bardz 'n the street : Founded five years ago by a motley collection of poets, the homeless writers coalition has served as an artistic outlet for those living on skid row.

By LUCILLE RENWICK

Dec. 11, 1994 12 AM PT

ON THE STREETS OF SKID ROW WHERE most people see despair, members of the Homeless Writers Coalition see poetry.

The world that unfurls each day amid the cardboard shelters, soup kitchens and crack corners stirs their muses. It is a world that inspires verses as gritty and hard-edged as the streets or as soft and dreamy as the people writing them.

Founded five years ago by a motley group of homeless poets who often gathered at an old Skid Row coffeehouse, the Homeless Writers Coalition has served as an outlet for artists living on “the Row” to flee their situation through words.

Some members moved on from the streets because of their work with the coalition, although the group was never intended to be a steppingstone. The prose was what mattered--grass-roots, in-your-face, humanizing a social crisis that has dehumanized for too long.

“It’s not just poetry, it’s individuals becoming open, honest and human enough to expose the darkest moments,” said poet and coalition member Eben Eldridge. “What they write about is not some ideology, it’s reality, it’s from direct experience.”

. . . Who are they

These Martyrs inside a box, awaiting the Designer?

Ribs showing through soiled T-shirt

Teeth rotting in their heads

Children’s sticky faces aswarm with flies

White lips swollen and blistered from the sizzling crack pipes

The chaffed crinkled hides of overexposed faces.

It’s painful for Robert Chambers to write such poems about what he sees on the streets near the Skid Row hotel where he lives. He remembers the situations and people about which he scribbles--sometimes in the middle of the night--all too vividly: The woman killed in her motel room in front of her children. Friends who got sucked into the maelstrom of the streets and died from drugs or illness.

Chambers, 39, says he’s a painter, not a writer. But it is writing that saved him from the streets.

Before joining the coalition three years ago, he bounced between flophouses and the streets, sliding into years of drinking and heavy drug use. The idea of resurrecting the creative writing he had abandoned years earlier pushed him into a drug rehabilitation program. He wrote three plays in his 11 months in rehab, a couple of which were produced for the coalition. He has since written numerous poems about his past and the bittersweet lives he sees on the streets.

Being part of the coalition put Chambers on the right track; he now lives in an SRO hotel, his rent money coming from monthly general relief checks and odd jobs.

The coalition itself has had ups and downs in its five years of existence: Membership has fluctuated as members died on the streets or went in and out of jail or simply disappeared. It’s nearly impossible to keep tabs on its transient members. To top it off, the group’s meager funds were stolen last year.

The coalition was founded in May, 1989, at Another Planet coffee shop, a gas station-turned-coffeehouse that was a drug-free oasis for homeless poets and painters. Alexander (the Poet) Andersen, Willy (Dino) Lewis and Charles (Southern Comfort) Walker--who often hung out there, scribbling their musings and sharing their inspirations--decided on a whim to pool their talents.

They wanted a vehicle to force themselves to write consistently and to open the door for broader audiences to see Skid Row’s talents. At the start, the men often read their work aloud to passersby from napkins and tattered pieces of paper under a flood of fluorescent street lights. The poetry and collective readings unleashed a drive in coalition members and a passion for art and writing that they had either lost sight of or didn’t know they had.

Comfort walked the streets looking for other men to add their prose to the group, while Dino and Andersen scouted for financial support to take their work beyond Skid Row.

Within two months the coalition had 25 homeless men writing regularly. Within a year, it gained nonprofit status and recognition from local artists, city officials and university professors. Members were reading around the city, had received attention from literary organizations such as PEN Center West and were mentioned on the “Today” television show. But life on the streets of Los Angeles’ Skid Row was never eclipsed by fleeting fame.

Comfort recruited Chambers to the coalition after the two had spoken a few times about poetry. At first, Chambers didn’t think much of the conversations. He was living on the streets and still into drugs.

One day something changed. During one of their talks Comfort mentioned that the coalition needed some plays produced. A month later, Chambers checked himself into a rehab center. Eventually, writing for the coalition became a release.

“We all had problems and the Homeless Writers Coalition was what helped us wake up every day and to keep sober,” Comfort said.

Chambers has been sober for three years and has focused even more on his writing since becoming president of the coalition a year ago.

His cluttered dorm-size room doubles as the organization’s headquarters, boxes and drawers brimming with poetry and coalition flyers. A typewriter and answering machine fight for space on a small table near Chambers’ single bed, while his paintings and drawings sit freely against a wall.

Chambers is one of the luckier ones who made it off the streets: Some of the homeless writers are sucked back into that life. Three coalition members have died--two in a robbery and fight, another of leukemia. A few went in and out of jail or sobriety houses. Others, like Paul Johnson and Alvin Wright, always stayed on the streets.

“I used to be real wild and radical--you know, fighting and stuff--and I started writing and it stopped me from doing things I used to do,” said Johnson, 36, who has been living in cardboard shelters along Towne and 5th streets off and on for five years.

One of the first members of the coalition, Johnson found his inspiration in his surroundings, basing characters on himself and his friends. He thought writing would help get him off the streets, make him famous. It did neither. None of his plays was ever produced, although plays by a couple of other coalition members were. So Johnson stopped writing. Now he just reads magazines or spiritual books.

Wright, 42, had been writing poetry before joining the coalition, churning out 100-page booklets of collections. He won the Los Angeles County Cultural Affairs Department’s Self-Esteem Award in 1992 for his poems, which read more like rhyming inspirational speeches.

In living in the moment, you do it everyday.

If you want to live correctly, that’s the only way.

When living in the moment you have to take it step by step.

So you don’t have to spend your next moment asking for help.

Wright had been an active coalition member until he left without notice last month, moving South for work, Chambers learned after trying to track him down.

Catching up with coalition members is hard, Chambers complains, because hardly anyone has a phone or a beeper. He has to rely on word of mouth to pass on information about meetings or readings.

Dennis Johnson, no relation to Paul, is one member who has always stayed around.

A slight, soft-spoken man, Johnson, 38, lives in a ramshackle room in a quake-damaged office building on 1st Street in Little Tokyo. Johnson works as the building’s caretaker in exchange for the shelter. He writes novels and rarely reads his work with the coalition or shows the stories--kept in large black notebooks--to strangers.

Johnson is the coalition’s hustler, hawking cheap gold-plated jewelry for money that he splits 50-50 with the group. The coalition has been working from scratch to raise money since last year, when a former president allegedly absconded with the coalition’s entire savings of about $9,000. No charges were ever filed.

The money was going to be used to open a cultural drop-in center for homeless artists and to regularly publish the group’s newsletter. Instead, the coalition operates on the pittance that members are able to hustle on the street or from donations.

The financial constraints caused Chambers and coalition officials to open up the group in the past year. The membership, once dominated by African American homeless men, now includes women and artists of all ethnicities.

Some members were homeless in the past, such as Eben Eldridge; others had never been homeless. There are also members like Roland Porter Jr., who reads and sells much of his poetry on his own but collaborates with coalition members for special events, such as last month’s Downtown arts festival.

“I’m not your typical homeless. I’m just this hippie that don’t like to work a J-O-B,” said Porter, who goes by Roland X.

X, 42, prides himself on never having stayed in Skid Row missions, although he slept in front of them when he came to Los Angeles in 1981. Instead, he sleeps in an old car on a quiet, industrial street in Marina del Rey, somewhere on Venice Beach, or he crashes at friends’ homes in Hollywood.

He joined the coalition in 1993 after meeting Chambers at a poetry reading. He is often one of the coalition’s main readers at events and has received several poetry prizes since he began writing two years ago.

X is a fast-talking, self-proclaimed Black Panther who is never without his trademark black beret and tosses his opinions about society and world affairs around like loose change.

His poems are sinewy creations about gang life or civil rights or world affairs, but never homelessness. Regardless, there is a kinship between X and the coalition.

“It’s all about words that make people think,” he said. “They’re saying, ‘Anything you see before you could be you sometime.’ You never know.”

He mentions Chambers’ poem about living in a cardboard shelter:

Who are they, Inside a Box?

For it is you

But listen, what is that sound?

Listen, it is the sound of Revolution

From Inside a Box.

Chambers is the driving force for getting the coalition back on its feet. His passion to see it succeed is tempered by discouragement at the lack of recognition and support the organization receives.

“The writing and plays are really good,” he said in the soft, slow drawl that harks back to his Midwestern upbringing. “But it seems like you just utter that you’re a homeless organization and it’s like you’re untouchable or something. People still don’t like to deal with the homeless.”

For those who have experienced the homeless writers’ work, the talents are obvious.

“These guys were good poets and had a God-given talent that you could hear in their work; they just happened to be homeless,” said Al Nadel, general manager of the Los Angeles’ Cultural Affairs Department.

Nadel has worked with the coalition since it started in 1989. He helped get the group a $2,500 grant during its infancy to develop a publication and to have members read their works at colleges, coffeehouses and other venues. He credits the coalition with getting several members back on their feet, like Southern Comfort.

While Chambers is the coalition’s driving force, Comfort is the group’s creative soul.

Comfort’s interest and his responsibility in the original coalition was solely creative--writing, reading and performing. His poetry always tried to put a human face on the homeless people who lived on the street for those who didn’t:

At a distance they point, they stay away,

they stand back and stare, as if they possess

incomparable perfection

I feel as though I am surrounded by waiting enemies

Waiting to see me cringe, to see me cry out,

And because I am humane retaliation becomes no option

. . . My ruin is predicted, but my future is certain.

Beneath the broken bones will emerge

an eternal home as a reward:

A place for my peace to have Peace.

Comfort, 38, found a place and a few odd jobs for himself in Palmdale, where he and his wife moved last year with their two children, ages 2 and 3. From January, 1990, until then, he and his wife lived in an SRO hotel Downtown after being homeless for three years. He is still active with the coalition, talking constantly on the phone with Chambers and coming into the city whenever possible.

Every day for three months in 1989 before forming the coalition, Comfort transformed a barren wall on 5th Street near San Pedro Street into a brilliantly colored display of poetic verses. Some were his, a few were by friends, and some were poignant phrases from books that captured the essence of the lives that revolved around the wall:

. . . Some say it is a hellhole with no real love

They see us from the outside, not from within

We know they’re not for us, they’re not our friends

So we stay to ourselves and try to get along

And build a wall around

This funny little place called home.

The wall is the Homeless Writers Coalition’s signature, Comfort said. Smack in the middle is the coalition name.

“Every time you look at the wall,” Comfort said, “you’re reminded of the coalition. So people can never forget it.”

There were things in my way

I couldn’t perceive

people I tried to deceive

bridges I burned but