A Month of Poetry in 3 Stanzas

O, yes, we honor Marianne Moore’s take on poetry--”there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle”--and, yes, we, too, dislike the gimmicky naming of months. But April is National Poetry Month, which “celebrates the democratic spirit of American poetry,” and we want to join that party, to know whether this poetry-for-the-people notion is sweeping the land, whether ours is a culture in which the poetic “O” is not askew.

How could we not love the imagination in projects inspired by National Poetry Month, which began in April 1996: The guy who drove across the country in a moving van, handing out 100,000 free books of poetry at supermarkets, zoos, prisons and elsewhere in 1998 (brought to you by the Washington State Apple Growers. Seriously). The 58 billboards put up around Los Angeles in 1999, featuring excerpts from the work of poets including Charles Bukowski and Gwendolyn Brooks, sponsored by a group called Poets Anonymous. (Members, who declined to be named, hired a publicist to speak for them.)

But this April, we wanted to peer beyond the Official Calendar published by the Academy of American Poets in New York and paid for by sponsors including Merriam-Webster, the New Yorker and Random House. Events such as the poetry readings on Mt. Everest and the International Space Station, a tribute to U.S. Poet Laureate Stanley Kunitz in New York City, a poetry festival at the Carl Sandburg House in Flat Rock, N.C.

We wanted to see if poetry is palpable to people for whom the usual readings and workshops are but distant constellations; to see whether poetry consciousness is surfacing in unexpected ways--say, in the non-poet populace as we know it.

Earlier this month, for instance, Long Beach Mayor Beverly O’Neill read her own poetry for the first time in public, before a standing-room-only crowd of 120 during the city’s Poetry Week. Was she scared? “Absolutely. I can talk about the city and other things very easily, but to talk about things personal. . . “ The poem, which she wrote in graduate school at USC in 1976, was inspired by Dante’s Beatrice from “The Divine Comedy.” “I’d like to be Dante’s Beatrice. . . .” the poem begins.

Turns out her act of self-revelation prompted another. The next day, at City Hall, a security guard asked her, “How did the poetry reading go?” Oh, fine, the mayor said. “Well,” he told her, “I write poetry, too.”

The English professor who invited O’Neill to read had no idea that she wrote poetry. Cal State Long Beach’s Elliott Fried, the week’s co-organizer, simply took a shot. “What we’re trying to do,” says Fried, “is break down some of the perceived traditional boundaries about poetry, that certain people write poetry and certain people do not. He turned to people he knew, to people his neighbors knew. The week’s five poetry events drew more than 1,000 people.

“The poets are already here. You don’t have to bring in big-name poets.”

I. In which the sound of the Muse is pl-unk-pl-unk-pl-unk-DING.

What if I don’t get it, the typical bookstore-goer worries about poetry. What do they mean, those famous William Carlos Williams lines: so much depends/upon/a red wheel/barrow/glazed with rain/water/beside the white chickens. Skylight Books general manager Kerry Slattery knows the type. This is the customer whom Slattery wants to beckon to the party, the type who is intimidated by poetry readings and the “rarefied audience, where you have other poets or people who are already knowledgeable about poetry.”

“It seems,” says Slattery, a bubbly redhead in her 50s, “like the whole point of focusing on a month like this is not for those people who are already the converted.” Oh, there is poetry everywhere, she thinks, and she--the independent bookstore manager in Los Feliz--must coax the poet out of the non-converted! In a gentle way, a simple way . . . give them . . . space.

So for April, Slattery decided to put together a poet’s retreat in her bookstore, a homey place with brick walls and a chunky cat named Lucy who jumps into laps during readings. Head to the back, past the rack crowded with poetry chapbooks sold on consignment. Past the 18-foot ficus tree that grows toward the skylight in the high ceiling with exposed beams.

A sunny yellow sign invites: “Add a poem to our Poetry Month Book, no more than one page. Use the hole puncher, and add your poem to the black three-ring binder.”

Nearby a manual typewriter sits on a worn oak desk, along with a stack of white paper, notebook paper and yellow lined paper, a couple of pens and pencils, and white correcting fluid. The “A” key sticks on the circa-1950 Smith-Corona unless you press hard, which is fine with Slattery, who wanted to provide “things that, in themselves, by touching, make [people] feel differently.”

Throughout the month, Slattery is asking random customers to pick a poem from the binder and read it aloud. By this week the binder held more than 75 poems, some typed on the Smith-Corona, some laser-printed at home and brought in with a fold in the middle, others scrawled in pencil.

Some people hunker down at the writing desk for an hour; others click the paper out after a few minutes. In her upstairs office, Slattery listens for the telltale tapping of a writer at work. The poems! They’re written in Spanish or with no capital letters, unsigned or with a telephone number. From free verse to rhymed couplets, from love poems to the hip-hop cadence of performance poetry. Slattery holds a hand over her heart. She didn’t expect the binder to read like a spontaneous capture of L.A. “People are doing it not to be a poet,” she says, “but as an expression.”

Of Lucy the tabby cat with no tail: Sundays are good, one woman wrote in pencil, in an untitled poem, with big, loopy letters. the butterscotch/cat taps his phantom tale [sic]. . . .

Of Cathy, a longtime waitress at the old Brown Derby restaurant in Hollywood: I landed a job at the Ole Brown Derby--/And the next 40 years enough stories/To melt your orange sherbet. . . . typed Harley Byrd, about a neighbor who recently died. Byrd, 60, a retired Pentagon public affairs official, composed the poem in about five minutes. Something about the typewriter made him sit down in the cane-backed chair. “I was drawn,” he says, “to the light.”

II. In which a Pottery Barn stockroom employee and other local poets get the same billing as “Seinfeld.”

You’ll have to excuse 44-year-old Keith Antar Mason for trippin’ down the street Sunday night, springing his poetry on the unsuspecting. He is far away now from his day job in a Pottery Barn stockroom, and snuggled inside his boyhood dream of being a poet.

See, when you’re a local poet, you get used to reading in front of six people in a friend’s living room, and you’re happy to get published in small literary journals with maybe a couple hundred readers, so when you get a break, well, you go a little crazy, the way Mason did. “Don’t mean to disrupt your meal,” Mason told strangers at sidewalk cafe. “But I’m a published poet, you know.”

He handed out proof. A postcard that just came out, featuring his prose poem “A Geography of a Kiss”: Hard bone gangsta layin up like fog in LA. Teardrops tattoo’d/ gold fangs. Century City deals being made. Night comes streets/thick, wet. Times be slippin’. . . . A postcard, in shades of soft gold and earth that remind him of the late afternoon light in L.A., all over the city now, as part of a National Poetry Month project sponsored by Writers at Work in Silver Lake.

This month, the creative writing center is distributing 80,000 free postcards featuring the work of Mason and seven other local poets in restaurants, coffeehouses, gyms and other gathering spots. The “Prose Poems at Work” exposure is huge, Mason’s biggest ever. Already, a literary press editor who saw his postcard has talked to him about publishing what would be Mason’s first collection of poetry.

The eight featured poets include both emerging and established ones, who speak with “this L.A. voice,” Mason says--a high school teacher in Pasadena, the literary curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the editor of a small literary press in Granada Hills.

Writers at Work picked the poets from among 100 who were invited to submit original poems for the project, which was funded with a $9,000 grant from the city of Los Angeles’ Cultural Affairs Department. For years, poet Terry Wolverton, the center’s founder, had imagined postcard racks filled with poetry. Last year, for the first time, the center distributed poetry postcards featuring sonnets by L.A. poets including Wolverton. “I saw your postcard at the Beverly Center,” someone would tell her, or “at this coffee shop in Venice.” Says Wolverton: “It really does have a life you can’t anticipate.”

“I’m gonna be reaching people I’ve never had access to in my whole life,” says Mason, a Santa Monica resident. He pictures how it’ll happen. Some guy in a bar, bored, looks around, scans the rack of postcards advertising: “Seinfeld” in syndication, Tide detergent tablets, Hawaiian Airlines. Mason’s poem. The guy picks it up for no good reason, wants to read more. “Now he has to go into the world of poetry,” Mason says. “I think poetry invites someone to start a new adventure in his life. This is 80,000 opportunities to have a new adventure in your life.”

III. In which the teenage poet is cool.

The skinny fourth-grade girl in a Pokemon T-shirt hears them before she sees them. STOMP STOMP STOMP (CLAP), STOMP STOMP STOMP (CLAP). On a sunny April morning in Marina del Rey, 15 teenagers are marching, unannounced, into her classroom at Westside Leadership Magnet School. The girl jumps to her feet, pencil in hand. Her teacher, who’s seated at a desk, doesn’t say a word. The fourth-graders exchange glances, giggle, clap hands over their mouths. “Guerrilla poetry attack!” the teenagers yell and scatter around the room. The girl is still standing.

One by one, the ninth-grade students read lines of their own poetry, off palmed index cards. No one has to shush the fourth-graders. They listen to the big teenager who wears sweatpants and mumbles his line, with a hand jammed in his pocket and downcast eyes. They listen to a teenager with a purple ribbon in her hair, who hops from foot to foot until it’s her turn, then bellows.

The still-standing Pokemon girl pivots from poet to poet, her pigtails flying: Her tongue is like a fresh slice of pineapple . . . It’s like snow in the middle of summer. . . . And then Steve Arevalo, 14, in a zipped tomato-red jacket and baggy jeans, slouched, with a sweeping glance at the room: It’s like SADNESS (pause), touching JEALOUSY (pause, shift to pianissimo, a tinge of woe) on its back. A couple kids giggle at his drama, but the laughter is friendly, and he grins.

Five minutes later, the poets finish, flip their cards into the air and stomp out. The still-standing girl wrests a poem away from a boy in a black sweater. She waves it in the air and sits down.

Outside, where the poets regroup, Steve hears: STOMP STOMP STOMP (CLAP). The kids are imitating them, their stomp now, but maybe later they’ll try to write poetry of their own. He smiles at his poetry teacher. “See, we left something,” he tells Shelley Berger, the poet in residence at the K-12 public school.

The trick, says Berger, who’s in her early 40s, is coming up with a way to use the physical energy of kids and throw in the irresistible element of subversion, with a backbeat. “Poetry is very oral and musical and rhythmical, and my idea was to try to use the rhythm of poetry in a way they could relate to, so I conceived of this as sort of a way of sending out postmodern bards.”

Even the shy kids come alive in their guerrilla poetry, a moment that they own, when their thoughts fall on all ears. “I think these kids have difficulty expressing themselves and aren’t often heard,” says ninth-grade writing teacher Rena Sassi. “I think they’ve gotten used to being silenced, and this gave them an outlet they’re not accustomed to.” Sassi, who’s in her early 20s, sees changes in the kids, bit by bit. They used to whine when she assigned weekly vocabulary words. Now, as budding poets, they demand more. More words.

For fun, Steve turns his vocabulary words into poems.

IV. Coda.

When April ends, the faithful, including young adults librarian Liebe Gray in Boyle Heights, will not stop putting on poetry events. After one such event, a high school student from an English-as-a-second-language class wrote to her at R.L. Stevenson Library: “Make more this activities, filled with abundance.”