry’s shift further toward the margins of culture, in one broadly shared but controversial view.

The poetry Establishment was shifting to universities from pockets in the American cultural mainstream. (Earlier poets had plied a multitude of trades, like bank clerk (T. S. Eliot) and pediatrician (William Carlos Williams), and poetry commonly appeared in general-interest magazines until 30 years ago. In fact, Robert Frost became a household name partly by virtue of his cozy relationship with Life magazine.)

In 1991, the poet Dana Gioia touched off a literary firestorm with an Atlantic Monthly article titled “Can Poetry Matter?” which declared that poetry had vanished as a cultural force in America. Gioia laid the blame at the feet of academia, which he accused of maiming the art form with its rigidity and isolation.

Oddly, he argued, this is so at a time of “unprecedented expansion for the art,” when there has never been more poetry published, more poetry programs launched, more professional poets accredited and more grant money invested.

“A ‘famous’ poet now means someone famous only to other poets,” he wrote. “The situation has become a paradox, a Zen riddle of cultural sociology.”

With universities virtually the only haven for poets who care to make a living at poetry, professional poets have been ghettoized, and it’s changed the kind of poetry they write, observers say.

“If you’re mixing with musicians and performance artists and going to the theater and living a certain creative lifestyle,” says Braverman, “you’ll produce a different kind of work than if you’re on a government payroll and you have to determine parking fees for the faculty. As an artist, you’re responsible not only for what you do know but what you don’t know.”

St. John, however, defends university writing programs. The classes are in high demand, he says, providing students with an otherwise elusive sense of community.

“I honestly feel that people don’t know what goes on in programs and have been dangerously cavalier with the things that are said about them. It’s a convenient whipping post. The blame . . . needs to be focused instead on the individual poets.”

Still, St. John concedes that American poets have never enjoyed the esteem of their counterparts in Italy or Russia, a peculiarity he lays at the door of the American character.

“Americans have traditionally been suspicious of those who use language too well,” he says. “There’s the sense of the snake-oil salesman, this American tradition that integrity is equated with silence. It’s the Gary Cooper school of poetry--the less said, the more truthful and honest.”

‘Incredible Agony’

In Los Angeles, poets outside academia say they have been grappling with yet another literary whammy--the regionalism of poetry publishers and grant and prize-givers concentrated in the Northeast (although some observers note that Western fiction writers and poets in other sections of the country are equally on the outs).

“There’s the idea that Los Angeles writing isn’t as intelligent,” says Braverman. “It can’t possibly be as good because they didn’t room with us at Yale.”

(L.A. poets have not, in fact, been totally shut out. Amy Gerstler, for one, won the National Book Critics Circle poetry prize in 1990.)

Braverman traces her own literary roots to a parallel strain that sprang up in the late ‘60s in Los Angeles, particularly in Venice, with the birth of the Beyond Baroque literary/arts center and the Venice Poetry Workshop. Those poets largely skirted MFA programs, springing instead from the beatnik/hippie ethos that colored the ‘60s.

“Despite the incredible agony of this life, particularly in Los Angeles, where being a poet is an oxymoron, there was a sense that those of us in the original Venice Poetry Workshop were outlaws on Jack Kerouac’s road,” says Braverman, who joined the workshop in 1970.

“There was a sense of Los Angeles as the glorious last outpost of the Holy Roman Empire. . . . That has been one of the great horrors and ironies of the situation: that what we thought would be the first great city on the new atomic trade route should so squander its promise.”

Shut off, if not exactly from fame and fortune then at least from the traditional rewards and outlets, Los Angeles poets have aggressively gone after their own audiences by performing. Indeed, it was that search for a public that gave birth to the Los Angeles Poetry Festival in 1989. The event, which spotlights 50 readings around the city, has since doubled in attendance to more than 2,000.

Poet Suzanne Lummis says she was spurred to launch the festival by yet another rejection slip from the New Yorker. “I thought, ‘What can I do that will be so big that it can’t be ignored?’ ” she says. “It came out of anger.”

The poets’ audience hunger was further quickened in 1987, when they lost another claim on the public’s attention. Then-Times Book Editor Jack Miles, following a national trend to devote less space to poetry, announced that he was reducing the number of reviews (although the section also began running a poem in each issue). That prompted three dozen poets to protest in front of The Times building, brandishing signs that complained “L.A. Times: Bad to Verse.”

Under Sonja Bolle, who succeeded Miles in October, 1991, the Book Review has assigned occasional poetry reviews and devoted two issues to the art form. “Poetry is an important part of the literature that’s being produced at the moment,” Bolle says.

The relative critical vacuum has produced fertile ground for performance, giving L.A. poets the freedom to experiment--and, in the view of many here, to fail.

“One of the reasons it’s happening more in Los Angeles,” says Krusoe, “is that Los Angeles has never had a traditional academic base of poetry. There has never been anything to slow it down. It’s also happening in New York but for different reasons; people like Laurie Anderson are interested in pushing that stuff out. New York has always been the avant garde. Los Angeles sort of invents things by stumbling.”

‘Funny and Vernacular’

What L.A. poets have stumbled onto goes by different names in these somewhat embryonic times. Krusoe makes the distinction between performed poetry (poetry written for the page but performed at readings) and performance poetry (work written to work equally well on the page and the stage). Charles Webb, a poet and Cal State Long Beach English professor, calls the latter stand-up poetry in a 1990 collection he edited with Lummis: “Stand-Up Poetry: The Poetry of Los Angeles and Beyond.”

“I noticed poetry coming out of Southern California that was more lively and funny and vernacular,” he says. “It really needs the theatrical element and props and hyper presentation.”

Poet and UC Irvine English professor Robert Peters, for example, is known for epic poems inspired by bizarre historical figures like “The Blood Countess,” a 17th-Century Hungarian mass murderer who bathed in the blood of virgins to keep herself young. But he finds that in the absence of conventional standards, much of the work performed in Southern California is emptily theatrical.

“I haven’t seen much that I think is very good,” he says. “People get a kind of success before they’re matured as writers or as performers. They get a shtick and go with it and bring their friends, and people come and applaud and they think they’ve arrived. They appear to be so successful, and maybe they’re super-declamatory and they light a lot of candles and yell and rant and it sounds like they’re there. I’m just afraid that a lot of the work won’t last.”

Still, performance poets are looking toward their piece of immortality with the growing affordability of technology. Videotapes have become “the chapbook of the ‘90s,” in the view of poet/publisher Bill Mohr.

Southern California poets G. Murray Thomas and Bowerbird Intelligentleman are trying to make the leap to television by producing poetry videos inspired by MTV. They’re organizing a mass reading for filmmakers and production companies that would expose them to 100 area poets by next summer.

And spoken word recording stalwart Harvey Kubernik, who has been documenting L.A. poetry for 15 years, is moving into compact and laser disc. His current projects, betraying his previous incarnation as head of West Coast A&R; for MCA Records, harness words and music performances by former Door Ray Manzarek and by Lisa Coleman, formerly with Prince.

Such hybrids call home the poets who evolved into rock lyricists (their musical performances punctuate poetry readings as well). Spiritual heirs to the 19th-Century Romantic poets, the poet rockers enjoy the material rewards denied purebred poetry--”the starveling of the art world,” as Webb likes to call it. Indeed, if W. S. Merwin and Gary Snyder and Gwendolyn Brooks are far from household names, Jim Morrison and Paul Simon have more than a few followers. Poetry isn’t dead--it’s just going by another name on MTV.

Of course, with rap, the musician’s disguise is even sheerer. South-Central poet Paul Beatty shed it altogether on his current reading tour with Allen Ginsberg. “He’s considered our first rap poet, which is funny because it’s like the snake taking its tail in its mouth--as though rap weren’t poetry from the get go,” Coleman says. “I understand rap has to be called music because if it weren’t, there wouldn’t be money for it.”

But here as everywhere, even money can’t buy love. Says St. John: “People recognize that in its compression, in its density, in the power of its emotion, that poetry is the one place they can look to find language used in a way that reflects the complexity and often the drama of their own experience.”

Beans With Garlic

this is important enough:

to get your feelings down,

it is better than shaving

or cooking beans with garlic.

it is the little we can do

this small bravery of knowledge

and there is of course

madness and terror too

in knowing

that some part of you

wound up like a clock