Readings and Relevance

A friend asked my advice about readings to go to in Los Angeles but told me to skip poetry. “When did poetry ever have any relevance to anything?” she asked.

Shakespeare and Co. may turn in their graves, but I took her comment seriously. After all, for some people “relevance” is the federal budget crisis or U.S. troops in Bosnia and nothing more. For many, literature barely registers, never mind poetry, which is seen as slightly wacky--Bill Moyers’ demythologizing television series notwithstanding.

Relevance.

As I review Los Angeles’ burgeoning literary scene, I ponder this elusive quality. “Relevance” is “germane,” the dictionary says, “pertinent,” “important to the matter in hand.” It’s a cryptic message, about as decipherable as literary life in L.A.

What, after all, is “the matter in hand?” Must it be multiethnic, in this mixed bag of a city, like Midnight Special’s ongoing Persian literature program or its Erotix series featuring “the budding stars in erotic literature from a multicultural viewpoint”? Maybe “pertinence” is political after all, like the moving speeches at PEN Center USA West’s fifth annual literary festival by Freedom-to-Write awardees Bei Dao, the exiled Chinese poet and fiction writer, and poet Goran Simic, the heartbreaking, all-too-relevant chronicler of Sarajevo violence.

And surely “relevance” is rooted in history, like the Central Library’s two-part series Eagle Feathers and Blue Jeans, featuring the haunting songs and stories of Native Americans--an oral tradition of literature, thousands of years old, but still very much alive today.

Some might say “relevance” is only about now--the trendy-chronological approach, exemplified, perhaps, by the avant-garde at Beyond Baroque or all those never-published poets testing their rhythms in coffeehouses and slams. Or maybe their celebrated colleagues are more germane--Eloise Klein Healy and Aleida Rodriguez, local chroniclers of life in all its particulars; Kentucky resident Nikky Finney, who charts African American culture; Jack Gilbert, balladeer of love--each one a building block for “the matter in hand.”

And if they are relevant, why? Because “hearts starve as well as bodies,” says Mary Smith of UCLA’s Center for the Study of Women in welcoming veteran poet and MacArthur Fellow Adrienne Rich to the center’s 20th anniversary celebration. But, reading from her latest collection, “Dark Fields of the Republic,” Rich shows us poetry in many pertinent guises. As social commentator, she skewers a me-centered era in which “the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged / into our personal weather.”

And when Rich reads, “In my 65th year I know something about language / it can eat or be eaten by experience,” she becomes a philosopher, questioning the very foundations of the matter in hand.

For what’s relevant in one period may be easily condemned in the next. The Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, in town to promote his latest novel, “Don’t Die Before You’re Dead,” understands the volatile nature of official fandom only too well. Having earned fame as a young man for his poem “Babi Yar,” in which he denounced anti-Semitism, he filled football stadiums with his admirers. But in the westward-looking climate of Russia today, he finds his latest work barely reviewed, his weekly television poetry show axed.

Yet Yevtushenko shrugs off political shifts. “I believe in joy,” he declares. “To be a pessimist is the easiest way to look clever.” Dressed in a most un-American red suit, he strides across the stage of the Central Library’s Mark Taper Auditorium or bounds up and down the aisles, kissing hands. Declaiming at full-throttle his poetry old and new as well as excerpts from his novel--”political, but also a love story, in the genre of Russian borscht!”--he hams it up for a mesmerized audience split equally among English and Russian speakers, who are clearly in no doubt about the relevance of this spritzy, elderly imp.

The truth is, “relevance” is by its very nature arbitrary. And that is where mutable poetry can guide us. Even my sceptical friend agrees it can teach us, first, to pay attention to the matter in hand. Second, consider everything to be germane. And third, have lots of fun.