Blank Verse Generation

Framing L.A. poetry with spoken-word pioneer and Beat avatar S.A. Griffin.
by Lucinda Michele Knapp
photos by Aaron Farley

Los Angeles is a city that breeds the fuck out of language. Hollywood specializes in the inbreeding of culture, grafting one contrived world onto another, creating impossible images and unattainable realities. Here, we perpetuate the uninformed and careless dreams of humanity, primarily the ones that lie to us, because we like to lie to ourselves. This is why we need poets, and this is also why we have so very few.

I met S.A. Griffin during the end of 2000, my year of Pop-Tarts, when I was living halfassed and feeling glamorous about it. Subsisting on a diet of the aforementioned toaster pastries, expensive vodka, and the dregs of my student loans, most of my days were spent catching up from the one that came before and launching myself, oblivious, into the next. Both Griffin and myself were volunteering at killradio.org in Los Feliz, hosting our own radio shows back when the station had just launched, and it felt like we were going to conquer the airwaves of L.A. with anarchic creativity and revolutionary politics.

At every station meeting and the subsequent trip to Akbar or the 4100 Bar, Griffin exuded a strange and simple kindness with which I’d been previously unfamiliar. If life can be viewed as a work of art-analyzed for the perspective it takes, the kindness it confers on its subjects, the degree of abstraction or realism present in each day that’s lived-Griffin’s was a decidedly humanistic and gentle one.

A few years passed, I got a day job and pulled myself together (to a degree) and couldn’t host my midnight radio show any more. S.A. drifted one way, I another, and I missed him.

How do you explain the importance of one person around whom so much of Los Angeles poetry, then and now, framed itself, in paths both serendipitous and carefully engineered?

How do you gauge the relative importance of a person to the world? Their contributions, their help, their damage? Their art? How do you tell the story of a poet?

Griffin says everything comes down to deliberation and empathy. “Deliberation is being acutely aware of everything that’s going on around you all the time. You understand what your choices are. And you get to a deliberate state through being empathic. In other words, you just-as Kelman would have put it, ‘You find the space or place that needs you the most.’ That’s not just physically, that’s spiritually and emotionally. Find the place that needs you the most and be there. It’s kind of a Zen thing, an experiment in be here now.”

“We open a door. There is no road. We take it.”
-Beat priestess and Venice poet laureate Philomene Long

Let’s flash back in time, before S.A. got here, before toaster pastries, before Schwarzenegger. By the 1950s, the optimism that had marked the construction of Venice, the “Coney Island of the West,” had faded to a sorry state. The water in the canals was rank. The Italianate buildings were decrepit. Of course, this meant cheap rent, and the artists flooded in.

The Venice Beat scene coalesced in the late 1950’s and early ’60s around a few coffee joints and cheap hotels. Galleries flourished. Stuart Z. Perkoff-a quintessential Beat poet if there ever was one-opened the Venice West Café (now the Sponto Gallery and home of 7 Dudley Cinema). Jazz musicians, painters and writers were drawn by the promise of cheap rent and camaraderie. What was the goal? Poet John Thomas wrote: “The first thing. To do violence to your myths.” Highest-profile might have been Lawrence Lipton, whose bestselling “Holy Barbarians” was cribbed from the lives of his friends and acquaintances. Holding poverty as sacred and the creation of art as the holiest of acts-”to eat the earth in search of vision,” as Perkoff wrote-the Venice Beats generated, for a brief moment, an idyllic playground for the weird and the wonderful.

Their quiet revolution gathered energy, flickered into life, burnt brightly for one season, then guttered and faded. Heroin does to poets what it does to jazz musicians and painters. There were too many slings and arrows for the Venice Beat scene to survive. “By then things were changing anyways,” said Griffin. I am sitting across from him in his apartment crammed with art, old toys, and his collections of lava lamps, first editions and vintage hubcaps. “The Beats became the beatniks became the hippies, the Merry Pranksters hit the road between ‘64 and ‘65 with acid. Vietnam took off. The world changed.”

Casting back to Griffin’s own beginnings as a writer, He explains that reading poetry came first, long before he wrote. “I think that’s what inspires people to write poetry-when they read it,” he says. “One of the most influential poets of all time was Dr. Seuss-his were the first poems I ever read. When I was in 7th grade, for extra credit we memorized poems…the first one was Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees”… ‘I think that I shall never see/a poem lovely as a tree…‘ and also “Invictus” by William Henley, ‘Out of the night that covers me/Black as the Pit from pole to pole,/I thank whatever gods may be/ For my unconquerable soul.‘ From the sort of background I come from, especially something like “Invictus” just blew my mind. It meant that I could get over it. That I could deal. It meant that I could reach inside myself. Nothing can put out the fire, really.”

But it wasn’t until Griffin moved to L.A. in 1978 after his tour of duty in the Air Force and two years of college that poetry took center stage in his life. “I really began the [poetry] process in earnest at that point. Someone gave me a beat-up copy of On the Road, and that changed my life. Another raging cliché, but hey, take the cliché and wear it well. Take your clothes off and swim in it.”

In the ’80s, the Beats might as well have never existed. L.A. suffered from a sort of cultural amnesia, as Beat poet Philomene Long said: “70s: Helpless. 80s: Abyss.” With Venice wiped from memory, and the culture of Downtown relatively underground, it was a fallow period for many artists and writers. In the midst of this wasteland, Griffin was taken under the wing of a handful of mentors, who bequeathed to him the knowledge of the Beat tradition and the unflinching honesty of Bukowski and Leonard Cohen.

“I then read everything I could get my hands on that had to do with the Beats. Got turned on to Leonard Cohen the poet-had no idea at the time that he wrote music-but I read all his work. At the same time, people started turning me on to Charles Bukowski. See, in terms of literature, the only thing up until then I’d studied was the classics, nothing contemporary. So that triumvirate of people-Leonard Cohen, Bukowski and the Beats. I never hung out with Bukowski,” qualifies Griffin. “My influence was Red Stodalsky of Baroque Books in Hollywood.”

Red Stodolsky had been committed to paper by Bukowski in the poem “Red” (Septugenarian Stew) and in the novel Pulp. The small bookstore was on Las Palmas Avenue near Musso & Frank’s. “I met Red in 1981 or ‘82, because nobody else sold Charles Bukowski or the Beats. Charles Bukowski was one of Red’s best friends. But I don’t really drink, and I don’t really gamble, and I wasn’t gonna sit there and talk to him about poetry, so Red would go ‘Hey kid, we’re gonna be over at Musso’s for lunch. Come on by.’ I went, ‘Yeah sure, Red, sure.’ And I just blew him off.”

In the early ’90s, Griffin met Venice expat Tony Scibella-a surviving Beat poet who would later transplant the Venetian vibe to Denver, Colorado. “He…tapped me into what is, in a sense, a sort of an underground railroad of poets…that goes all the way back to the mid ’60s. We inhabited readings together, most specifically the Sunday night readings at The Onyx during the mid/late ’90s. After the readings we’d always head over to The House of Pies to end the evening with an ice cream sundae.”

There was something of the energy of the Venice Beats-a willingness to break the mold and try new things-that caught fire with Griffin, implanted by Scibella.

proving it true

that no matter how old
the good
they die
young

& that
“life is a bargain
whatever the price

pay it”

an excerpt from
the ballad of victor bent
(for tony scibella)
-S.A. Griffin

Griffin’s wife Lorraine Perotta, a delicate and beautiful woman, is a librarian at the Huntington, and is actually working with the institution’s recent acquisition of the Bukowski literary archive. “Poetry brought [Griffin and I] together. We first met at a wedding, but I wouldn’t have thought we’d ever see each other again,” Lorraine explains. “I was working at the Getty Library, and I had an assistant who came in one day telling this crazy story about this actor/poet he’d seen the day before. I asked him if his name was S.A. Griffin. If Elliot didn’t come in and talk about the poem, and how great his poetry was, S.A. and I wouldn’t have ever met each other again.” The pair was married at the merry-go-round in Griffith Park in 2000. After the ceremony, everyone rode the carousel.

“Right away, when he knew we were clicking, he was so proud to take me to The Onyx and have me meet all his friends,” says Lorraine, when I ask her about their courtship. “It was like the Little Rascals down there: ‘Let’s put on a show tonight, kids!’”

The Onyx Café opened on Vermont Avenue in 1989. Onyx proprietor John Leech had originally occupied the narrow space adjacent to the Vista’s wide portico; now, in his new digs, a strange alchemy-brewed, possibly, from Onyx coffee, the dregs of L.A.’s Beat scene and its downtown artists, smog and smoke (cigarette and riot)-began to percolate. Life began to flutter in the poetry scene with a vitality that hadn’t been around since the Venice Beats.

“The place looked like a combination coffee shop and mental institution. Some of the local artists would showcase their beautifully bizarre paintings up there and local musicians would sometimes just show up and play a short set there to dazzled fans,” explained Carlos “Cake” Nunez, a devoted Onyx patron. “I was witness to a few early Beck gigs there. … The Onyx Cafe was the hangout for everyone that I can remember. People would show up smoking cigarettes and talking about their daily habits and what’s pissing them off at the moment or wondering where the hell they were going to get money to pay their rent. You know-typical bohemian rants! But we all had them, and some of us were living off of five grand a year. Geniuses like S.A. kept us levelheaded. I swear to the gods that created us. If not for S.A…” Nunez trails off ominously.

The Onyx became ground zero for the creative outsiders of Los Angeles in the late ’80s and through the long, hot ’90s. Frequenting the place were writers Steve Abee, Hope Urban and Mark Eherman; artists Van Arno, Mark Durham, Anthony Ausgang, Alfredo de Batuc, Carol Es, Louie Metz, Manuel Ocampo, Mike Cronin and Gronk; Blessing of the Cars organizer Gabriel Baltierra; Germs member Don Bolles; Marcel de Jure and the Cinnamon Roll Gang; Zack de la Rocha; burlesque queen Scarlette Fever; Beck and Channing Hansen; performance troupe the L.A. Mudpeople, and local actors like Forrest Whitaker and Lily Tomlin-who would come in with her girlfriends and chat in a tight, protective knot. There were weekly readings and open mics. It was a home for refugees from L.A.’s soul-crushing corporate culture.

“I didn’t feel it so much at the time, but now that I look back, it was akin to the Beats in Venice or in San Francisco,” says Pleasant Gehman, a poet and prolific writer with roots in the Hollywood punk rock scene. She and poetry compatriot Iris Berry recently completed editing the third edition of the Underground Guide to Los Angeles. Of the Onyx scene, Gehman says, “It was really underground in a lot of ways, because it was more fanzine-based and chapbook-based and live-based-there was no e-mail or Internet. No one made a lot of money or published a ton. There wasn’t a lot of stuff publicizing it. It was this literary punk rock type deal; the people doing it were very creative and self-starters, but beyond word of mouth…it was based on coffeehouse readings and house parties.”

In 1998, after a decade of incubating creativity and creeping out the other, more upscale boutiques and yuppie homeowners starting to colonize Los Feliz, The Onyx received its eviction notice. Café regulars blamed gentrification and uptight new neighbors. John Leech cited disputes between tenant and landlord. Like the Venice Beat scene, it was time for the poets to move on. Time for something new.

“It’s awful that it’s closing. I just hope they don’t put up a big corporate Starbucks.”
-Dana Griffin [no relation],
Vermont Avenue boutique salesperson, 1998

Ellyn Maybe meets me at the Starbucks on the corner of Olympic and Fairfax, on a sweltering afternoon. I’m a little giddy to meet her. Along with Griffin, Ellyn’s been a mainstay of L.A. poetry since the late ’80s, and has achieved national prominence.

Griffin remembers meeting Maybe-”She said that she got the name somewhere else, but I swear she had signed up for this reading, and she’d put ‘Ellyn’ down on the list, and ‘maybe’ in parentheses after it. She was standing there giggling, and I looked at her and I said, ‘Oh my God, you are Ellyn Maybe.’”

Ellyn corroborates, “S.A. was at my first reading. I had to sign up to read. It was ‘88, I think. Afterward, he remembered a line from my poem. I went with him on the Carma Bums tour to open the show … S.A. is a champion of others. He likes to help others, to include them. My grandma thinks he’s a sweetie too.”

In addition to winning the hearts of grandmas citywide, S.A. did a thorough job of bringing poets outside the city, freaking out small-town-dwellers throughout the western United States. Collecting a motley crew of L.A. poets and artists, he channeled the Beat spirit and hit the road.

In the mid-’80s “abyss,” the only places in L.A. that had open poetry readings were the Water Gallery and Beyond Baroque. “It was a small, sad state of affairs,” tells Griffin. “In the beginning, it was truly about a dozen people, and we’d gather every Wednesday at the Water Gallery. That’s where I first met Doug Knott, Mike Mollett, Mike Bruner and Bobbo Staron.”

Griffin and Knott, Mollett and Bruner began to perform their poetry together as a group called the Lost Tribe. “It was a four-man collective. We wanted to break out and create poetry as a performance. We wanted to get past the academics, make it accessible and entertaining, without corrupting the poem.” They became popular enough to win The Gong Show, “with the lowest score of all time, eight points.” The Lost Tribe’s first poetry road trip was in 1985, commencing on April Fools’ Day.

Then, in 1989, Griffin took his newly acquired 1959 Cadillac and made a few phone calls. “Because I was so invested in a lot of Beat literature and poetry-and I’d bought a Cadillac-I called the guys from the Lost Tribe, Scott Wannberg, Bobbo Staron and Ellyn Maybe. I told them, ‘Look, we’re gonna travel around in this car; we’re not gonna rehearse anything. It’s all going to be deliberation and empathy. We’re gonna be like the Grateful Dead in that regard-go on the road and just perform. We’re gonna call ourselves the Carma Bums.’” [A play on Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums, and the role of the vintage Caddy.]

Griffin’s closest friend, poet Scott Wannberg, says, “My first Carma Bums trip was ‘89. The Lost Tribe was very slick, choreographed and rehearsed. When S.A. talked to me about the Carma Bums, he wanted something less structured.” Over four years, the Carma Bums hit everywhere from Canada to San Diego on a series of road trips, touring as performance poets. They booked the tour like a rock gig and pretty much built-and then broke-the mold for poetry touring.

“The speedometer in the car was broken. The radio was broken. It was like 100 miles an hour to nowhere. Often in a…” Griffin pauses, arches an eyebrow at me. “…often in a … um … a damn good mood … you know?” He grins. “It was a glorious mess. A horrible beautiful thing. We did a lot of improvising, a lot of political satire. At one point, I quoted the Dead and said, ‘We may not be the best at what we do, but we’re the only ones.’”

“Iris and I went on the White Trash Apocalypse tour,” says Gehman of a poetry road trip she, Berry and Griffin took. “We went all over the southwest, booked it just like a [music] tour. We went in S.A.’s vintage ‘71 Riviera. Iris and I were wearing, like, braids in our hair, tiaras and leopard coats. S.A. had this insane blue Elvis wig and sickeningly garish golf pants. We’d go into town and look like this crazy Hollywood explosion.” Iris remembers a show at the Hotel Congress in Tucson, with the Geraldine Fibbers, when she was asked, “‘… what exactly does White Trash Apocalypse mean?’ We just looked at each other and without saying a word we hopped up on the bar and started dancing and kicking drinks over. We managed to hop from the bar to the surrounding tables, doing the same. No one seemed to bat an eye.”

“The bus was kind of an homage to [Ken] Kesey’s Merry Pranksters,” said Griffin of an ill-fated 1991 bus tour. “We got away with a lot … mostly ’cause I stayed sober the entire time I was driving. Everywhere we went, there were 20 drunk and stoned people on board, all kinds of crazy crap. In Deming, New Mexico, they chased us out of town with a police escort. We were freaks. We pulled in there, we got a flop at the Friendship Inn-me and about six or seven others split a room … about five in the morning, when the lights came up, the other 14 or so were sleeping under the bus, or they’d taken over the swimming pool, swimming around like happy otters with beers in their hands, Billy Barnum had shown his dick to the hotel owner’s wife, and they just called the cops and gave us our money back and couldn’t get us out of there fast enough. They chased our asses out of town.” The bus later broke down in Albequerque, and again in Truth or Consequences. S.A. had to buy Greyhound tickets to get people home.

“Poetry tours didn’t happen-this is ‘89, this was touring way before it was common,” explains Maybe. “That was pioneering. It was such a grassroots level. That was pre-slam; at that time, there weren’t a whole lot of venues for poetry. He really helped show [that] could happen. It’s really a nourishing role,” she says, of Griffin’s place in the continuum of L.A. poetry. “The Carma Bums’ trips, they really helped make it possible.” And Maybe, Griffin and friends continue to tour, planning their trips and connecting to other poets through, of all things, MySpace.com, which has shown itself to be invaluable in creating community for poets.

“Back in 1981, people weren’t performing poetry in groups,” says Griffin of the arid cultural scene in ’80s L.A. “[But] I find it fascinating that anyone could say they invented the performance of poetry, because that’s absolute horseshit. I think that Homer would be pretty offended. Poetry was the way people passed along history. The old bards, what they did was tell stories-culture throughout history has been passed along through the retelling of stories in poetic form … poetry’s more a part of peoples’ lives than they understand. Almost all theological text, across the board, is written in poetic form. We’re going to war-we’ve been at war since the beginning of modern history-using the theological text in hand. So poetry sends people to war and brings people light.”

“Someone once asked Abbie Hoffman if poetry should be ‘political’ and he answered that everything we do is political,” says Griffin. “I wholeheartedly agree. Every choice we make can be viewed as a political move if we want it to be.”

The poetry tours are still continuing, but Griffin recalls one in particular. “In Big Sur in 1996, we started the performance on the lawn at the Henry Miller Library-but if you walk a few yards you go literally down into the redwood forest. And so we started the show up there, and as we were performing we just led people down into the forest down among the giant redwoods, and we performed there. It becomes a real temple, you know?” He looks across the room at Lorraine.

Later he tells me, “She is my muse, The Lady.” The Beats often referred to their wellspring of poetic inspiration as “The Lady.” “The love I have for my wife,” he says, “defines all other things for me. She’s really helped me to grow up quite a bit, and deepened my relationship with everything around me.”

I ask Lorraine to tell me about her husband. “His sensitivity to others, his creativity, his energy. He’s just-anywhere you go in this city with S.A., even up and down the coast, he’s gonna run into someone he knows.” She pauses. “You know how there’s always one person in the couple who knows everyone else in the building? He’s the one.”

S.A. shows me his poem “Food Shopping,” the first one he wrote for Lorraine. “It’s missing a line,” he says of the book, and reaches over me with a pen to scribble in the final line of the poem, which had been left out by the printer:

I was lucky. LAA

There Is A River

there is a cheerful ignorance
a chance like meeting and
luck like gold that cannot be
mined or
stolen

a common atom

a dance

and stars that trick the
water with their
certain
magic

do not wash your wars in it
take your holy rituals to the
precious fountains built by your
agencies of fear

press your
wine from the fallout
and drink you
bitter victory

for yes
there is a river
a giving river that will
sing you along safety

a river of
light
final
fast
and
free
where you can
disrobe
and leave your casual sadness
walking sideways at the
shore

meet me there
whoever you are
and we will agree to
swim it
together

-S.A. Griffin