Poets Unleash Power of Words

Dana Gioia grew up in Hawthorne, the son of an Italian American cab driver and a Mexican American mother who used to recite Edgar Allan Poe’s “Annabel Lee” to the son who would become the first in his family to go to college.

Lucille Clifton said her mother’s formal education ended before she finished elementary school, but throughout her life she wrote poetry in a formal iambic pentameter.

Gioia and Clifton, along with Pulitzer Prize winners W.S. Merwin and Mark Strand, held a capacity audience spellbound Saturday during a panel on “Poetry: The Music of Language.” Guided by moderator James Ragan, four of the nation’s most noted poets talked about their art, read some of their work and answered questions.

“For me, a poem always begins with hearing something . . . not with thinking about it,” said Merwin, who won the 1971 Pulitzer in poetry. “I try to find the other sounds that belong with it.”

The panel was the first of several poetry venues sprinkled throughout the fourth annual Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, which continues today from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at UCLA. Admission is free and parking is $5.

Featuring more than 400 authors and celebrities, 90 panel discussions and more than 350 exhibitor booths, the book fair last year drew 110,000 people. Tickets to the author lectures and panel discussions are free, and most--including those for the poetry programs--had been reserved by the time the festival opened Saturday morning.

“We have a lot of pretty remarkable writers gathered here,” said Thomas Curwen, Times deputy book editor, who helped put together the poetry events. He said he is pleased--but not surprised--by their popularity.

Besides several panel discussions, the festival features a Poetry Corner, which will also be open today, where writers deliver 20 minutes of readings, sign books and answer questions about their works.

Under a white canopy, Bonnie Burns, a printing consultant from Torrance, eagerly awaited Strand and Merwin, who she said were two of her favorites.

“They’re accessible,” she said. “If I sit down to read Wordsworth or Dante, I have to sit there and translate, ponder. It’s a lot of work. I’m part of the TV generation. What [Strand and Merwin] say reaches me quickly and powerfully.”

At noon, Strand strode coolly to the stage.

“I have nothing to say about my poetry,” he said dryly, as the audience of about 200 erupted in laughter.

“Everything I have to say is in my poems.”

He proceeded to read from “Blizzard of One,” a slim volume of 55 pages for which he just won the Pulitzer Prize.

“I love [Strand’s] simple style, without any gaudiness to it,” said Aaron La Fleur, a college student from Mission Viejo.

Merwin, appearing at the Poetry Corner half an hour later, read a nostalgic set of verses called “Remembering” and “227 Waverly Place,” about a Manhattan apartment he lived in for many years.

“Sometimes writers are chided for paying too much attention to the past,” Merwin said. “But the past is the only thing that’s real. The future doesn’t exist. The present exists only in flashes.

“Memory is how we recognize and cherish and live in the world,” he added. “Memory is what language is made of.”

Joe Stapen, a Santa Barbara psychiatrist who brought three books for Merwin to sign, said the poet “has that seasoned wisdom about him. He seems like a warm, caring soul.”

At the “Postcards from South America: Poetry and Prose” panel, the lines between poetry and politics were erased. Speaking in Spanish, the panel members discussed similar pasts in which they witnessed and experienced oppression in the form of human rights violations in their native Latin American countries. The poems they read were filled with pain and sorrow, the same pain and sorrow they continue to see in the world today, they said.

The room was crowded with Latinos, whites and African Americans. Most knew Spanish, but others were not native speakers and struggled to understand the poems. That didn’t stop Rachel Phillips of San Francisco from understanding the message. The tone of the voices, the facial expressions, the body language all made it clear what the writers were trying to say, she said.

Panelist Marjorie Agosin said she feels obligated to incorporate the “voices of the dead” into her works. Her characters are the “heroic people who were brave and were imprisoned and died because they thought they could create a just world, a noble world,” she said in Spanish.

No Latin American writer can forget the people who sacrificed their lives for political freedom in the tumultuous region, she said, before reading a poem about a mother describing a picture of her daughter, who was one of the many who vanished during political unrest in Chile.

“This is my daughter/ She’s beautiful/ Every day I talk to her/ . . . It’s been years since she came home,” she read in Spanish.

Various panels dealt with literary forms other than poetry. For example, authors who wrote about growing up in troubled homes discussed the difficulties of laying out their memoirs when family members want to keep their lives private.

Hope Edelman, who wrote about the death of her mother in “Motherless Daughters: The Legacy Loss,” said there are several version of the truth in every family.

“One person’s truth is another person’s secret,” she said.