Ojai poet Peake discovers monthly readings at Bell Arts Factory in Ventura

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When Robert Peake moved to Ojai from Los Angeles nearly two years ago, he thought he was leaving behind a thriving community of poetry readings. Then he discovered a monthly reading series at the Bell Arts Factory in Ventura. “Apparently the series started in June. I went to the July reading and was blown away,” Peake says, “The commitment to poetry in that room was easily on par with other series where I have been featured, such as the World Stage in Los Angeles and Beyond Baroque in Venice.”

Peake studied poetry at U.C. Berkeley before moving to Los Angeles. There, he won an award for poetry sponsored in part by the NEA and was published in several journals and anthologies. He is also a former student of LA-based poet Suzanne Lummis, who was one of four poets featured at the Ojai Poetry Festival last year.

Peake will be the featured reader at the Bell Arts Factory series on November 25th at 7:30 PM. “I’m thrilled and delighted,” he says, “there is definitely something special going on here.”

Friday Lubina, who hosts the reading series, agrees. “I’m most pleased with the incredibly welcoming atmosphere generated by the attendees at the Bell Arts Series. These people are here to support one another and it just plain feels good.” Lubina was approached to host the new reading series by Phil Taggart, co-editor of the poetry magazine Askew, who promised to help her get it off the ground.

Formerly the Bell Mattress Factory, the Bell Arts Factory is a multipurpose community arts center in what used to be the factory showroom. The nonprofit organization behind the venue seeks to enhance young lives through the arts, and to help lead greater cultural revitalization of Ventura County.

The Bell Arts Factory is located at 432 N. Ventura Ave. in Ventura. The poetry reading series happens on the last Saturday of every month at 7:30 PM. Bring one poem to read during the open mic portion of the evening.

From: “‘Factory Floored.” Ojai Valley News 27 October 2006: A9.

Related Links:

• Ojai Valley News

• Bell Arts Factory

And what poems–an abundance of new work in her signature noir yet self-aware style. She seduces an audience into thinking they are getting entertainment–often with moments of humor, irony, and wit–but in the end her work always delivers art. She also read some timeless mainstays from her book In Danger. I am glad Val, who came with me, got to finally hear them. And I’m glad, of course, she came with me and made the ninety minute drive each way a stimulating delight.

Lynn Emanuel also read some of her most well-known works, including “White Dress” and “Blonde Bombshell”, which apparently Garrison Keillor has read in honor of Marilyn Monroe’s birthday. Her other work, from her newest book, is a significant departure from these more accessible poems with broad appeal. She attempts to investigate the relationship between reader and writer, between aspects of the mind and emotions, in dark, spare, strange, metapoetic works.

I finally got to learn about and experience a bit of the venerable Ruskin Art Club, which is reviving itself as a champion of the arts in Los Angeles. After the reading, I met up with two of my former classmates from Suzanne’s master class. It’s been about four years. Kathleen Tyler has just published his first book of poems, The Secret Box, and Jawanza Dumisani is circulating his second book to a select few publishers. He introduced me to a young poet who won a scholarship from The World Stage to study with Suzanne. It was heartening to hear that Jawanza is still hosting the writers workshop there each week, in the heart of the city, working to support the community and to provide opportunities for promising young poets.

We made our way home through considerable fog. It seems autumn has arrived in Southern California.

But for all my rhapsodizing on the positive implications of Suzanne teaching one of my poems, it suddenly occured to me: my art has been assigned as homework. The dreaded drudgery of academic life that prevents parties, curtails social interaction, and keeps you from remaining in college forever: is homework. The moment turned sour at the thought of someone having to read what I wrote.

Yet thankfully, I recall the moment during a lecture at Mt. St. Mary’s (so far my only, but still treasured, poetry teaching experience) when I had the privilege of introducing a young college student to Pablo Neruda. She read Amor, America out loud in Spanish, and I could see a deep chord had been struck in her psyche as she described her ancestral homeland through Neruda’s eyes. To think my own homage to Neruda anthologized in Open Windows might possibly have a chance in itself of connecting some future student to the great legacy of poetry–well, that washes the bad taste from my mouth at the thought that my work has now become homework.

In short, poetry is art. If the artist finds all the necessary materials for his craft in rummaging through the toolbox of his past, so be it. But the notion that great writing should (or, equally, should not) be about self-expression in a personal way is like saying all good cars should be red or all great paintings not trees. Absurd, and strange.

There is a tendency to focus on personal experience as the source for creative writing in beginner courses. Memory is readily at hand, often harbors rich detail required to give a poem a sense of veracity, and the right kind of memory can bring the emotional weight and conviction to bear required to sustain a powerful poem. Then again, emotion, haphazardly expressed, is never art. In fact, some feelings and thoughts may never make great art, no matter how well described.

While this trick of focusing on the personal can make unreadable, ambiguous poems take some shape, failing to evolve from this device into other approaches limits the scope of the artist. It cripples her with the notion that poetry is about being understood–rather than making your work understood. I think we must all accept that we will never be understood in the ways we would like to be. But what we write can strike a chord in the poetic minds of others, give them a great experience that transcends prosaic thought. Whether the subject matter is me or something else entirely, the satisfaction of communicating art is the greatest success an artist can hope for. Usually, it comes in a comment like, “Wow. That was a good poem.”

Personal intimacy can create conviction. But so can deep observation. Mary Oliver’s House of Light is a stunning work you could call intimate–but intimate with her keen observation of life around her, and her wise, strange, and beautiful extrapolation from the natural world to the world of artistic thought. BH Fairchild’s The Art Of The Lathe is likewise an intimate portrait of the blue collar Midwest in the 50′s and 60′s. Yet this sense of closeness to the work, to the poet’s genius, comes not from the prolific use of “I” but from excellent writing.

I am reflecting now on events in my own life that have affected me profoundly, and I know that I may or may not ever write about them in a poem. Yet I do write, I do express, whatever I want and as often as I need to. I work through a process similar to Julia Cameron’s morning pages concept–where I write uncensored for as long as I need to, to “clear the pipes” if you will. What I write, I tear up and burn. Literally. Then I get on with writing, thinking and living.

Perhaps there are such, “Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.” (Wordsworth is often misquoted as saying such thoughts are too deep for words.) And surely poetry is one of the best possible media for expressing such thoughts, or approaching them. Still, until I discover a compelling image, an interesting rhythm, something to put at the heart of a poem that tells me it could succeed–such thoughts are likely to remain below.

Poetry has never been a matter of simply choosing the right subject. Which is why I find courses specializing in, for example, writing protest poetry, like a course in composing only music in G major. Honing the craft–not the content–should always be the aim of a writing course.

My teacher Suzanne Lummis, for example, has a very different style and voice to my own. She is interested in the sultry, decadent and noir. I put paper covers on toilet seats before I sit down on them. Yet I learned a lot from her about what it means to write, because her love of poems transcends her love of genre. If only all teachers were so magnanimously made.

More than the personal, or transpersonal, I think the best aim in art is the transcendental. Whether that means elevating a personal experience beyond the personal, or is achieved through keen observation of the natural world–or something else entirely–matters less than the trajectory it describes. Poems are art. Self-expression is healthy. But to consider the work of writing well has shifted in balance to a kind of “art therapy” seems to miss the point of writing well. Poems are not meant to be understood. People are not meant to be understood. Both are designed to be experienced. Great poems lift us up into a great experience, and our aim as poets is to write such poems.