THE BERLIN WALL IS DOWN
IT'S TIME THE ORANGE CURTAIN WENT TOO!
(A feature article in Next... magazine circa 1994)
By Christine Trzyna
Southern California poets, all writers, all artists, have unique rights and responsibilities. We illuminate or cast shadows, have the power to increase understanding or wreck havoc. We can choose to work within the stratification of Southland society or vacation into another culture just a few miles away.
A decade ago as a new immigrant to California, and a neophyte California, I came here "knowing" only that Watts was the slums and Hollywood, wealthy and glamorous. Hollywood is in the process of urban renewal. Its very pavement, embedded with honorary stars, needs sweeping. Fooled by neighborhoods of houses with grassy lawns, I drove fearlessly through Watts, my Yankee points of reference rocked with the police pulled me over and told me to get out.
I can now call myself a native, having served their prerequisite seven years. I seem to have taken root in a place that takes itself seriously enough to call itself No Ho, yea, like So Ho in New york, it's getting know for its creative culture. I gradually learned which streets are "safer." Eight years ago I placed a personal ad and first learned that men from Santa Monica, only a half hour away, think Valley Girls are geographically undesirable. In Los Angeles, the West-siders are horrible snobs about us residents of The Big Valley. But ask any Angeleno, event he supposed enlightened ones, and they'll tell you terrible things about Orange County.
Determined to know my city's history and neighborhoods and encounter culture, I got the Thomas Brothers Map books, the AAA tour guides, and religiously referenced the LA Weekly, Reader, and publications like Out Loud to fill my free time. I'd make a fantastic tour guide of the city of Los Angeles. But I still don't know a thing about Orange County. It seems the Orange Curtain has kept me out.
Last spring I made a rare trip to Dana Point to participate in a Paper Shredders reading at a cool surf shop. We surf poets have since been pretty well received. The stereotype of the surfer is a guy with a three word vocabulary, someone instinctual who doesn't think too much or too deep - certainly not enough to write poetry. And the stereotype of the poets - all angst and intensity, extremely verbose. Can surfers wear black berets? Do poets get tans or go about in flip-flops? The Paper Shredders readings may just be particularly fascinating because they bust though some of that old-think that can do us all in.
When I told the Orange County poets that I'd always heard there was no culture in Orange County, they responded by inviting me to their readings. They pointed out that the Laguna Poets have the oldest poetry series in Southern California. And then one of the men there said, "When I have to drive to Santa Barbara, I keep both hands on the wheel and just keep going, I can't relax until I cross out of LA into Ventura County." This from someone who has fearlessly tackled Hawaiian surf?
If any one's going to cross boundaries, it's going to be the artists and thinkers. Let's join together, become foreign exchange poets, and make Next... Magazine a vehicle that we can use to participate in a "society" that disregards the status quo.
Christine Trzyna
original C by Christine Trzyna 1994 C 2008 all rights reserved includinig Internet and International Rights
Commentary 2008 : As it turned out, I myself was unable to travel very far to read poetry, and I found myself either a confident performer who seemed to be in some sort of symbiosis with the audience or a shaky nervous wreck of a reader who looked out upon the audience and saw a sea of gaping faces expecting me to pull off something "important." Eventually, I also turned off the reading scene. Too much earnestness at the time, I suppose. There was also this snobby idea afloat about who was a "real" poet. I don't think I made the cut. Early in my writing I felt it was very important to be poetical in a short story.
Poetical + the "Writing Well" philosophy of William Zinsser" = that was my formula. Some people thought my short fiction at the time was "too easy." Contrast that with the stream of consciousness, Doors and the Beat poetry that had such meaning it , well, had no meaning.
