Clique-Bait: The San Diego Poetry “Scene”

prelude to the storm
San Diego is a city-by-the-sea with a population of 5 million. It has spaghetti freeways numbered like 5, 8 and 805. These firmly establish the metropolis as a driving town. I grew up in San Diego in the 60s and 70s. We first rented an apartment in Point Loma named Loma Palisades. I attended Barnard Elementary School, which has since been converted into high priced condos, like everything of value in San Diego. Life was relatively laid back. The beach, particularly Ocean Beach, was close by. I began attending the early Comic con meetings in Ken Kruger’s science fiction, comics, and porn bookstore. My new friend Barry Alphonso joined me at the nerd-meets. The founder Shel Dorf would regularly give his moral sermons to us geeks, freaks, and comic book hounds.

I didn’t actually read comics at the time. I was kind of snobbish about them. However, my friends Barry and Bryan Smith did. They consumed comics ravenously. My parents didn’t give me an allowance. They were strict about where their kids spent their hard earned money. Science Fiction was another story. This genre I consumed like a dehydrated camel at an oasis. First Edgar Rice Burroughs and A Wrinkle in Time but soon it was Harlan Ellison, Theodor Sturgeon, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick (who I barely understood), Philip Jose Farmer, Kurt Vonnegut and then there was Ray Bradbury. Of all the fantasy, horror and SF authors I read, it was Bradbury who spoke deepest into my soul. I saw Bradbury as a kindred spirit. Along with Baudelaire, Poe, Rimbaud, Malarme and Zola who I also consumed with ravenous glee.

But Bradbury’s poetic novels forge my writing and poetry to this day. The Illustrated Man, The Martian Chronicles, and the devastating Something Wicked This Way comes. These stories infected my dreams. I recall having vivid dreams of sitting next to the illustrated man. I also dreamed of being on the carousel of youth in Wicked and meeting the Martians on Mars.
It was his short film “Dial Double 0” about an actual artificial intelligence (NOT that misnomer marketing term AI!), born in a phone box haunting a terrified man with phone calls that animated my imagination. That and the first series of Star Trek (yes, I am old enough to have seen the first series when it was broadcast, sitting next to my dad who was equally mesmerized by heroic space exploration. My actual dad and I bonded over Star Trek AND Ray Bradbury.

Deeply profound imagery, is what Bradbury delivered and my being the son of a painter, it was the paintings he put in my head that I could not get enough of.
My father, a professor of Anthropology at SDSU, encouraged me to read. He had taught me how to read English. I learned Spanish first in a Costa Rican Catholic school.
My father loved Science fiction, being a scientist and he reveled in the fact that I would empty the SF section of the downtown library every two weeks when we took a family outing to the library.

I eventually met Ray Bradbury at the age of 14 (or 13). It was thanks to my serving on the Comic Con steering committee. Walking up to the man in the ice cream suit and white fedora took all the nerve my nerd self could muster. He was standing by himself on the first morning of the Con, next to the El Cortez interior swimming pool. (Not in-door, but outside under a windowless sky light in the center of the hotel lobby. I walked up to Mr. Bradbury in terror. Here was this magician, this shaman of words who had entered my dreams at night and took me to far flung peaks of aesthetic bliss mixed with mystery and terror. Of course Mr. Bradbury was always Mr. Bradbury to me. Even when I got older and saw him briefly before his death, I never called him ‘Ray’. I deemed it to be a desecration of his powers.

I did summon the nerve to get him to sign my first edition paperback of Something Wicked This Way Comes and found him shining his benevolent smile into my eyes and face. He wasn’t a powerful, dark, intimidating wizard after all! Ray Bradbury was a kindly, warm, sincere man who cared about his fans. The artist as saint. He returned my paperback to me and smiled. I knew that I was safe from his dark magic. I could venture to ask him what I really, desperately needed to know.

“Mr. Bradbury”, I said before he turned to go to attend to his convention duties. “Mr. Bradbury, can I ask you a question?” Ray Bradbury stopped in his tracks. He turned back towards me. Leaning over my form, he replied, “Why of course, young man. What is it that you would like to know?”
I hesitated for a split second. It occurred to me that he was mentally anticipating a question about one of his stories, some character, or plot twist. But I had a bigger question in my 14 (or 13) year old hungry mind.

“Mr. Bradbury, tell me, how can I become a writer like you? Is there a special school I need to go to?”
Now it was Ray Bradbury’s turn to be enchanted; by little old me.
Mr. Bradbury motioned me over to two pool lounge chairs cruxed by the blue fluoride pool of creation. He sat down and faced me. He examined my face intently. Then he uttered these words:
“First, young man, you’ve got to get the name of my profession correct. It’s not writing, I’m not a ‘writer’, I’m a re-writer. The vocation is called re-writing for a very good reason. Because that, my son, is what you’re going to spend most of your waking life doing. Some of your dreaming life as well!” I became so mesmerized by meeting my hero. I didn’t remember what he said after that. It was about a 20 minute conversation and then he left to attend to his celebrity duties.

And That, My Friends, is how I became a writer. I was baptized by the worldly experience of a kindly, white-haired, be-speckled magician. He wore an ice cream suit and a white panama hat in the San Diego sun that blazed all around us, through the skylight at the very center of the El Cortez Hotel in the summer of 1972 (or 73). The El Cortez Hotel of legend, mystery, and comic book panel has become over-priced condos. This change happened because money is money. Culture and history are really just for the poor.

THE REAL STUFF NOW: (Hold onto your Horses!)
As the previous heading sign-posted, this was all just the prelude to the true subject of my dissertation:

Which is in fact, the Poetry Futures Poetry Festival I attended only yesterday, hosted by the San Diego Poet Laureate Jason Perez and held at the Cross Cultural annex of the UCSD campus.
There was no publicity covering the event, no posters or flyers to guide the poesie aficionados, but I was able to navigate my way to the upstairs set of conference rooms.

On my way up the stairs I found myself at pace with a young, well dressed Asian man with horned rim glasses. I asked him if he knew where the poetry festival was being held. He smiled an affable smile. “That’s where I am going as well,” he said. He reassured me that I was heading the right direction through this academic labyrinth.

Upon entering the reception room and pausing to shake Jason’s hand to thank him for inviting me, I found that the horn rimmed well dressed Asian man was actually the poet Lee Herrick! The Poet Laureate of California! Which I really cared nothing about. What I cared about was that he was an honest, good poet who had truth to tell in his writing. I had only read a few of his poems in an academic journal but he was the real thing. An adopted Korean child who had grown into a gentle, sensitive man.

Lee was not only a formidable wordsmith but the very man I had wanted to connect with in order to further my plans for the first international poetry festival to be held in San Diego: The Balboa Park International Poetry Garden Festival .

But more about that later. I plan to leave San Diego in 2025. However, I am also resolved to leave a lasting monument to the culture of quality in literary arts. A yearly Poetry Festival could continue long after I relocated back to more civilized climes. In conjunction with the festival, I also want to organize a poetry competition. The proceeds from this competition would go to building a Rumi’s Poetry Drinking Fountain in the center of the Prado. This fountain would be accessible to the general public. It would feature a stone sculpture of the Greek Pegasus, the symbol of poetry.

Donald (Dumb Hitler), Trump’s triumph in last November’s election convinced me. I realized that I was no longer suited to the American nightmare. For the first time, he secured a majority of the popular vote by only 175,000. I knew a nightmare was about to be unleashed.
The day after the tragic election results, I made two long distance phone calls:

The first to my ex wife, Felicity Brooks, the Managing Editor of Usborne Books with whom I had a tempestuous separation some ten years previously. As soon as she answered the phone, I didn’t have to say a thing.
“I’m so sorry, Igor, I’m so sorry about is happening to your country. What do you need to get out? I’ll help you with the home office to re-establish your residency and your work permit. I’ll even tell them that we’ve reconciled and are back together as a married couple.
“Whatever it takes”, she continued.

“I’m so sorry, I know that you loved the US but the time has come to make the hard choices you have to make to survive”. My heart leapt at her kindness and generosity of spirit.
How many men can count on their ex-wives as reliable friends?
But I also understood what she was saying and why:
Both of our parents had lived through WWII and understood the reality of political upheaval. They knew the plight of refugees escaping political oppression and tyranny. Now it was my turn to be a political refugee. My ex-wife knew that some forces in life are stronger and more important than mere marital squabbling.

The second call I made was to my never-actually-met-him Facebook friend, the musician Richard Torres. Richard was a punk rocker in the 1980s London scene and had had a hit. A big hit. But bad punk rocker that he was, he didn’t spend all his money on drugs, alcohol and womanizing. Instead, he betrayed his genre by buying a mansion in the Gothic quarter of Alicante, Spain!

What a loser!

3 years ago, I was illegally evicted from a house in Clairemont. This was after the passing of Louise Karsten. She rented me a cheap room in exchange for tending to her massive yard and building a vegetable garden. I also paid for the restoration of one of her three bathrooms. I had found myself vaguely homeless. Couch surfing from friend to friend and eventually anchoring myself to the outdoor couch of my bike mechanics overpopulated two bedroom rental.

His family and he were avid meth consumers. Every morning, I used the bathroom coming in from the front garden. I would be greeted by billowing clouds of smoked speed. I was invited to partake. Eventually, my polite abstinence proved to be an unalterable faux pas. I was inevitably asked to leave for not conforming to the social norms of their meth-smoking “community”.
Which is directly relevant to my account of this festival.

After shaking hands with Lee, I wandered through the space. I was looking for poets to invite to my festival. They could teach as guest teachers at the Pegasus Poetry Workshops. It starts the last day of January 2025. They might even contribute to my new poetry journal, The Mission. I began to recognize some familiar figures of the San Diego Poetry “scene”. Poetry Underground had constructed a long table promoting their books and events. I avoided the eye contact of Anthony and “Sunny”. My last encounter with them was when they barred me from their underground open mic poetry reading. It was because I read my anti gun poem. THE BULLET FROM MY GUN. Anthony and Sunny founded Poetry Underground. They are proponents of the school of thinking that believes everybody who even tries to write a poem deserves accolade. I’ve always believed in support and encouragement for young artists; but support without critical discernment, without discipline, is no support at all.

Poetry takes work, not complacency. Each to their own but Poetry Underground’s so called “mental health” agenda leaves me a little bit worried. My concerns might not have a cause. However, it’s healthy to recognize your limits. By doing this, you can surpass them and grow as an individual and an artist. The slogan for Pegasus Poetry Workshops is straightforward. Poetry Underground blatantly rebuffed it. We will teach you the rules of poetry. Then, you will know how and when to break them. Poetry is not a nightclub, it’s a hard earned craft that requires discipline, focus and dedication, not constant applause.

My anti gun poem I read at my last ever ™”stand up tragedy” at Poetry Underground is reproduced above.

Anthony had took umbrage at my poem and its contents. He was especially upset at his audience’s reaction.

The audience was visibly excited by my heart-felt honesty. I had exposed the mental problems of gun obsessives. My poem highlights their detrimental impact on American society. We have too many guns and not enough gun control. The number one cause of childhood mortality in this country are gun deaths! That is obvious even to servicemen and women. However, Anthony did not see it that way. As MC, he seized the stage after my performance. He denounced my poem with a tirade about Second Amendment rights. My poem called out the gun nuts who want to spread even more death and mayhem. Gun violence is a reality, not an opinion in America. We experience a pandemic of gun violence every day in the US. This is a fact, not a perception. Gravity can be an experience, but it is not a perception or an opinion.

It is the truth.

I was pleased that my poem had triggered (sic) some kind of reaction but Anthony was adamant in his denunciation. As an ex military type, he had always eyed me with suspicion and barely concealed hostility. He could smell my liberalism and it made him sick. Some time later, I called Sunny to invite her and Anthony to my Pacific Beach Poetry Workshop. She found my invitation insulting. Her attitude towards me was evidently infected by the same hostility. She informed me that if I decided to return to their open mic ritual, “Anthony wants a word with you, first.”

That was enough for me.

Unlike some of the aspersions cast in my direction, I am an adamant pacifist and avoid conflicts at all costs. What I have learned is that if you turn away from “trouble” to avoid it, “trouble” will often follow you down the alley way anyways. It might even mug you from behind!

Needless to say, I never returned to the Underground. (Take notes, Dostoevsky!), These days, I keep my feet above, not under the ground.

The Poetry scene in San Diego is parochial at best; and that, relatively speaking is a compliment!

San Diego as a whole, is a metropolis sized city with the mentality of a small town. It has no real literary or arts scene comparable to San Francisco, LA, Oakland, Sacramento or even Fresno. In Southern California, artists are seen as stunted adolescents. They are treated as if they won’t grow up and get a real job packing groceries at Whole Foods. Most other major California cities have thriving poetry and expressive arts scenes. Poets stand together in brother and sisterhood and help and support each other.

San Diego Poetry “scene” has been and is still, more like an open dog fight between warring and self-aggrandizing factions.
The gatherings and readings tend to be mutual admiration clubs of gratuitous glad-handing applause. It reminds me most of the participation awards of the 1990s when everyone wins just for having partaken. On a few occasions, I’ve heard a young poet with promise recite an amateur piece. I approached them afterward to encourage them to “Rewrite” and think about who they are writing the piece for. I am then admonished by the host poets and told off for being “negative”. Critical thinking is abhorrent to the San Diego poetry scene. Writing is too.

Curan was a rare exception. Sadly, he is now deceased. He was a white Buddhist gay poet. Curan ran the Mission Hills Library monthly workshop. He was genuine and real and we are publishing his work now posthumously in The Mission monthly. Curan was the exception. The rule in San Diego poetry readings is that there are featured “stars” backed by their publishers to sell products. And there’s the so-called “Open mic” monthly gatherings guaranteed for applause.

This is regardless of merit, and discussion or feedback is profoundly discouraged.
At one such “open mic” reading I asked the assembled audience of would be poets, to hold their applause. That if they wanted to give me feedback to approach me after the reading and tell me what they honestly thought. This caused the bah-bah-ing, amateur sheep to deride me as I was challenging their ritual. The veterans at the same reading openly mocked me for even suggesting such a trespass of their precious norm.

All of this petty-clique behavior is more worthy of a bad high school TV drama than a literary tradition. This has inevitably led to an impoverishment of poetry as a craft in San Diego. A vocation which in fact takes literally decades of hard work and endless failures to achieve anything of merit. Art is a vocation, not a dilettante’s hobby.

The owner of Verbatim Books was at the festival, there with her entourage. Of course, she avoided my path. I had tried to get her shop to stock my books. Then, on one occasion, I invited a homeless street poet reeking of alcohol. Former Beat Poet Laureate Chris Vannoy and I had heard him reciting incoherencies outside their reading. We asked him to come inside and recite his insane, psychedelic, beautiful ramblings. The owner did not take kindly to what she misconstrued as an attempt to sabotage her event. Apparently, you can’t be drunk and read poetry in San Diego. Sorry, Charles Baudelaire, Dylan Thomas, Charles Bukowski. You’re not wanted here!

After Avoiding the Poetry Underground & Verbatim, I said hello to Ted Washington who was going to be reading for the Fighting Poetry panel (which was my highlight of the festival. Ted and I have known each other for years. We do detect that we’re not exactly friends. However, we do share a begrudging respect for each other’s work. I would publish Ted Washington in a blink. His voice is angry, political and authentic, an African American raging against The Machine. Hey, we don’t have to be “Friends” with everyone. People don’t have to “like” each other; we just have to not kill each other.

Poetry is a forum, a medium of expression wherein people with differences can air those differences in lyric, rhyme and reason.
Jason’s Poetry Futures festival proved to be just that: political, engaging and inspiring. I met some great poets and some great human beings there. Mainly from LA, Portland, Anaheim and the Bay Area. I found myself applauding loudly, wildly at the voices of mainly women poets. I also found myself randomly running into complete strangers. We would exchange a line of verse in rhyme and reason.

“Strangers stopping strangers just to shake their hands.” Robert Hunter

The out of town readers were amazing, truly wonderful, sending shivers down my spine and music to my ears. In contrast, the academic poets both students and teachers, presented a stark contrast. Some of the UCSD graduates buried themselves in their own self-righteous academic graves. They pronounced their degrees like ancient Egyptian curses. These poets tried to conjure magic that wasn’t theirs or of any lasting potence. At best Art and Academia are uneasy bedfellows and can lead to abusive relationships as the only steady income an artist can muster while they perfect their craft is by teaching. Which is fine except that higher education in California (and probably throughout the US) is a business. The products are students and credentials that lead to paying jobs. That can be alright except when the credential is a token of conforming to an inorganic, bureaucratic entity that just wants to control the thoughts and actions of others. That’s when the relationship between art and academia becomes an abusive co-dependence.

Unrelated, Michael Klam and his San Diego Yearly Poetry Annual entourage of county editors were there too. I like Michael, even though I don’t have to. We’ve had over the years, a disagreement or two, but he’s always remained an affable sort. Besides, the Annual has published my poetry 4 years running and you don’t shoot the horse that lets you ride him. I gave up submitting to the annual a few years back mainly because ones poetry gets lost in its voluminous thickness. I don’t really know who actually buys the annual apart from the poets who are published in it. Some of its editors are friends and support what I do. Others despise me for my work, my dedication to critical thinking and my politics. I am devoted to Poetry and this poet’s life like it was my parent. Having lost both, Poetry has taken their place in loving me, in caring for me; poetry has nurtured my body, soul, and mind; without it I most likely would have taken my own life years ago.
(If not for my daughter Olivia as well; who I could never inflict such trauma upon.

In the end, it is our children who save our lives from dissolution and despair.

The San Diego poet I now most admire is Sonia Gutierrez, who recognized me when she was first approaching the center, outside while I spoke to an Arab who happened to be the buyer for the La Jolla Barnes and Nobel and who I had given a copy of Is She Available? and was raving about it, asking where he could order more copies for his store.

Sonia Gutierrez wasn’t quite sure where she recognized me from but insisted that I was familiar to her. She asked me a question about where the event was (Signage, people, signage!!). Sonia Gutierrez peered at me and told me that I looked familiar. Later when I heard her read at the Fighting Poetry panel brilliantly hosted by Ted Washington, I recalled that the great Mexican muralist Victor Ocheo had introduced her to me over 5 years previous. Victor was always pushing me to celebrate my Latino, Costa Rican heritage. My uncle being the now deceased Costa Rican muralist, painter and sculptor Francisco Zuniga. (I come from Art Aristocracy!)

He wanted me to connect with other “Chicano” poets. This was the very first occasion I heard Sonia Gutierrez read. I was literally and pleasantly blown away. A non academic, self taught poet. She is now a poetry teacher. She exuded her culture like a wafting perfume. There are too many phony Chicanos in this world; too many Latinos laying claim to a uniquely Mexican American heritage. People like Peruvian painter Mario Torero who insists that he’s a Chicano “Artivista” when there isn’t a drop of either American or Mexican blood in him.

Sonia Gutierrez filled the room with sounds and almost smells of her Mexican heritage.
She is a real poet in every sense of the term, as she serves her words up as a vehicle for her people’s history, her people’s culture, her people’s sounds. A woman’s sounds (like my mother singing in the bath tub, cantina songs), I wanted to embrace Sonia after her reading; and breath all of Mexico in.

Instead, I invited her to come teach at the Pegasus Workshop as a guest teacher and gave her a blank cheque as to how to fill the two hours. I admired her spunk. She bluntly asked me if there was a stipend for teaching. There is not, as the workshop is a semester long and free to the public. The event is held on the premises of a public building, which the tax payers pay for. Poetry should be free.
Poets do have to eat. Their words may feed the spirit, but the flesh is also wanting. Poets should be paid for their work. Buy their books, it makes a big difference!

So I told Sonia I would see what I can do. Her poem “Perspective” should be mandatory reading in San Diego’s classrooms. It is a monument to hypocrisy. It highlights the disingenuity of the new right as they sabotage our thinking, our ability to reason. They gaslight us into accepting racism and bigotry as just a matter of “perspective.” In today’s post Trump intellectual wasteland, all opinions are valid even house that would strangle opinion at its source.

The panel called Fighting Poetry was a little distracted by a ‘transitional” (transgender?) poet, who’s name escapes me. She was a striking woman with a beautiful face.
But the transgender poet had marred her own face with a frozen smug, plastic smile. I have had friends within the transgender “community”, (Not my choice but It is their’s and I would fight to protect that human right.), But there was definitely something false, something wrong with this particular poet’s self presentation. She proclaimed the righteousness of her gender choice as if it was a weapon to be used on her audience. Her answer to fighting poetry, in which real truths were being told, was to lead the group in a contrived “breathing exercise in an off-the-shelf mindfulness.

Her poetry was mediocre although her pain and composed anger were real enough. If she had not taken affront I would have shared with her some constructive feedback. The politics of sex, of gender, and identity are volatile like nitroglycerin. A single misstep by a boring straight man like me could spell disaster. I chose to avoid the risk of confrontation.

A young Vietnamese poet, whom I have lost track of and could not find, breathed air into the room. She did this by reciting a poem that mixed English and Vietnamese words. The music beautifully infiltrated the comprehension of the poem. I am a devotee and follower of Thich Nicht Han, the monumental Vietnamese Zen monk. I have met, sat, and walked with him in London. I was well disposed to the sound of her vowels. Even without understanding the meaning of her words, they were sheer poetry.

The highlights for me were Jason himself. He bid farewell to his position as poetry laureate. Then I was captivated by the sublime psychological work of Lee Herrick. I had only read him before and never actually heard him read. His voice opened up his exploration of his own heritage, his own adoption and adaptation to my heart.

A lesson for us all: if you can always hear the poet read his or her work aloud, do it! The human voice carries the breath of the soul. Like Homer, we are all blind to the written word when it can instead take flight. It flies on the winds that come from within us into the wide, wild world.
But don’t believe me when I sing Lee’s praises; Listen for yourself.
Listen to the wings of poetry unfold and take flight!

Experience life’s moments on your own.
The universe doesn’t expect much from us but it does want us to pay attention and listen….just listen.

Thank you for reading this far, now please if you will, comment below.