Yes, Virginia, There Is Poetry in the City of Angels

It’s hard enough to write decent prose about Los Angeles; just when you think you’ve wrapped your fingers around a good, honest handful of the place, it squeezes out the other side and tiptoes away to get a bikini wax.

And writing poetry about Los Angeles? A disciplined art for an undisciplined place? My dears, what could one end up with but either parody or doggerel?

I ought to have known better, and now I do, for I have read it. A spiritual child of Los Angeles, who never saw the place until she was 27 and never met the grandfather whose romantic prose and promotion helped to put Los Angeles on the world’s map, has followed his energies and enthusiasms with her own bemused verse, offering it to her heritage and the city that spawned it.

It’s true, here we are all blonde, even in the dark, on Mondays or in slow traffic.

Without knowing of Suzanne Lummis, I felt linked to her grandfather, Charles F. Lummis, writer, ethnographer, editor, librarian and, in a city full of singular beings, one of the most distinctive among them.

He came out from Ohio to work at the Los Angeles Times. About 80 years later, I came out from Ohio, eventually to work at The Times. He walked all the way; I drove. In this city’s ordinary serendipity, I came all this way to find myself living a mile from the house he built with his own hands, of stones hauled up from the arroyo that is now the Pasadena Freeway.

Now, like her grandfather, Suzanne Lummis lives here, a few miles from her grandfather’s home, which is now a cultural and historic landmark. It is a matter of some amusement that when she invites friends to visit, they encounter on their drive north on the 110 Freeway a sign reading, “Lummis Home, Next Exit.”

Born in San Francisco, she grew up in the Sierra Nevada, loving L.A., at least the idea of L.A., from a distance, probably because she was so far from any city. “If I’d been born here I’d probably be trying to get out of town all the time.”

For a woman whose grandfather made his mark on the city two decades before the movies got wind of the place, it is a trifle embarrassing for her to admit that she more or less came here to be in the movies, “or if not in the movies, then near the movies.”

Then, too, there was growing up hearing about her grandfather, supposedly famous. But no one she knew had ever heard of him, not like Tyrone Power or James Dean, and for those mortifying teenage years she could only think of the man who died long before she was born, the man in the curious corduroy suit, as a quirky old has-been.

The nearest she got to the movie world was a Hollywood apartment building that qualified as borderline tenement, its hallways strewn in hypodermic needles like a flower girl’s scatterings from a junkies wedding, its rooms peopled by the near-homeless and certified hopeless.

And yet, and yet, “the movie world is a place where anything can happen. I don’t really feel that way about any of the other cities I’ve lived in--a certain kind of potential in the air.”

That powerful industry overshadows the other arts and the other lives that are struggling to thrive. “It gobbles up everything,” other crafts, other labors, other arts. “That poetry is springing up in the shadow of that is fascinating.”

We could be the pair in the summer’s big budget movie, one where shots get fired but everyone winds up with the person they love.

Her work is about the alter-world of Los Angeles, the authentic one that lies inland from the sun-beaten beaches and preternaturally young who stroll them, the Los Angeles that those who cling to the coast gaze at fearfully without knowing what there really is to fear from it.

She titled her book “In Danger,” for the street sensibility, the edge to the language that is not always the refined language of the MFA graduate, and the pervasive idea (not the reality) of peril. Amid placid titles such as “Shangri-La” are the more sinister ones: “Letter to My Assailant,” and “The Cradle Will Rock,” a poem about living amid the web of fault lines that underlies rich places and poor.

Her book is the second to be published by the California Poetry Series, a Berkeley consortium dedicated to promoting the works generated in a state rich in poets but underpopulated with publishers. The poetry series promotes California creators just as the grandfather that Lummis calls “old man Lummis” once promoted the city . . . and as his granddaughter now writes with a different sense of place.

“He was so involved with boosting the image of L.A., so passionate about it, as somebody who came from another world and made this his adopted region. And I seem to be doing that. It’s very strange.”

New York, is it true that great cold

makes the bones ache as if broken?

. . .

We’re like the landscape inside

a plastic dome filled with water.

But turn us over, then upright.

See?

No snow falls.

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Patt Morrison’s e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com