When the Spirit Moves the Muses, It’s Poetry in Motion

“I’m really real, I am, I am . . . am I really? Am I really?”

On a darkened stage in Hollywood, Charles Ellik slowly revolves, chanting his ever-mutating verse while he creates existential clacks on a hand-held noisemaker. Throughout the tiny theater, other poets begin to clap in unison. They are here to ride the latest wave in the avant-garde: “performance poetry,” itself an ever-mutating, vaguely defined product of the coffeehouse scene.

Ellik, a regular at the Gaga Coffeehouse in Long Beach, gives way to Alli B. Watson, who started out at the Cobalt Cafe in Woodland Hills before she began reciting at Van Gogh’s Ear in Venice. Watson takes the stage with a guitar. She is in her 20s, a lank-haired woman who was homeless before scraping together money for a 1961 Volkswagen van, which now houses all her belongings.

The van is shared by her husband, who before their marriage was the inspiration for the poem Watson now delivers: “Where’s My Hippie Boyfriend?”

“I’ve been rambling ‘round from town to town/Lord knows I really miss him now,” she begins in a twangy presentation that blurs the line between poetry and song. “Have you seen his long hair/That’s never known the violence of scissors or a comb?”

One by one they come up, more than a dozen performers of far-ranging backgrounds and interests. Bringing them here, to the 250-seat Barnsdall Gallery Theater on Hollywood Boulevard, is a 40ish poet widely known in Los Angeles art circles as bowerbird intelligentleman, a name he writes in the e.e. cummings style.

An owlish man in glasses and faded T-shirt, he has organized this show of performance poetry as the first in a monthly series scheduled at least through September. Although intelligentleman is reluctant to define the art form, saying it is still nascent, others in attendance have developed a more vivid impression of performance poetry, which has experienced minor waves of popularity through the decades--the latest evolving over the past two years.

William P. McLain, 82, a Burbank poet who plays Highland Grounds in Hollywood, Ground Zero in Burbank and other venues, describes it as poetry that includes “accompanying music, two or more people doing one poem (or) physical movements--dance, gyrations, walking about, hand and eye movements, etc.”

The genre, now popular in New York as well, is in vogue at about 50 Los Angeles coffeehouses, many in Hollywood, West Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley. For some performers, the style represents a more dramatic way to vent outrage over the problems confronting Los Angeles and other cities.

Shane Montgomery is one of many poets who have written about urban violence in the aftermath of last year’s riots. Her work is called “Hatred Burns.” It begins with the 30-year-old writer and actress undulating in a tight black bodysuit to the rhythms of a conga drum and other percussion instruments.

“Judge me not for my existence,” she commands, “but for how I failed to live!” The verse goes on to impugn racism, violence and the flawed wisdom of social politics: “The air we breathe/The blood we bleed/The love we need/Are all the same;/Still, we play these games--/And call it evolution.”

At that moment, vocalist Angel Sheppard joins in for an impassioned chorus: “Roasting in the prejudice of madmen . . . Hatred Burns!”

*

About nine years ago, a poet who calls himself Dr. Mongo watched a murder take place on a drizzly street near Little Tokyo. The victim, an elderly Japanese gentleman, was beaten to death with a pipe during a robbery.

It became the subject of Mongo’s work, “Tanabe”:

“He was approaching 80 as reluctant misty rain baptized his most untimely death/Washing blood and his gray matter into the guts of a wide-mouth cluttered gutter.”

The words come out in an angry wail, holding everyone in the theater rapt.

“After that day I wondered, did he have time to think, ‘What’s going on?’ as his skull was pounded into kaleidoscopic fragments/ Body buckled beneath an unprovoked barrage of blows upon his person/Or did not he have time to think at all?”

Mongo, 53, is regarded as a guru to many in the scene, particularly downtown, where he still holds weekly readings in Little Tokyo. His performance brings down the mood of the crowd--temporarily.

It lifts with humor. G. Murray Thomas roams the stage with a modern lament: “Someone is dialing wrong numbers on my windshield and faxing me bills for toys I never bought.”

Jimmy Townes, who dabbled in an earlier wave of performance poetry in the late 1960s, closes the night by beating a base drum with a plastic horn. Around him, a dozen backup performers join in with tambourines, triangles and even a predator call, which sounds like a wounded animal.

“Blessed are those who worship all the senses of the body & soul;/Blessed are those who have the power of the dreamer. . . .”

The number, laced with musical eccentricities, ventures far from mainstream tastes. But that has not stopped Townes from dreaming his own dream--of rising out of the coffeehouse scene to become a major new artist with a big-time recording contract.

In fact, the 46-year-old performer has put the song on a new, self-styled cassette tape, which he hands out to record people at every opportunity. This one, the third in his long-playing quest, is titled: “Play This Music or Die.”