S.A. Griffin and Diana Bonebrake
           


Diana Bonebrake is the Art Editor of Luciole Press. She is a very gifted
painter; you can see her work at www.bonebrakepaintings.com 

APRIL ~ MAY ~ JUNE FEATURED ARTISTS:


S.A. Griffin and Diana Bonebrake: Collaborations

Diana Bonebrake's art and S.A. Griffin's poetry create a stunning
combination. A selection of their pieces follows, as does an interview
of Griffin by Bonebrake



"Lady"






"Love Poem for my Wife"

Poetry, The Internet and The Process of Collaboration:
an interview with S.A. Griffin, by Diana Bonebrake

S.A. GRIFFIN. 

I had heard of the Carma Bums, that motley crew of poet
performers who ran amok throughout America and the Internet
in the late 80’s and early 90’s. I knew about the writings of Scott
Wannberg and had spent plenty of quality nightclub time with
Doug Knott. But in all my years in Los Angeles I had never crossed paths with S.A. Griffin. Then around 2004 a friend introduced me to S.A. at a coffee shop in Los Feliz.  I asked S.A. to send me some poetry. He sent me his book Unborn Again (2001 Phony Lid Publications). Reading his work sent me into something of a spell-- I sat down at the desktop, pulled up some images I had painted, and began slapping stanzas of his poetry onto the images of my paintings.   I couldn't help myself. I guess I wanted to become part of the words, or make them part of my experience, inhale their power, their musicality; so I read, copied, and pasted until I came up with what I thought might be an image or two worthy of sharing. And I had the uniquely 21st century experience of e-mailing the author with something new and different, hopefully something that would be appreciated.  And thankfully S.A. was pleased.  Later I learned that he is quite the visual artist himself, having created numerous posters, paintings, collages and book designs for his own work and that of many other writers and poets.  His latest creation is Dreams That Would Drown Most Men, a soft cover, hand-assembled book of poetry by Amanda Oakes and John Dorsey. 
Poet Ellen Maybe says Griffin ‘rocks to a solar system of kindness.’ 

That's the truth:


I Have no Poem for You Today

only my arms and
hands
that hold and shape this
empty longing

so
take the
music
from  my throat

and sing

use my legs
to
out run
your seemingly unconquerable
fear

and when the
race is run and the
song sung

I will wash your
tired body with my
tongue
while you
rest
and
heal
inside my
hunger


(poem by S.A. Griffin, all rights reserved)




The Interview:  

It's a Thursday afternoon, and I'm on the edge of my chair with S.A.
Griffin, naturally, as he is sitting across from me eating a Salisbury
Steak TV dinner. His son Spencer plays music on his guitar and there
are books everywhere. Books in and on shelves, books on tables,
books in boxes and books on the floor. There is art on the walls
and leaning against the walls of their Silver Lake apartment.
They also have cats, one black and white named Ooga, and one
recent addition, a pregnant Calico stray that Spencer named Juno who just gave birth to four kittens; two orange tabbies and
two black.

Diana: Is reading your work in front of an audience part of the
process of doing a piece?

S.A.: You mean does it have any impact on the writer? No, not
really, not at all.  Back in the day, back when Dinah Shore ruled the earth and I had hair, about 50 pounds ago...

Diana: I'm editing this part out.

S.A.: No, who cares? Leave it in, who cares? No, the first year
easily that I read in public at The Water Espresso Gallery in
Hollywood, I read very flatly and blandly on purpose. Very
deliberately I tried not to put any emotion into what I was
reading simply because I wanted to know if the writing
worked, you know what I mean? That was the idea anyway.
And so that was the only reason I began reading in public,
aside from meeting other freaks. Wanted to know if what I
was writing actually worked on any level at all.

Diana: So it does have an impact on validating?

S.A.: In that context over twenty five years ago it did, but these
days I very rarely read in public, and that's only because, well,
I can't say very rarely; I just don't do it that much anymore.
I just have too much going on in my life, and I've done thousands
of the damn things now. Very little of what I write anymore
is ever performed.

"27 years"


 

Diana: Do you ever feel compelled? “Oh I love this piece, I gotta
get this piece out in front of an audience...”?

S.A.: No, if I feel compelled at all to share it with anyone I'll do
something like call you on the phone and read it to you.

Diana: Right.

S.A.: Generally that means more to me than reading in public.
Because it's personal, it's straight ahead, and I can talk to you
about it if I want to.  When I do call somebody to read it over the
phone, which I don't do very often, for me is usually part of the
editing process. I might have questions about the flow of thing or the structure and of course, reading it to somebody by phone, I can hear it out loud and possibly catch what my eyes and fingers didn't. It can also be fun or exciting to read something fresh out of the oven to a friend that might actually want to hear it and share in some of that excitement of something new too.

Diana: I love when poets read their work directly to me, you know? Poet Craig Danielsen will come over with his work, whips out a poem and goes, ‘Wow, you gotta hear this!’ It's important.

S.A.: Yeah, I mean that was kind of, for awhile anyway, the value
of MySpace in part, posting stuff and then getting responses. But
in the end it turned into such a carnival of smoke, you know what I mean? It's just that 99% of the time it's true, including your friends, bless them all, but it's just like nobody wants to hear anything unless it's positive.

Diana: Right.

S.A.: And so then it becomes a very false forum in which to
exhibit your work. Now granted, there's some really good stuff
on there and I have met some very cool folks. Been published
quite a bit too. But it is hard for me to deal with the negative,
whether it is directed towards me or not. The crossfire can be
just as deadly.

Diana:  Oh, I see, criticism is frowned upon.

S.A.: Are you kidding? People will call you the devil. They'd go
(hollers), "You don't know anything about writing! You don't
know anything about writing! You're just, you're just an asshole
like all the rest!" Or my favorite word for people who don't
agree, "haters".

Diana: (Laughing)

S.A.: You know? I just don't dig the flames. But there are some
people that I still correspond with over email like John Dorsey,
Scott Wannberg, A.D. Winans and a few other people and it does
become a bit of a forum sometimes. Charlie Whitley, he’s great!
He sends out great essays on poetry and the poetic process. Some he's written, some by other poets he just copies and sends out for everyone. So there's some value for me in that regard. But in terms of performance in public, it's really a completely different thing. You know, it really is, there's a different validation in performing in public than in the process of the writing itself.

"Scott"
 

Diana: Do you think that all poets should be able to read their
pieces live or does it matter?

S.A.: No, it doesn't matter at all.  It's called writing, not performing. And actually, because you know the truth is, I would suggest that the better part of people who are really great, really brilliant writers, probably can't read for shit in public.

Diana: Yeah, there are recordings of people like T.S. Eliot reading and they aren't the greatest at reading their own work. It’s difficult.

S.A.: Well I love hearing writers read their own work, I always have. No matter how good or bad they might be in public. But in terms of performance, I wouldn't suggest that reading is performance, you can call it performance but when you say performance I think you're taking it to a different level where the apple's been shined up a little bit before you feed it to the sleeping beauty. You know, 'performance' in today's vernacular is a different critter. But in terms of reading, Scott and I specifically have made this distinction over the years because we got really tired of the idea of the performance of poetry. We really did. So we called ourselves page or reading poets. This became our performance, reading poetry.  Page poets, we called ourselves, reading off the page, writing for the blank page, and so we were, page poets. Especially when the slam thing was going full blast back in the early-mid 90’s. It was kind of our little joke on slam, and performance poetry, as well as, we really do believe in reading off the page which is where it all begins and ends.

We think that that’s really what it's all about; you know what
I mean? We really get off on that as opposed to memorizing everything and doing it for points.
 


 "War Prayer"
and money or something.

Diana: Well that brings me around to the subject of collaborating, something I know you enjoy doing. Pardon the pun, but how important is the ‘tribe’?

S.A.: You mean The Lost Tribe?

Diana: No, I mean working with a group of people, The Lost Tribe, The Carma Bums?

S.A.: You mean performing with a group of people?

Diana: Yeah, collaborating.

S.A.: Well the value of collaborating is easy, it's an exchange of
ideas, and then hopefully, increases the result. You know, I've
thought about this a lot. Although I've been rewarded a lot for
collaborating, I've been punished a lot too.

Diana: And talking about MySpace, there’s no collaboration
going on.

S.A.: Not really. I think some people are certainly affected and I
think that's the best. I really do believe that you have to be affected by what you read or what you experience. In terms of collaboration on MySpace or in the blogs; there's some, definitely some.

Diana: Although we created some.

S.A.: Yeah, we did, but that wasn't MySpace.

Diana: No, it was the Internet.

S.A.: Email.  But, collaboration!  

I’ve thought about this a lot, why am I obsessed with collaborating with other people and have been over the years? I think that's because I was an actor first, that's how I was introduced to the creative process. As an actor, that is the process, you have no choice but to be a collaborator.

Diana: Or you're a lousy actor.

S.A.: Well, no, not so much that; but rather, if you aren't willing to collaborate, you don't get to act. Films are made by lots of people. Plays are made by lots of people. It's collaboration from beginning to end.

Diana: Yeah.

S.A.: An actor is the exact opposite of being a writer. Whereas a
writer is, ‘all by yourself’ and that's the way it should be. You
collaborate with the paper, you collaborate with the computer, you collaborate with your experience, reference materials, or whatever is going on around you, but as an actor it's just the way that process works, you must be able to collaborate with people because that's what its all about. Everyone is involved in the storytelling, the actor is only a part of it.

Diana: Throughout.

"This Place of Love You Make"
 

S.A.: Throughout, from beginning to end. As a writer, you are the storyteller. In acting, you are always collaborating with other actors, writers, producers, directors, musicians, sound guys, camera guys, however it is. You're always collaborating, there's just no way around it. So I think that that's why I brought that to what I was doing as a poet. Primarily because I already understood collaboration, or thought I did. It was what I was familiar with. 

For example, with The Lost Tribe, our first poetry performance
group.  I met all those guys at The Water, which is where I first
started to read poetry in public, The Water Gallery Espresso Cafe in Hollywood across from where the Kit Kat  Klub used to be. Right next door to The Lhasa Club, where that used to be. Anyhow, in regards to The Lost Tribe, we were already performing poetry individually, we'd already made that leap, after my year or so of reading completely banal. So right around the same time, we all shifted gears. I shifted gears because the punk thing was raging, we were right there at The Lhasa Club, one of the ‘ground zeros’ of the punk scene, and we performed there all the time, so we couldn't help but be affected by everything around us; bands, other poets, and most importantly, performance artists. All these things led us to really fuse our work with performance.  

As The Lost Tribe and The Carma Bums, we never wrote anything for performance, ever!  That remains one of the greater differences between what we were doing and slam. We never wrote for anything except the page. So we started performing. The next level was to do it as a group, the reason being, we were kind of imitating the bands around us. That's what we were doing, we were really becoming the instruments. So that's what The Lost Tribe was. Very rehearsed, very choreographed poet band with whoever wasn't on lead becoming chorus. You take a poem, and then we’d figure stuff out. We’d just choreograph and rehearse it; we were pretty slick. We were good at what we were doing and we were the only people doing what we were doing in group form at the time, there was nobody doing anything like what we were doing. We hit our zenith by appearing on The Gong Show twice.

Diana: O.K.

S.A.: The first time The Lost Tribe won with a score of eight, the
lowest score ever for a winner. The second time they brought us
back just to gong our asses.

Diana: (Laughs) That sounds great. Is there any existing tape or
anything?

S.A.: Yeah there's a film called ‘The Lost Tribe” by John Lesley
Fox, it’s really a nice piece, about 15 minutes long, shot at The
D.A. Ward studio downtown L.A. where the Rose Street studios
 were. All gone as well, across from Al’s Bar, where that used to be. Dear God, I feel like a Civil War vet. Where's my teeth?

Diana: Yeah, me too. We covered a bit about the Internet in
terms of collaborating, but my question is...

S.A.: Yes….

Diana: Do you think that the Internet has made poetry more
accessible to people?  Has it benefited the world of poetry?

S.A.: Wow, that's a tough one, I would say that it's benefited the
world of poetry in the sense that it has made poetry more available as opposed to more accessible. Easier to find, easier to purchase, easier to find your favorite poet maybe. Certainly easier to publish for many. In regards to sheer content, the Internet has made it more available in every way, whether it's classic poetry, modern poetry, you know, whatever it is; open poetry, rhyming poetry. The point is, that the greatest thing about the Internet is that it is a great resource or can be if you don't take everything as gospel.  

In the end though, the numbers remain rather constant. The
majority of this boon in newer writers and content is still about
eighty per cent bullshit, which makes good fodder for the
flowers up top.

 

"Throwing Glass at Brick Houses"

Diana: You and I have talked about how you see the poetry
you create as artifact, can you talk about that one briefly?

S.A.: Sure. I have always viewed whatever I have created in hard
copy form as artifact. Something to be found, something that
reflects not just my points of view or those of the writers that
I publish, but hopefully something from the period. All small
parts of our wild history that contribute to the greater history
that we all think we already know, understand or complacently
accept. Mary Kerr, a wonderful filmmaker from San Francisco
who created a documentary about The Venice Beats called,
"Swinging In The Shadows," infected me with the idea of our wild history a few years back. As she gave it to me, it is from the
Chinese, the people's history, our wild history. That history
that governments, corporate and military machines have no
real interest in because it does not serve their own greater good.
So then it is up to all of us to create this together, and in the world of small press especially, I consider it one of my greater callings, our greater callings, to help create and preserve some of that wild history as artifact in poetic form. It always gives me real pleasure to have faith that sometime long after I am gone, somebody will be reading or enjoying something that I have created or helped to create.

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