Reading Poems at the 2024 Los Angeles Times Festival of Books

Now that I'm soon to be "skyin' up" (as a good friend of mine would call it) in a flight to New York City for more poetry readings, in this year of launching my new poetry book God in Her Ruffled Dress, I realize that I never blogged about going down to the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books (LATFOB) in mid-April to read on the poetry stage.

 
What a choice gig! Two full days of 20-minute sets by poets with new books out that year on the beautiful USC campus. And the chance to stay for the cost of less than the usual fortune, because of conference rates, at the gorgeous, historic Millenium Biltmore hotel in downtown LA (DTLA), in an unusually large room with a window that opened. 

I loved hearing so much poetry. And I really loved the festival overall, not only because it featured many events with authors from all sectors of publishing and all genres, but also because it was free and attracted thousands of attendees -- strikingly diverse and excited about books, strolling the many aisles of book-related booths. A rare chance to be among a teeming crowd there for book culture.  

A homey thrill was connecting with Bay Area poet friends and organizers Joyce Jenkins, of Poetry Flash, and Jennifer Joseph, of Manic D Press, whom I'd known for decades but not talked with much in the last decade or two, who had a booth together. Ironic that we connected in LA.

The festival was a well run machine, the organizers on top of their jobs at every step. For instance: providing not just a green room but an entire green building for all the presenters, whose enthusiasm was palpable. Gaggles of panelists partook of the generous buffet along with famous actors and entertainers who had published recent memoirs. These prose writers and book business people were sociable and chatty. 

 

BUT I confess that on this second visit to DTLA, after a vacation there with my sweetheart five years earlier, I concluded that I just didn't vibe with the neighborhood. Big, windy, no there there. (Ironic, as that's the phrase that Gertrude Stein assigned to my current longtime hometown Oakland.) It seemed to offer the familiar but strange combination found in big U.S. cities today of expensive warehouse space converted into condo lofts and their stylish residents juxtaposed with down-on-their-heels addicts and homeless folks. But without that feeling of personal excitement or rubbing shoulders that one finds in NY. 

And I was lonely traveling alone this time, especially as a COVID-cautious holdout amid people gaily eating indoors unmasked. I did enjoy discovering pockets of old L.A. and ethnic culture -- that alley street filled with 10 different Greek restaurants, the old Fashion District, the Jewelry District. The largely Mexican-American staff of the hotel were courtly in their old-fashioned uniforms and warm.

   
Underlying my sense of isolation was the feeling of not being in the poet in-group. Maybe that's inevitable for all poets whether they show it or not, usually being introverts. Yet it was clear that my situation was rare among the other poets: the scene has become strikingly more academic since my first book, The Transparent Body, from Wesleyan University Press's prestigious New Poets Series, was published in 1989, and I was not an academic. 

The past three decades-plus brought an explosion of graduate creative writing programs along with proliferating poetry prizes and contests. Getting a book published now fulfills the academic need to publish, and winning a prize or award is even more helpful to a professor's career. In this way, the book becomes a function of the academic career. Not that I blame poets; it's good to be able to have a poetry job. But I was not a player in this particular game. And I could taste the flavor of the academy there and in many of the poems no matter how subversive the content. A big vibe shift for me in this return to the scene since this second book of mine came out the previous October: feeling like an outsider.

In between my two books, I kept writing poetry and publishing it in excellent literary magazines and anthologies, but the bulk of my artistic focus veered to becoming a singer (no small feat) and producing and releasing my original jazz/groove music over seven albums. Over this period, the music business kept changing rapidly, with independent CDs in reach for indies rather than the requirement to go through gatekeeper major labels, then the advent of mp3s, then streaming. This was a lot of figure out in a lot of ways. 

And further resourcefulness was demanded of me as I learned to navigate the music world, because even in jazz and its sister genres, I was unique, with my songs including both sung and spoken verse, the latter more poetic than the rap-grounded verse more common in this music. 

Before entering the indie music business, I was quite grounded in the literary poetry scene. After earning a master's degree in creative writing/literature at San Francisco State, I cofounded a literary magazine in the '80s in San Francisco, including all the work of outreach and editing and even running a reading series over a few years. I kept my eye on the ins and outs of the national poetry scene. I even spent two years teaching and serving as Associate Director of The Poetry Center at San Francisco State, where I'd received my master's only eight years before taking that job. During those two years, I also began writing and recording music as well as studying to become a psychic reader. A hectic, exciting time. 

Yet by 2023, my artistic community had shifted to the jazz-and-beyond universe within the music business. In this universe, while some jazz musicians also have academic jobs, they are by no means largely academic in style or art; many still play in clubs and are still connected with the Black culture that is the foundation of the art form. And music, even indie jazz-and-beyond by someone stretching genres as I was, is released, distributed, and promoted within a commercial framework. The goal was to sell it, even at the pitiful streaming rates we now face, or at least chart or otherwise gain traction with the public so as to be able to get gigs. Reviews, radio play, and other promotion were fast-paced and even garish compared with the more genteel context for publishing and publicizing poetry books.  

And suddenly, after a number of smaller readings with just a few other poets (in LA, Miami, Berkeley, San Francisco, Venice) here I was in a large concentration of poets of 2024. 

Not only poets, but also poetry professors. I was maybe one of three poets among over 50 poets there who was not teaching creative writing and/or literature in a college or university. Certainly not one who had been attending the profession's big annual gathering, the Association of Writers and Writing Progams's (AWPs's) annual conference, over many years.

These folks were mainly nice to me, but they tended to already know each other and to want to hang around with each other rather than me. Even some of the poets published by my LA-based publisher, What Books Press. Also, my style as a performer was different -- influenced by my experience on stage in clubs as a singer-poet and bandleader, not to mention my work as a psychic reader and coach intent on communicating on a different wavelength from that of the cloistered poet or the professor.

The art of poetry is solitary by nature, not collaborative. Poets are a lot more private and inward-directed, and more in their heads, relative to musicians, who live and work more in their bodies and are more oriented outward toward performance, even entertainment. These obvious differences hit me as I stayed close to the poetry stage area for two days, feeling a bit like someone returning to a country that she had once known well, but no longer did.

The readings were good but mostly they still felt as if they were being delivered by non-performers. And that's fine. I don't feel comfortable in the more performance-oriented poetry slam scene either, as the craft is so different from what I crave from poetry; it's just that sometimes more literary poets don't do justice to their own work in presenting it. Being a good writer and being a good presenter of one's writing are two separate skills.  

This is not to say that I have not often experienced the dichotomy between poet and performer within my own being. Was I Emily Dickinson or Barbra Streisand, to choose two iconic figures?  Here in this group the dichotomy was made external and even clearer. I had always maintained that in ancient cultures, the poet and the singer and the shaman/spiritual leader were often one and the same person, so why not claim and seek to inhabit all those spheres? But being at the LA Times Festival of Books, especially in the ultra-vividness of emerging into big crowds after the long retreat of the initial pandemic phase, it was dramatically clear that the scene was not ancient culture. At that moment, literary poetry existed in a distinct world. 

Still, I had fun just being there, feeling isolated or not. And I bridged the dichotomy of my two art forms for myself by including some a cappella singing in my set. The singing drew people into the audience from the farther reaches of the festival. I should have done more earlier rather than later in my set. Always more to learn.

 
The day after the festival ended I drove out of multi-lane, multi-freeway LA to see my pals in 29 Palms, where I've visited many times. Ah, the clarifying desert. The stimulation and comfort of long friendship and rich conversation. A pool in which to find my inner compass tilting toward true north again. 

It's been wonderful to have an excuse to travel after the pandemic isolation I felt was necessary, even though I continued to mask (using a semi-transparent N95) during the previous poetry readings I gave, which were indoors. As a type 1 diabetic who has kept up with the data on the ravages of COVID, I remain cautious. I loved that this festival, being outdoors, allowed me to present my poetry without a mask on. 

Once home, I bridged the feeling of isolation by writing all of the other poets who had read there. From the safety of our homes and the privacy of writing and replying online, we made connections (most of the time) and traded books (some times). A good feeling. 

And I'm off in a couple of days to two more outdoor readings in the noisy, accessible glamour and dense contact of the Big Apple! The joy of sharing my work and reading with other excellent poets, in the city of my ancestors, promises to be a homier experience.