“leaven our hearts”: Poetry Research Bureau/ Book Reading / LA Trip
“Thank you Poetic Research Bureau,” I began my talk, the first of several last Friday evening at a small performance space on 2220 Beverly Blvd, Los Angeles, not far from Skid Row, where we met for Indian food before. “I’m super excited to be here with Prageeta, my old Brooklyn Neighbor. Wonderful to be with Therea, Kathleen and Kathleen in this city that's shown me so much about friendship and conflict. The riots of 1992, the flames that filled the sky in the sky that signaled something wrong, then and now. I saw them at immigrant rights protests in 2006, flames in the sky from burning police cars in June as LA pushed back. It felt like the same flames in the sky.
LA the place where doors open, where friends saw me then, mirroring, reflecting something back, asking who I was, what I was trying to be.
Thank you for having me.
Thank you for being here.”
And so I began my talk on the ways friendship has changed, followed by a wonderful night of readings and performances.
It was strange getting my head into it after the cross country flight.
Woke up at 430 am, after seeing Vassar college friends late, off to Laguardia, to Detroit, to LA. At the airport, Dodi says hi, picking me up, driving around playing the Screamers, “Mater Dolores”, singing along with the synth punk anthem:
“In the cathedral, going out of her head
…
Glazed terra cotta Della Robbia Madonna
Mater Delores, Mother of sorrows.
She longs to be someone else…
No one seems to notice she's crazy in her head
Loco en cabeza, Loco en cabeza.”
No one seems to notice, its poetry says the college kid, looking about the city, driving East, through downtown, from the airport, stopping for lunch on the way to “TOMATÂ,” a show “celebrating the vibrant world of Tomatâ du Plenty, legendary frontman of The Screamers and underground performance icon” at MutMuz galley in Chinatown. Siena, who runs the gallery, greets us, showing us around the wildly imaginative paintings, ACT UP sketches, music, an extravaganza of ideas from the old Screamers front person. And off to for Indian food at Skid Row, before the reading with Prageeta, Kathleen, Theresa and Kathleen. Prageeta read from her new collection Onement Won. Teresa read from her autofiction A Healthy Interest in the Lives of Others, one of experimental autofiction, the other of poetry. Each take on some of the messy ways friendships ebb and flow away, magically merging and then fading away.
I remember meeting Prageeta and Dale all those years ago in Brooklyn, our Sophie's Choice neighbors, poets downstairs, first seeing them, Dale with a bottle of wine and firewood in hand, going home to make a fire, with their own, our own private trials, personal pain, evolving through the years of career moves, shifts, increase, reduce. First we left for a year in Long Beach, Prageeta’s friend Thomas, renting our apartment when we were gone. His poetry collection had just come out:
“A dream. A democracy. A savage liberty.
And yet another anthem and yet another heaven
And yet another party wants you.
Wants you wants you wants you.”
Thomas stayed for a year.
Then moved on.
We came back.
Prageeta and Dale made their way West to Missoula. Dale kept moving to parts unknown. And Prageeta’s life passed into a Grief Sequence when Dale passed in 2019. On the way back from Tokyo, I drafted my review of this majestic exploration of the poetry of abandonment and grief, mourning and suffering, adding my own chapter to the ever evolving story. Next trip to LA in 2021, we met Michael, her partner at the time. He was sick and now he's gone. Prageeta reflecting, writing about widowing, "inside the sunlight of lost friendship..."
In July, Thomas, Prageeta’s friend who stayed with us, passed himself.
And we read about those messy spaces.
Theresa read a story about a breakup, explaining, "in time, as the two women nurtured internal visions, their friendship, inevitably it seemed, came to an end."
And we talked about the 'emotional biases'that Audre Lorde saw, the 'goodness that has some edge to it' that Ralph Waldo Emerson understood, the partitions, and barriers, schisms in our minds, that keep us from seeing each other, the losses, the breaks.
Surprising us all, Kathleen Kim stood with her violin and chaos pad, to channel her inner Laurie Anderson / Kronus Quartet, creating an experimental sound, her shadow behind her, dancing on the wall, as she played, finishing with the familiar sound of ragtime.
And Prageeta with a startling reading:
“I, too, have been course: and thus lost meaningless friends
For which I am weighted down in bouts of sadness…”
Her tempo and cadence, striking:
“No Ram Dass. No be here now.
No om of sitting in place.
This is about size and succumbing.”
Each poem explores a trajectory of loss and mourning, meaning making and friendship, Prageeta read. Sitting at the oncology ward with her partner, she reflects lost friends, those no longer around, those who’ve stopped replying, the familiar ghosting, thinking about her role in the mess, the losses which add up, and what part she had in it.
“That I arrived somewhere, to a truer belief from all
The aching sorror: sometimes its not the people you miss.
It's the longing you had to be understood by them.”
With a gentle, earnest sincerity, a shine in her eyes, Pragetta read, the audience sat rapt, completely absorbed in her poetry of loss and the absurd.
Finishing with applause, we paused for beer, then converged again, the panel meandering well into the two hour mark in our evening.
Time to end, we all talked. Dodi hadn’t seen Prageeta in years.
We went to Walts on Eagle Rock for a hot dog and beer with Jonah and Siena, talking about entomology, and the upcoming Dorothy Fuzz show with ESG this Wednesday. Over a hot dog and a beer, I couldn’t stop thinking about Oki Dog, where Darby Crash shared Germ Burns, cigarette burns with friends and fans, stopping there after a final gig, before his demise here.
Aug 30
Woke early, reading Prageeta’s poetry, talking about Throw Away Your Books, See You in the Streets, the 1971 experimental drama film by Japanese director Shūji Terayama and record stores in Shinjuku, debauchery in Hollywood, running into the singer for the Circle Jerks at at Indian Food off skid row, before the Ed Wood film fest on an afternoon, out and about, finding a bed, putting it together, while baby C danced on the east coast, and the birds chirped outside and we hatched plans to go to Malibu, and went out for tacos.
Friends dropping by, we worked on the bed, tracing the short eventful life and death of Darby Crash, everyone’s favorite LA apocalyptic punk star.
Crash committed suicide from a heroin overdose on December 7, 1980. According to SPIN magazine, Crash attempted to write "Here Lies Darby Crash" on the wall as he lay dying, but not finishing.
The last line of Lexicon Devil, the biography of Crash and the Germs, is attributed to Genesis P-Orridge of Psychic TV. He knew both Crash and Ian Curtis, who had taken his own life only a few months prior to Crash. No one really knows why are still so drawn to the spectacle:
Aug 31
Each day in LA, I started the day with Prageeta’s poems, sitting in the back yard, greeting everyone waking, a cup of joe in hand. Walked out for lunch, running into a woman railing about the church down the street that kicked her out, stopping for Mexican food, strolling through Highland Park, down Hollywood Blvd, to Soap Plant / Wacko, perusing their 'eclectic range of pop-culture ephemera, novelties' running into a couple of buddies back from Marseilles, stopping at cafe figueroa for a cappuccino to plan for the day, a stroll through Echo Park, out to the beach, too many cars, traffic. Still we caught up on life, four years after she got to LA. With gigs to play and a job, friends and a room of her own, a life is taking shape, two decades after she joined us in New Orleans, two days before the storm. Since then, the storms have been many. Finally, a fall with no school, lots of music and a tribe, new steps. Hello goodbye, sunlight, warm water, waves on the beach. Liminal airports, where we meet and depart. Goodbyes for now.
Onward across the country.
A couple of girls slept with their dad, across from me on the flight.
I didn’t know where I was when I landed.
Thought it was Laguardia, but the tram took me to Jamaica Station, back to Howard Beach, I watched a rosy colored, early morning pink splash across the morning on the way to the train.
People were out and about, getting ready for the 6 AM pre parade event for
J'Ouvert and West Indian American Day Carnival.
The house was empty when I got home.
Just a few pieces from the college kid’s formaldehyde collection, a few sneakers, and winter jackets, spewn about the room before they left for college.
Other than that, both kids are out, one in LA, the other in Boston.
Empty nests don’t get easier.
Onward kids, onward all of us, ever entangled and confused, our lives blurring into each other.
I sat on the couch perusing Prageeta’s poems, with references to condoms and estranged step kids. My mind trails back to our days on Sackett Street two decades prior, our kid, who was just a baby entering all this. The messy connections and attachments, ever severing, swaying, stretching, breaking, bending backward and forward. You arrive at an apartment. You never know what you are going to find. Certainly, Nathan did not arriving at the old rooming house in Ditmas, meeting Sophie with her secrets, the abuses she tolerated. Prageeta knew little of us, and the struggles we brought with parenting, or the wounds we inherited, that our kids gradually got to know, to carry themselves. Sound carried from floor to floor in the old townhouses. You could hear the amorous moments of new neighbors, familiar fights late at night, on and on. Sound passed, revealing secrets.
“Let all the lines be as they must, both ornamental and necessary,” writes Prageeta.
