COVER STORY : Poetic Justice : Coffeehouses and Other Venues Give Writers a Chance to Be Heard by Small but Appreciative Audiences

“Aristotle” has gripped the audience.

From seats on overstuffed green couches, at wooden tables and even at the bar where they hold cereal bowl-sized cups of cappuccino, the mostly teen-age crowd has its eyes focused on the stage at San Pedro’s Sacred Grounds. A lone in-line skater rolls through, his wheels humming across the concrete floor, but everyone else is quiet. They’re waiting for poet Charles Ellik to finish his tale about Aristotle:

I let go and it began

to work its way back into my skull

I fumbled for tweezers

This thing had to come out!

Ellik reads from letter-sized white paper in a dramatic whisper as if he is revealing someone else’s secrets. Is this a metaphor for the existential dilemma of modern life? Could this be a biblical reference to the corrupting nature of knowledge?

Tall, spider-thin Ellik leans forward, moving his fingers and arms in a gawky choreography. He continues in a hushed tone, much to the delight of his listeners, who giggle nervously. But as the poem builds to its climax, it becomes clear that “Aristotle” is about nothing more than the father of all, well . . . pimples. A collective groan comes from the audience. The cappuccino maker hisses faintly in the background.

OK, OK. So it’s not Shakespeare. Still, this is not just kid stuff. Readings of original poetry and prose have sprung up all over the South Bay during the past two years.

Each week Los Angeles County has about 150 readings, including a dozen or more in South Bay spots like Sponda in Hermosa Beach or the Laughing Coyote Readings in Torrance’s City Hall complex. These venues have given local writers an opportunity to have their work heard, and the small, but appreciative, audiences another way to spend an evening.

“This is cool. It makes you think,” says San Pedro High student Melissa Klaussen, who sits at a table with four friends. It’s a good way to practice for drama class, they say. They might even get up and read something next time.

“The main goal of Sacred Grounds was to be an art gallery and coffeehouse where the intelligentsia could gather and discuss the important matters of the day,” explains night manager and programmer Raindog, a gruff-voiced musician who uses no last name.

Those who gathered included talents like writer Charles Bukowski, who, before his death this year, regularly came by for coffee and cheesecake. In fact, it was Bukowski’s death that sparked the open-mike readings on Mondays and Wednesdays at Sacred Grounds.

“When he died, I organized a tribute to him--one of many in Los Angeles,” Raindog says. “Our edge was that Linda Bukowski, his ex-wife, helped us organize the event. Through her contacts, we were able to launch a few interesting readings. Sean Penn read, and Sinead O’Connor sang to about 15 people. And that helped get momentum going.”

Raindog believes San Pedro is a fertile field of creativity. The community has a healthy dose of visual artists, writers and jazz musicians.

“There is all this talent here, but I haven’t quite figured out how to unlock it,” he says. “I keep thinking I’ll come across the magic key, turn it, and all this stuff will come falling out.”

He’s hoping that adding featured readers to Sacred Grounds open-mike nights will be that magic key. The mike is open for 30 minutes to anyone who wants to get up and read, and then one or two scheduled writers take the stage. The featured readers aren’t necessarily high-profile writers, or even ones who have been published. The criterion is simply that they have enough experience reading to be entertaining. But good material helps.

“My pet peeve is whiny, teen-age Angst -ridden poetry. That’s really popular,” Raindog says, eyeing the flannel-and-combat-boot-clad kids moving past him into the coffeehouse. “My other pet peeve is whiny, Angst -ridden middle-age poetry, but we don’t get a lot of that.”

*

Program manager Tony Rose arrives an hour early to set up for a Tuesday night reading at The Hungry Mind, a coffeehouse-bookstore hybrid that’s the literary hub of Manhattan Beach--right next door to Paradise Surf and Sport. Rose usually organizes readings that have themes, and tonight the subject is revolution and independence.

Rose carries ragged tomes of Alan Ginsberg and Walt Whitman and a few computer-typed musings of his own. This reading is open to anyone, but Rose never knows whether his sign-up sheet will be full or as barren as a bachelor’s refrigerator. He might have to fill in.

“It’s like throwing a party,” says Rose, who gave up a career as an experimental psychologist almost a decade ago to write full time and help his wife, a doctor, raise their children. “You never know if anyone will show up.”

But Rose isn’t really worried. Typically, about 30 people, from a core of some 100 loyal locals, show up for each reading. There’s been a slow buildup of interest in the community, and not just for poetry. Local writers of fiction and nonfiction have started bringing work in, he says. Other Los Angeles-area writers, like Kate Braverman and Donald Rawley, occasionally are invited for special events.

Sometimes the buildup isn’t so slow. Rose recounts the time Manhattan Beach author Bob Holtel read from his autobiographical book “Soul, Sweat and Survival.” A crowd of 200 attended, and the line for the book signing stretched down the street.

“That’s an indication to me that people see this as an important place,” Rose says. “The strange thing about this place is that if you come here during a night when there are no public readings, people are still sitting at the tables, opening the books, talking, staying for three hours at a time. It’s like the coffeehouses of old.”

Kim Houston says when she and her husband, Jim, opened the business a little more than two years ago, they hoped to build a business that would “be a service to the community.”

And they have succeeded, says Elaine Mintzer, a local writer and the first to read at The Hungry Mind. “They take poetry readings and the like seriously. During a reading, they stop serving food and drinks so speakers don’t have to compete with noise from the espresso machine,” she says. “Not many places will do that.”

Manhattan Beach resident Bob Davis says he got hooked on coffeehouses after he got burned out on local night life. He is now a regular at The Hungry Mind readings not because he fancies himself a poet but because he enjoys the espresso-scented ambience of the place. “I like the people who gravitate to this place,” says the tanned-and-toned attorney. “You can find some stimulating conversation.”

*

Michael Andrews remembers the 1950s in Hermosa Beach, in the days when that beatnik haven Insomniac stood on Pier Avenue just spitting distance from The Strand. He and his friends would step out of the surf, their trunks still dripping saltwater, and read Henry Miller. “They had a concrete floor and didn’t care about shoes and shirts,” Andrews recalls.

Andrews, who along with Los Angeles poet-teacher Jack Grapes publishes the quarterly literary magazine OntheBus, is a kind of South Bay poet laureate. In the mid-1970s when “every poet in L.A.--which you could count on your digits--was at Beyond Baroque in Venice,” Andrews says, he began a series of readings at a place called the Alley Cat, in the building on Hermosa Avenue where the Strawberry Patch is today. So successful was the program that he and Grapes published “The Alley Cat Readings,” a transcript of the stories and poems, from December, 1975, to September, 1976.

“There was a lot of community support in those days because we talked to everyone in town to get ads to pay for printing the magazine,” he says. “Plumbers would come to poetry readings . . . and sell the magazine in their shops. It was an interesting phenomenon, but the bottom line is that you can’t keep doing that for free forever.”

Andrews’ next contribution was to organize readings at the Friends of the Arts in Hermosa in 1979 and ’80.

“During the past two decades there have always been literary circles grouped by geography or common interest,” he says. “Long Beach has always had a strong one because of professors at Cal State Long Beach, but most activity has taken place in West L.A. The South Bay has always been a vacuum in a sense, until possibly recently.”

What has changed in the South Bay is the number of coffeehouses looking for a way to attract business. Conveniently, poetic types work for free.

Andrews points to the programs at The Hungry Mind as a positive, unifying force for writers in the area, but says the trend doesn’t mean there’s a Parisian Left Bank in the making.

“These coffeehouse readings are good in the sense that they are more or less egalitarian and don’t discriminate, and do bring in a small audience,” he says. “But there often is no quality control--there are quite a few readers who aren’t very good at it and who don’t put much effort into it. The danger in bad readings is that someone will come to hear literature and get turned off and never come again.”

His fear that bad work could kill the sprouting scene might be right: Hava Java in Hermosa Beach recently stopped its weekly readings because audience interest had become anemic.

Andrews dreams of a place in the South Bay where writers could come together and create a writing community that would foster talent. Los Angeles has The Writer’s Program at UCLA Extension, and literati who offer structured workshops. “There are enough serious writers down here now who could use the benefit of good teachers,” Andrews says.

*

Postage-stamp-sized Kafeneo in Torrance is about as far as you can get from the hipper-than-thou, I’m-an-actor-but-a-poet-deep-down feel of Hollywood’s literary hot spots. It’s not the kind of place anyone is going to get “discovered.” Regulars include two elderly British men who recite epic works like “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” and a mother-daughter team who read poems and play bongos.

Jack Mackel, who runs the readings here, believes open-mike nights are barbaric, so he has just one or two people read their works, then discuss them with the audience. Mackel says he wants to offer a way for people to communicate humanely.

“It’s an easy, gentle thing, not a big cattle call,” he says.

Mackel says the difference between Venice and Hollywood and the South Bay has nothing to do with quality of the works performed, but rather the number who show up to hear it. “We don’t seem to attract as many people,” Mackel says, “which is good, because that means we don’t have to put up with all that psychobabble bull.”

That’s not the only difference in the South Bay scene, Rose says. “At a lot of places uptown, they want to see blood, they want guts, they want to experience something that is beyond MTV and O.J. Simpson,” he says. “Audiences here look for more humor. Perhaps people are more comfortable in their lives and don’t want to dwell in the darkness. It’s not a fault; they just come with a different set of needs.”

Mintzer says that audiences in the South Bay, out from under the dictum of hipness in Hollywood, are more open and accepting. In other words, if you want to read in iambic pentameter, go right ahead.

But unsophisticated? Brainless beach bums? Hard bodies? The local literati say these are all baseless stereotypes of the South Bay.

“My son, a writer, keeps an apartment in Hollywood even though his friends are here,” Rose says, because he thinks of people in the South Bay as “beautiful airheads” who are not serious about art. “I think that is never true anywhere. Everybody has their pain and anguish, and everybody has their glory and wonder. It’s happening all over the South Bay.”

Where to Find Poetry Readings

* Sacred Grounds

399 W. 6th St.

San Pedro

Mondays: Open mike and featured readers. 8:30 p.m.

Wednesdays: Open mike. 8 p.m.

* Kafeneo

25364 Crenshaw Blvd.

Torrance

Second Monday each month: 7 p.m.

* Sponda

49 Pier Ave.

Hermosa Beach

Mondays: 8 p.m.

* The Hungry Mind

916 Manhattan Ave.

Manhattan Beach

Tuesdays: Open mike with special programs or themes to be announced

* Laughing Coyote Readings

Joslyn Center in the Torrance City Complex

Torrance

Second Friday each month: Featured readers. 7 p.m.