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America demands a poetry that is bold, modern and all-surrounding and kosmical, as she is herself.
-Walt Whitman, in his essay
"Democratic Vistas" (1871)
*
It is Friday night and the poets are out among the people, doing Walt's work.
Steve Kowit and Terry Hertzler are reading their poems at the Writing Center, a storefront operation in San Diego's nightspot and tourism district called the Gaslamp Quarter. It is one of several poetry readings in San Diego this night.
Kowit is a pro: bard of innumerable liberal causes, a teacher, elfin, self-mocking, editor of a sassy volume of a no-intellectuals-need-apply poetry called "The Maverick Poets." Possessed of a growing reputation, Kowit's poetry is recommended by the poetry editor of New Yorker magazine.
The poems he reads celebrate the grit of an undocumented immigrant named Romero, mourn the death of a friend from AIDS, and play with the preposterous notion that Kowit was mistaken for the patrician-looking Richard Wilbur, who served a term as the nation's poet laureate. Kowit mocks the Southern California zeal for exercise in "The Workout," dedicated to the Family Fitness Center.
Not unlike the penitents of other sects
they are convinced that decades of decay
can be undone & that the more one genuflects
the less one rots-a doctrine
that has got the aged, the adipose & the misshapen
pedaling their stationary bikes
in such unholy fury. . . .
*
Hertzler, an unemployed technical writer, is coming to terms with the moral complexities of being a foot soldier in Vietnam. He reads his poems about going AWOL, about fearing that Vietnamese women at a coin laundry might be terrorists, and about his revulsion at being ordered to use his M-16 to kill a python that had crawled into a bunker.
From "The Way of the Snake," the bearded and burly Hertzler reads:
I saw another snake die that year. But it was
a different kind of snake: man-made. The Huey
Cobra had been flying close-support that night,
and was just overhead when a rocket smashed it
from the sky.
*
The audience-verse lovers and versifiers, and some people who were just walking by and got curious-is intense and supportive. Admission is $3.
"Poetry is like theater in miniature," said Dana...