Poetry in LA
The past weeks have been a detour away from hope, and the weeks before, filled with our Holydays and Festivals were a hard stop from thoughts of the future. Yom Kippur is the hard edge, life or death, and when we rush headlong into Sukkot, every person under their olive tree, so to speak. We have survived and we can rest in the abundance of the harvest, freshly gathered. This is all well and good when the harvest is good and the halo of reckless joy in the apparent favor of God lingers. But as our friend Jacob Perl reminds us, this is the month of Heshvan, Mar Heshvan, bitter Heshvan.
For many months I pursued my inquiries regarding Judeo-Futurism, now well interrupted, but I will return to them. Having the Central Library’s collection easily available to me, I have been digging into their poetry collection. Living in San Francisco, I know many poets. Before the tech boom, I think poetry might have been the cities most important product. Coming to Los Angeles I was hoping to find that sense of poetry as a prevailing wind, but it has mostly eluded me. San Francisco was a city of many schools of poetry each with their own physical geography of cafes, bars and bookshops. LA seems to have Beyond Baroque and I am not sure what. I am still, “the poor immigrant/ who wishes he would've stayed home,” but there’s no going back.
In my search for understanding I read “Poetry Los Angeles: Essential Poems of the City,” by Laurence Goldstein and I have been making my way through the anthology, “California Poetry: Form the Gold Rush to the Present,” edited by Dana Gioia, Chryss Yost and Jack Hicks. The latter title was published in 2004. I am hoping to find an anthology which treats the twenty years following. Those are the poets I would be more likely to find here in LA. Nevertheless, I have found in that collection some voices associated with LA who were new and exciting to me.
Josephine Miles came to Southern California as a child where her parents hoped the climate would be more favorable for her. She suffered throughout her life with severe rheumatoid arthritis. She was well recognized in her lifetime and her poetry is still a live wire.
Conception
Death did not come to my mother
Like an old friend.
She was a mother, and she must
Conceive him.
Up and down the bed she fought crying
Hel me, but death
Was a slow child
Heavy. He
Waited. When he was born
We took and tired him, now he is ready
To do his good in the world.
He has my mother’s features
He can go among strangers
To save lives.
Bert Meyers was born in Los Angeles, I am guessing from what I can find, in Boyle Heights. He was a socialist, in belief if not in specific affiliation, and a working man. He worked as a ditchdigger, janitor, warehouseman and picture framer and didn’t have any more than a High School education. Despite that, on the merit of his compositions and with recommendations from several major poets, he attended graduate school for writing and eventually became an instructor at Pitzer College.
The Garlic
Rabbi of condiments,
whose breath is a verb,
wearing a thin beard
and a white robe;
you who are pale and small
and shaped like a fist,
a synagogue,
bless our bitterness,
transcend the kitchen
to sweeten death -
our wax in the flame
and our seed in the bread.
And so, for this week, as my mother often signs off, “I guess that’s all I have to say.”
