Love Letters & Hate Mail

Chicano artist and Eastside resident Linda Gamboa has been part of the city's cultural scene since the early 1980s. After taking a break from poetry readings, she is back and will join fellow female poets Frankie Salinas and Pat Viera at a La Palabra Poetry Reading this afternoon (Sunday, Nov. 22) at Avenue 50 Studio in Highland Park.

The program is titled "Love Letters & Hate Mail" and here is one of Gamboa's poems:


Nevermore ... I Say

"Nevermore, will I go back..."
I've said (over and over)
Put myself in the position
Of ridicule and disrespect
Still, I find myself
Here
Sitting in the threshold of pain
Eating my pride
Once more
With each bitter bite
I cringe
Just to think
I have sunk
So low

The cultural and environmental legacy of an Occidental College poet

The poetry of Robinson Jeffers is in the spotlight as Occidental College hosts a series of events celebrating one of its most notable alums (class of 1905) who wrote extensively on the environment. On Saturday, Jeffers poetry will be part of several events - including a reading, sculpture dedication and garden opening - at The Southwest Museum in Mt. Washington and the Lummis House in Highland Park. The events will continue through early November as part of The Big Read: Jeffers and the Ecologies of Poetry.

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Jeffers, who died in 1962, is best known for his poems inspired by the Western landscape, the Central California coast, in particular. So, why should his work be of interest to modern day Angelenos, particularly those who live in the Eastside? Occidental College professor Thomas Burkdall said Jeffers' words and sentiments still resonate with Americans living far from the Pacific.

"Even though Jeffers did focus his work on the Central Coast of California, I see his poetry as relevant to all of California ecology and, indeed, much of America," Burkdall said in an email. "In his poem, Carmel Point, Jeffers observes:

'This beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban houses-

How beautiful when we first beheld it.'

Whether this is the Carmel coast or the Verdugo Hills, I think we can all understand this nostalgia for a pristine landscape," Burkdall said. In the wake of the recent fires that swept through the nearby mountains, Burdall offered up this Jeffers poem titled Fire on the Hills:

The deer were bounding like blown leaves
Under the smoke in front of the roaring wave of the brush-fire;
I thought of the smaller lives that were caught.
Beauty is not always lovely; the fire was beautiful, the terror
Of the deer was beautiful; and when I returned
Down the back slopes after the fire had gone by, an eagle
Was perched on the jag of a burnt pine,
Insolent and gorged, cloaked in the folded storms of his shoulders
He had come from far off for the good hunting
With fire for his beater to drive the game; the sky was merciless
Blue, and the hills merciless black,
The sombre-feathered great bird sleepily merciless between them.
I thought, painfully, but the whole mind,
The destruction that brings an eagle from heaven is better than men.

- Robinson Jeffers

Portrait of Jeffers by Remsen Bird/Occidental College

Poetic moments at the Echo Park pool

Poet Steve Abee grew up in Santa Monica, but Echo Park and other nearby neighborhoods have served as the setting for many of his poems and books. The El Sereno resident, who also teaches at the magnet program at King Middle School, will read work from his most recent book, "Great Balls of Flowers," at Skylight Books in Los Feliz on Wednesday night. Here's an excerpt from one of the poems in the book set at the Echo Park indoor pool:

I’m at the Echo Park Indoor Swimming Pool,
thinking about sonnets, watching my daughter, Penelope, swim.
She’s learning how to do the free style.
She lifts her arm up out of the water. Then the other one. She lifts
her head out of the water to breathe. She stops and stands
and starts
again. It’s a lot to do.

There are a bunch of kids splashing in the pool all around her.
She swims around them.
A woman in blue swims in the deep part of the pool.
She comes to the wall, flips around, and glides the other way.
The life guard is a cute girl, small, with dark hair, and soft smile.

The pool is blue. The water looks blue
but I know it is not. It is water, clear and the color
of your hand.

My daughter makes fun of other kids.
What can I say.
I am sitting on cement steps, looking at the pool
and I am sad because I am reading poetry
and that’s what poetry does to me and I like it.

Read the rest of Echo Park Pool and other poems.

Photo by Comparator via Flickr