Hearing the Word : New Alliance Records puts author readings on CD

Over the last several years, Los Angeles poets have found something of a godsend in Harvey Robert Kubernik. The Lawndale-based recording label he produces recordings for, New Alliance Records, has offered poets and prose writers with a certain panache to their reading style the opportunity to press themselves on compact disc. The lengthening list of these CDs, which now includes such L.A. literary fixtures as Michelle T. Clinton and Wanda Coleman, is a clear product of the ‘90s coffeehouse scene and the renewed presence of poetry. The latest batch of spoken-word discs from New Alliance unearths a diversity of voices that point up a richness that has always lurked under the surface of L.A. cliche. While Lynn Manning, Paul Body, Tommy Swerdlow, Eloise Klein Healy, Holly Prado and Luis Alfaro are hardly newcomers to the literary circuit, New Alliance has made them first-time recording artists whose singular styles you can now hear right in your living room, without the accompaniment of squeaking chairs, sotto voce conversations and untimely trips to the espresso machine. Alone, you can absorb a wildly colored spectrum of images that includes South-Central grit, West Hollywood night life, Jewish rituals playing out on Fairfax Avenue, makeshift altars smoldering in Pico-Union.

These releases are splendid at best and dubious at worst. While most writers interpret their works fluidly, some can be ill at ease, rushing past their words or poking along with precious little variation in tone or inflection. Maybe it’s stage fright, lack of a familiar audience or plain inexperience, but I found myself wishing at points that certain poets would either get some vocal coaching or confine their material to the page and/or a live setting. Poets would like to think they naturally do justice to their own recorded material, but alas, such is not always the case, and it’s the job of the producer to ensure that the recording stands up to repeated hearings. (Most of these CDs run about the length of a reading--50 minutes to an hour--but since recordings invite more intense study, it might have been nice to include the written texts as well.)

Still, the overall effect of the discs, individually and collectively, is powerful. Veteran poet and writer Quincy Troupe, a product of the Watts Writers Workshop, cuts joyfully loose on his first solo recording, “Root Doctor,” with a trademark barrage of images, blues-inflected rhythms and impassioned phrasing plucked straight from the pulpit of traditional black churches. Troupe’s searing yet agile voice demands to be heard from the first poem onward, and for the most part you willingly lend him your ears. While the scope of this work doesn’t disappoint--Troupe tackles everything from racial conundrums in “South Central Vendeventer Street Rundown” to life-affirming lust in “Male Springtime Ritual”--his words are too often upstaged by his delivery. Personal, small-scale observations hinted at in poems like “A Thought for You” and “It All Boils Down” are blown away by Troupe’s forceful voice, like so much delicate cobweb before a hurricane. It would behoove Troupe, a writer who cut his literary teeth in the civil rights era of the ‘60s, to realize that not every communication is a social indictment and to adjust his instrument accordingly.

Lynn Manning, also an African-American poet, presents altogether different points of view, often moving in their eloquence. His “Clarity of Vision” offers restrained reflections on the harrowing incident in a Hollywood bar in which the poet lost his sight and much of his life as he knew it. Struggling with blindness, Manning cannot help but look inward at his troubled childhood, or help but feel the omnipresence of urban woes that loom even larger precisely because he can no longer see them. Through the pain, however, Manning delivers “Shakin’ It Down,” a paean to all-night parties, with James Brown fervor, and his images of life along the Wilshire Corridor and the faded glamour of Central Avenue have a slyly sensual edge. It doesn’t hurt that Manning’s honeyed, jazz-inflected voice is perfectly suited to recording. Though it is marvelously controlled and never stoops to self-pity, it’s still heartbreaking to hear Manning talk about the panic he feels at being a passenger in a car who intinctively still searches the road for trouble, but can only imagine it.

Luis Alfaro also packs a punch with “Downtown,” a blast through his Mexican-American past imbued with plenty of humor and pathos. His lively, rhythm-driven delivery is part disco, part sermon, part storytelling. A child of the ‘70s who grew up in the Pico-Union District (“in the shadow of the Hollywood sign”), Alfaro puts us smack in the middle of pop culture as he knew it--Art Laboe presiding over KRLA-AM oldies radio, Wallabees and Miller’s Outpost corduroys, Eastside girls with mile-high teased hair, first kisses in third grade. This is a bumper-car ride through adolescence and young adulthood, with Alfaro caroming off his hard-drinking father, garment factory sweatshops, Al Green soul, the ever-present Virgin Mary and his own nascent homosexuality. Tortured stuff, but Alfaro’s keen sense of the ridiculous is more than up to the task of breaking it all down.

There are lots of other pearls, though you may have to rummage a bit. Paul Body’s “Love Is Like Rasputin,” the African-American author’s unique coming-of-age story in 1965 Monrovia, is notable for its blend of spareness and meticulous detail, though it could have done with some editing. Tommy Swerdlow’s irreverent “Prisoner of the Gifted Sleep” sends up everyone from the Jewish senior-citizen set to Spike Lee with rap-beat rhythms and feverish word play. Holly Prado arrives at some graceful resolutions about the human struggle with myth and reality--particularly dream-factory L.A.--in “Word Rituals,” and Eloise Klein Healy effectively tracks the wildlife, both human and non, of her own corner of L.A. in “Artemis in Echo Park/The Women’s Study Chronicles.”

Valid voices all, these discs are worth a listen. It’s like hearing the voices of those interesting-looking neighbors we all intended to meet, but never did, because we moved on before we got the chance.