Rivendell
Editor's Note
In the spring of 2000, I returned to teach at Pitzer College, my alma mater, as a visiting writer. Pitzer is located in Claremont, a quiet college town an hour inland from Los Angeles near the base of Mt. Baldy. It had been over ten years since I spent time in southern California. During those first few weeks, I walked around the campus and the town feeling simultaneously at home in, and utterly estranged from, my surroundings.
Early in my stay, I was invited by my old friend and mentor Barry Sanders to sit in on his poetry class; a colleague of his, Peter Harris, was coming to read to the students. I remember sitting in that bright classroom and being bowled over by Harris' dynamic poetry. Harris himself seemed electric with energy and intelligence. I walked out of that classroom bristling with questions. Eventually, I sat down with Peter Harris and turned those questions into the interview that opens this journal. It was in that congenial talk that I first heard about The World Stage, a writers' workshop and performance space located in the heart of L.A.'s Crenshaw District.
Around the same time, I reconnected with another old college professor, the poet Dick Barnes. Dick, it turned out, had been fighting off cancer and would in a few months succumb to the disease. I went over to visit him on one of his better afternoons, and along with his wife, Pat, talked about a handful of subjects. When he asked about my poetry and I told him that I was dabbling with a loose form of haiku, one that didn't adhere strictly to syllabics, Dick frowned. "What's so hard about 5-7-5?"
I didn't get out much that semester, but on two occasions I made the extra effort, once to hear Dick Barnes perform with The Real Time Jazz Band and once to visit The World Stage. Both evenings were memorable, alive with the palpable energy that emanates from topnotch live entertainment. There were big differences in the feel of the performances. Dick's show was a low-key affair in a Claremont bar filled with old friends and regulars out for Dick's final public performance, while the workshop and readings at The World Stage combined the raucous communality of a southern Baptist church with the smoky intimacy of a jazz club. But the overall seriousness and good-spiritedness displayed at each event wedded them in my mind.
On the long, late-night drive back from L.A. the idea for RIVENDELL came to me. In fact, it was the 10 Freeway itself that brought me to the notion: for it is this strip of road that both connects and separates these two radically different literary scenes. I had a vision of a metropolis made up of a network of artist communities, rife with a dozen World Stages and surrounded by a ring of Claremonts. And, by extension, the whole country was made up of just such clusters and juxtapositions.
It occurred to me that there weren't any literary journals that took this as a focal point. In fact, regional ties were often obscured or erased altogether; only in special issues were writers ever brought together around the place in which they made their home or created their art. Whereas each issue of RIVENDELL will focus on a specific place out of which art is made and enjoyed--a geographic location, a pairing of communities, a shared sensibility. Hopefully, by bringing together writers and artists from different backgrounds and communities, I will be encouraging an original and "multilingual" conversation.
And so here is the first issue of RIVENDELL, dubbed "City of Angels" for its focus on the Los Angeles area. But don't think of this as a "Best Of L.A" issue. It's not. Instead, consider it a series of forays into this sprawling metropolitan area, a microcosm of its diverse literary life. And though this issue focuses on the writers and artists working out of Claremont, as well as some of the poets who identify with The World Stage, it also looks beyond these two centers. In "City of Angels" you will be acquainted with writers working out of Beyond Baroque, The Women's Poetry Project, The Poetry Society of America, UC-Riverside's graduate writing program and a host of other workshops, writing programs, community centers and writers' groups.
When I told a prominent L.A. poet that I was including Claremont poets with other L.A. writers, he seemed perplexed. "They don't even identify themselves with L.A.," he told me. But why should that matter? Don't they all live in the shadow of the San Gabriel Mountains? Don't they all drive the 10 Freeway? It takes writers and educators such as Peter Harris and Dick Barnes, Barry Sanders and Wanda Coleman, to do the hard work of bridging the artificial spaces between local writing scenes; when they cross into new territory, they are connecting cultures.
It's been over a year since my stint at Pitzer; I am now making a new home in the mountains of North Carolina. In that time RIVENDELL has become, in the words of a correspondent, a series of excursions into a strange city led by Virgilian guides. May this issue bring you to new places; and may these places connect you more deeply with your own. Thank you, guides.
Sebastian MatthewsAsheville, NC
October 15, 2001
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