Intimations of Obscurity

Of all the poets who feel marginalized by the mainstream culture, the Los Angeles poetsapparently have special intimations of obscurity.

But don’t take my word for it.

Take it from Luis Campos, who told his listeners at the recently concluded Los Angeles Poetry Festival: “Ah poets/ They bare their souls/ on the stage of life/ for a few dollars/ coffee and cake/ and the applause/ of 37 hands.”

The 5-year-old festival was established, not incidentally, to cultivate an audience in a city where poets are easily discounted. And, judging from the crowd at the Los Angeles Theatre Center for the festival’s “Heard Word” closer--it was presented Nov. 6 by Harvey R. Kubernik, literary impresario of New Alliance Records--it has. Roughly 150 people showed up.

According to Francis X. Alarcon, a Northern California poet whose open letter to the festival was read from the LATC stage, “most L.A. poets have reclaimed . . . a direct, visceral, entertaining, blasting, funny and tragic poetic language” for their “burning truths.”

Overstatement, you say? The poets at LATC did give strong accounts of themselves:

Luis Alfaro (above), built like a stubby fireplug, was particularly dramatic. He stripped off his T-shirt and baggy shorts to reveal a black full-length slip underneath. Then, looking not quite dressed, he delivered a polemic about being a gay Chicano whose God “revels in the freedom of difference” and “works for below minimum wage.”

Marisela Norte, in a less urgent sartorial key and with less rhetorical flourish, called attention to the pin on her lapel. It said, “Illegal.” She was wearing it, she announced, because “Pete Wilson has declared open season on Chicanos and Mexicanos.” Her poetry told of rape, abortion and a sense of degradation made complete by the white male physician who said, “Open your legs wider, wider. . . . I know you’re used to that.”

What all of them shared, though, was not so much a common theme or even a declamatory style, despite their collective grouping as “spoken word” artists, but the idea that poetry consists largely of autobiographical vignettes.

“I used to be a bank teller, and now I’m a poet and I’m going to tell you about being a bank teller,” Danny Weizmann said, launching into a well-written monologue that didn’t sound for a moment like poetry but proved to be one of the comic high points of the program.

The swift pace of the evening’s first half--a few minutes for each performer--helped foster the illusion that poets as different as Linda Albertano (gender-war chronicler), Joel Lipman (post-Beat diarist) and Willie Sims (high-speed spritzer) belonged on the same platform with each other.

The bill’s second half, organized by festival founder Suzanne Lummis, offered Jamie O’Halloran reading “The Forensic Butterfly” (winner of this year’s USC Ann Stanford Prize) and poetry readings by three actors.

Roscoe Lee Brown dazzled the house with his sonorous recitations from memory.

All in all, not bad for a suggested contribution of 10 bucks.