Where Muses and Poets Find Sustenance

Amelie Frank is filling the room with words so weighted they seem to sink through the floor, sharing some of her darkest thoughts with a small crowd of friends and strangers.

Suicidal tendencies, love gone wrong, war, clinical depression and cancer are just some of the topics she’s tackling tonight as she reads a series of poems in a dimly lighted dining hall at the back of the Jolly Roger restaurant in Laguna Beach.

Frank, a marketing specialist from Los Angeles, is the featured speaker at Poets at the Jolly, the latest incarnation of a loose-knit group that’s been meeting monthly for five years.

“They bring me down here for comic relief,” Frank deadpans during a break, revealing the quick wit that better defines her personality, making her a clear favorite with this motley crew.

These folks meet on the third Thursday of the month. They were known as the Pale Ale Poets when they first gathered upstairs at the Laguna Beach Brewing Co. Their readings have become a fixture on Orange County’s poetry scene -- if you can call it a scene -- that has waxed and waned over the last few decades. Other favorites include Two Idiots Peddling Poetry at the Ugly Mug Caffe in Orange and Lee Mallory’s long-running readings at the Alta Coffeehouse in Newport Beach.

Laguna Beach, founded as an artists colony, has always been favored by creative types. And many of the Jolly poets feel a kinship with the Laguna Poets, considered the longest-running group of poetry readers in Southern California. The remnants of that aging society, which hit its peak during the city’s bygone hippie past, still meet occasionally in an old bank building a few blocks away. But their numbers have dwindled to the point that they have all but disbanded. Pat Cohee, a founder, is in the audience tonight, as usual. And he is happy to witness new generations carrying on what he started.

“Poetry readings are wonderful,” he said. “This one was really extraordinary.”

Readings rarely get started on time here. This is a group that tends to tarry. Some regulars are killing time in a booth by the window, yucking it up about the great issues of the day, the red wine and conversation flowing at a happy pace.

“It’s my fault,” jokes John Gardiner when asked who founded this Jolly tribe.

Gardiner, 55, is an academic advisor at Irvine Valley College. Also at the table is property manager Mike Sprake, 54, artist Michael Paul, 55, and administrative assistant Jeremy Stephens, who at 23 is clearly throwing off the age curve.

“The beautiful part of this is that poetry is the most wonderful demonstrations of democracy I’ve ever seen,” Paul said. “There’s very broad demographics ... a harmony in this community. It’s really an inspiring thing.”

Featured poet Frank is another obvious inspiration to the crowd of about two dozen who eventually fill the room. All eyes turn her way as she walks in, energizing the atmosphere with a palpable buzz and greeted with hugs and kisses and roses.

“I’m just so glad we have Amelie here,” Gardiner gushes after telling a story about how friendly, funny and encouraging she was when they first met seven years earlier.

Frank, who received a creative writing degree from UC Irvine, has written several poetry collections and helped launch Blue Satellite, a respected literary journal that was published for six years. She reads at venues across Southern California and hosts a biweekly reading in Los Angeles.

Above the clatter from the kitchen drifting into the room -- “it’s music,” someone suggests -- Frank gives her listeners a sampling of what she calls her “kicked-in-the-butt-by-love poems.”

“We should have brought Kleenex,” Sprake quips, later explaining how Frank’s poems are as powerful as a punch to the gut.

“I’m so happy. My stuff is so cheerful, I know,” Frank says, her tongue in her cheek.

But she makes sure to end on a more uplifting note, weaving in some humorous poems by others. And at one point she spontaneously leads the audience in two verses of a Tom Jones song, at the request of the waitress.

“I’ve got to have a couple in there that are funny, because my stuff is so relentlessly grim,” she says.

But the mood is anything but grim as others take the stage. Performers range from first-timers like 26-year-old Aaron Roberts of Mission Viejo, who delights the crowd with his “Pseudo Poetry,” to long-timers like Mallory, who electrifies the atmosphere with one of his in-your-face poems that has made him somewhat of a county legend.

The readings go on for hours but it doesn’t seem that way. This is a happy crowd, a laid-back crowd. They’ve come for the fun and the fellowship.

These aren’t the headier days of pot and LSD, the days when Timothy Leary lived in town. Even cigarette smokers have to step outside now. But the atmosphere has an intoxicating feel of its own. And there’s a good vibe tonight. Everyone seems to know it.

No one wants the readings to end.

But it always does, with the same cue: The staff pull out the cleaning equipment, and the sweet sound of poetry trails off, literally and figuratively, into a vacuum.