The Hummingbird’s Part of the Show

In poetry and in art, you get this paradox: a beautiful thing that cuts you open. Emily Dickinson put it better: She said she knew it was poetry when she felt as if the top of her head was taken off. In his introduction to the first of four summer readings in the Poetry Garden at the Lannan Foundation last Sunday Patrick Lannan quoted Dickinson. It seemed fitting to hear poems read aloud in a garden, one that’s especially remarkable considering that it was created out of what used to be a parking lot and is itself something of a poem.

Housed in what used to be an air systems assembly plant, the foundation building incorporates a library, offices and an art gallery. The Poetry Garden, complete with Japanese maples, sea pink flowers and hummingbirds, was designed by the artist Siah Armajani. Engraved in the garden walls are the words of Wallace Stevens’ poem, “Anecdote of the Jar.” Sitting there, listening to the reading, you notice that the fragrance of the sweet shade and green grass cuts the smog of Los Angeles air.

“Poetry,” Lannan said, “invites us out of our own neighborhoods and transforms us.”

And who would not want to be transformed in such a setting? The reading was very low-key, as you’d expect on a Sunday afternoon. A homeless man wandered in. Admission’s free. Everyone’s welcome, so long as there’s room, although this particular reading, devoted to four poets published in “Manoa,” a journal of American and Pacific writing from the University of Hawaii, was packed. Two hundred people showed up--not a bad crowd for poetry.

The first poet to read, Walter Pavlich, stood at the podium, framed by the two maples, one pink. A former firefighter who has worked in prisons, he wrote “This Is Touch Time,” about visiting hour at a prison, and even more hauntingly of bears starving in a Sarejevo prison after the zookeepers had been killed. Orioles darted in and out of the garden as he read.

Next, Cole Swenson, dressed in white, read from her book “New Math.” She had an almost musical delivery, rather like Suzanne Vega, and read “An Immigrant Carries Her Painting,” about her grandmother, and my favorite poem of the day, “Cathedral”: “When we dream, we dream alone/The only true flight is that of stone.”

Next to read was the Mexican poet Alberto Rios. His father, he told the audience, is Mexican and his mother is English. “I look like my mother,” he said. “She’s got the beard.” A short, imposing, colorful man, dressed in a blue shirt and brick-colored tie, he said: “My first language was the language of listening, which I learned at my grandmother’s. Growing up, if I’d been as tall as I am now, I’d have to duck. So much stuff was coming through the air.” And then he read a couple of remarkable poems from his book, “Teodoro Luna’s Two Kisses” about his parents and his grandmother.

The last and perhaps best known poet to read was Carolyn Kizer, winner of the 1985 Pulitzer Prize. As she read from part four of her poem “Pro Femina,” written in the voice of Robert Louis Stevenson’s wife Fanny, she became that woman, describing the rampant blooming of Samoa, the island to which this brave, iconoclastic wife took her sick husband.

After the reading someone asked John Lannan (a board member of the Foundation):

“Did you plan the hummingbird too?” because one had dipped in to sip from a flower in front of the podium as if to punctuate the end of a poem. “Of course,” he said joking. “Isn’t this a good time for a poetry reading series, at 4 on Sunday afternoons?” he added and one couldn’t help but agree. Afterwards some people stayed to drink wine and talk about poetry, or wander through the gallery’s exhibit on Photography in German Art. The next reading is July 18, for the 1992 National Poetry Series winners, Gerald Burns, Mark Doty, Terry Ehret, Mark Levine and Lawrence Raab. On July 25th, James Krusoe and Benjamin Alire Saenz will read.

The Poetry Garden is located at the Lannan Foundation, 5401 McConnell Ave. (in the western section of the city between Marina Del Rey and the L.A. International Airport). For further information, the Lannan Foundation can be contacted at (310) 306-1004.