Poetry for Southern California

 

We are very proud to now have two terrific poets covering the OC poetic turf:  M.C. Bruce & Jaimes Palacio.

Hints & Allegations: The OC Poetry Scene

By M.C. Bruce

His Final Bow

Amazing: Here we are in the middle of summer, a season whose months are typically so hot and unbearable that it’s axiomatic. (“Hotter than the 4th of July…”) Yet people walk around in the 100-degree heat, staring at one another in constant surprise, asking the eternal question, “Why is it so hot today?”

It’s hot because it’s summer, I try to explain, but everyone wants to believe that somehow this heat, this swelter is something new and unusual and sinister. They want to believe they are heroic for living through it. They want to believe that, as my buddy Al Gore has been warning us for 25 years, this Global Warming thing is real and not a figment of the scientific imagination. And, come to think of it, there’s nothing wrong with that—so long as it makes people act instead of complain. But you know people. They suck. They complain. They expect someone else (like Al Gore) to do it for them.

“Hot enough for you?” I’ve been asked about six thousand seven hundred forty-two times this week. I respond, “No, I’d like it a little hotter so that people collapse and melt into the sidewalk. Then we’d be living in the dream of Salvador Dali.” But they merely look at me with the expression of a dog who watched you throw the ball but can’t find it because you’ve hidden it behind your back.

Sigh.

By the time you read this, it will be September—and, dear reader, in Southern California that merely means that it gets hotter. The weather doesn’t start cooling off till late, late October, if that. I recall many a Halloween as a young boy in which I sweat a river in my little costume, the plastic mask sticking to my face as if it were being glued on for good. Hey, if you don’t like it hot, move to Minnesota.

But I didn’t sit down to talk about the heat. No, I came to say goodbye. And not in the Captain Spaulding sense (Hello, I must be going/I cannot stay, I came to say/ I must be going…) No, I am truly abandoning Southern California, land of my birth, scene of my misspent youth, location of my desultory adulthood. I am trying to sell my house for a reduced price and get myself on the damned road. I’m moving to Humboldt.

Okay, get your snickers over with. Yes, I know that Humboldt is the home of the really killer pot. I know that it’s where Hippies go to die. I know it’s where the 60s meet the sea. I lived there in the 80s, so I’m somewhat familiar.

(It so happens, dear reader, that I am allergic to the magic weed. I found this out the last time I lived in Humboldt. I “experimented” one night, then broke out into bright red splotches the next day. The doctor asked, “Have you done something in the last few days you’ve never done before?” “Yes,” I said nervously. “Don’t ever do it again,” he said.) 

No, I love Humboldt because it is green and clean, because the people are nice and friendly, because it’s a small town masquerading as a county. To say it is God’s country is a bit of a cliché, but I have it on good authority that Humboldt is where God will go when He retires.

As some of you know, I am a Public Defender. The County of Humboldt has requested that I take over the job as Supervising Attorney for the Alternate Conflict Counsel. I said yes, for a number of reasons which would bore you should I recite them. The bottom line is, I am uprooting my lovely 13-year-old jazz drummer and heading north for the duration.

 I will miss a few things about SoCal, not the least of which is the Poetry Community. I will miss hearing Jaimes Palacio’s wickedly funny angry political verse; Dan McGinn’s quiet contemplations of being a child in an adult’s world; Marcia Cohee’s pinwheel verse, throwing off colors so fast you can barely register them; Beth McIlvaine’s lovely, sexy presence; John Gardner’s angry and romantic young man grown into late middle age; Rikki Mandeville’s highly charged erotic verse; Lee Mallory’s soapbox prophetizing; Little Bob Lamphar’s practical spiritualism; and more and more and more I can’t even recall at this point. No, don’t look at me. I’m not crying, there’s just something in my eye.

So for the last column at Poetix, I’m here at Tebot Bach, wanting some revelation to carry with me into the Great Northwest.

The first feature this night was Tri Tran. He came to the OC from England (“It’s a different language than we speak here in Orange County,” Daniel McGinn said) by way of Vietnam.

Dressed casually in t-shirt and shorts, he opened with a poem in Vietnamese, then followed with a love poem to a woman he’d met in the Old Country. It went so fast that these old fingers couldn’t quite catch them. His next poem was a bit slower, a piece about the unending war he feels when he returns to Vietnam:

The deafening explosion of bones…
The fishy smell of the dead
The bitter taste of misery
The unending feeling of fear…
The lacerated country left to die
I, the poet, still lost in the deadly vortex
Of my homeland…

Then he read a love poem to his ex-wife:

She’s copper and aluminum
She wants to kiss me goodnight in the bedroom
And I camouflage myself in the bathroom…

She’s nitrogen, I’m copper…

She’s potassium, I’m uranium…
We are both cobalt
We strangle ourselves to death after the divorce.

Once, he said, he thought of quitting poetry, so he wrote this as his “last poem”:

I, the poet, wishing to return the real world
Having lost the passion to write…

Watch each letter of the alphabet melt in my brain
Beyond the hills a new earth
Slowly rising to the sky.

He sang a song in Vietnamese, “Yesterday’s Love.” Interesting how the music of another language can communicate even when you have no idea of the actual words.

Cannily, Tri did not remain on too long, giving a nice taste of his $5 chapbook (which can be bought on Amazon.com).

The second feature of the night was Lucia Galloway. She has published in a number of impressive journals and presently teaches grammar and composition online to young students.

Dressed in an orange blouse and print skirt, she appreciated what she called the “Cabaret” setting.

She led off with “Rollerskating with Walt Whitman” (a poem from her new chapbook):

Just think how much more of Manhattan
You could see, Walt.

Come, don this pair of skates…

Let your gaze be far and near
Seeing the skyscrapers and sidewalk cracks…

Seeing the grand marquis and the good humor men
And the beggars in their patient bodies…
And the pigeons strutting in the squares…

She told of her daughter’s rough birth, because the baby had been born with the arm bone not quite in the socket, “Soft Parts”

I’m making slugs from snails, you said…
You were just four or five

We thought you precocious.

Did we think also of the body cast
You’d worn in infancy
To realign the bones and thighs…

Snails take shelter in the vestibules
Of spiral shells…
You couldn’t slither out…

I couldn’t even diaper you…
But had to invent a way to fit
The oblong diapers in the hole
In your cast…

The nesting of you, damp and warm…
The hooded towel I toss around you,
I lost that, too.

I keep this litany of what I lost
Because no way could I keep
This shell…

Shells, I know, by their outer surfaces…
But to their owners, homes, yes, fortresses…

And you, now in your adulthood
Your shell nearly invisible…

In parchment envelopes they come
In careful scripted lines
Across the front.

Without drama, she read with confidence. She did not try to charm us, but was charming nonetheless.

A dry river runs slowly
If you hurry, even a little
You can launch a secret…

Someone gave me a paper hat
Then I wanted a walking stick
Made of paper…

If you write ten verses, they say,
You will name a skyscraper…

The window washers pause
You will name a skyscraper, they say
If you write ten verses…

I am part smoldering ash…

The poem doubled back on itself, yet even though it ended with the opening line, still came to a surprise. Sadly, I couldn’t catch the whole piece so you’ll have to guess at the effect.

She ended the night with a Dictionary Poem, “Link”:

Something forming part of a chain
A piece of metal bent
A missing segment of the armor
The opening through which
A lance’s point can slay…

Also, a joint of the body
A hip an elbow or a shoulder…

A rod or lever enlivening a machine…
A river or a messenger

A means of travel between two points…
The lone railroad across Siberia…

A single connecting element,
The caged canary’s riff…
The map that answers long lost questions…
A letter hiding in a beat up box…

A missing ancestor who, more than any other
Has given you your breath,
Your song,
Your story.

This, my friends, is the end of my story—at least my OC story. I was born here 49 long years ago at the Sisters of St. Joseph and have practiced poetry and law here since 1988. That all having been said, the truth is, I’ve always felt like an unwanted guest in my home county, a person whose heart had grown so different from his homeland that there will never be a comfortable place for me. Even my beloved tract home in Cypress never looked so good as when I decided to leave (I really had to spruce the yard up to attract buyers. The question then from all friends and family was: Why did you wait so long?)

I have conducted an unrequited love affair with the poetry of Orange County, ever since I sat and listened and didn’t read but was blown away by the quality of work at Pat Cohee’s Laguna Poets reading at the Upchurch Bookstore. I listen to the talent and camaraderie of the people in the scene and I am enamored and jealous and sad that somehow I am still out of place. A misfit in a world of misfits. I love you all. I know you can’t love me. It’s okay, really it is. We can still be friends.

My friends—and I address you as such with affection as much as with irony—it’s been a nice ride. I will carry your memories and your chapbooks up with me to the Great Northwest. I hope that you love one another and support one another and show up for readings and read chapbooks and, most of all, appreciate one another. The poetry in the OC approaches greatness; great wit, great heart, great personalities. I think it’s much livelier and more articulate than the LA scene. But because it’s the OC it will remain behind the Orange Curtain. You will never be famous. You will never be analyzed by dusty academics. You will write your great and heartfelt poetry and your friends and a handful of others will listen and be touched and moved and changed—and that’s all you can ask for in this life, my friends. All else, as Emily Dickinson would tell you, is illusion. Of course, Emily would fit in nicely in the OC scene, somewhere between the erudite Mike Sprake and the fire of Rikki Mandeville. But that’s our secret.

I’m sorry. I ramble because it’s hard to leave. But at any going-away party, even the guest of honor eventually has to turn off the lights.

Take care, my friends. Come up and visit sometime. Be well. Keep writing against the darkness. Hold on fiercely to the light.

MCBruce

edseleddie@aol.com