NS You
recently put together an extensive series on noir called “Night in the City,” that took place at over a dozen locations spread
throughout Los Angeles within a week. It must have been a tremendous amount of
work to organize.
SL As
far as I can tell, everything is a lot of work. If I were trying to make a
small farm become self-sustaining, it would be a lot of work. If I wanted to
enter politics as a congresswoman, that would be a lot of work. If I had
invented something and I were trying to get a patent for it . . . so,
everything is a lot of work. I’m not feeling sorry for myself in that respect.
The thing about poetry is that unlike many other endeavors, the stakes are very
low…The remuneration isn’t very good, unless you get to the superstar level,
and start receiving those ten, twenty, hundred thousand dollar grants that go
to a small elect group of people. Also, the recognition compared to celebrity
fame is very small. Its just a little group of people across the country, a
little echelon of people who might know your work and know who you are. But on
the other hand if you’re aspiring to write something so good that it endures
for a very very very long time -- maybe one “very” is good enough. Maybe it
doesn’t need any “very”. Let’s just say you want to write something that
endures for a long time, something that will outlast the fame of Kim Kardashian
or Snooki. Is that her name, Snooki? Then poetry has its possibilities.
NS I’d
like to talk about what you’ve been doing the last several years, but I’m
wondering if we could move in chronological order. Charles Webb suggested
exploring your early life, particularly the influence of your parents.
SL Yes,
my parents were very interesting.
NS How
they’ve affected your life choices, your direction
SL My
father was a very adventurous man, a great lover of beauty and all of its forms
in nature and art and women. My mother also a great appreciator of the arts,
always fascinated that I wanted to write, and it was something I feel that in a
way that she always wanted to do, and that it seemed to be working itself out
in this generation.
My father and mother, Keith Lummis and, back then, Hazel
McCausland met in the US Secret Service. My father was a Secret Service agent,
under the Treasury Department, so his job concerned crimes against the federal
government, and smuggling and counterfeiting. My mother was the third woman to be hired in the Secret
Service office after WWII when all the men went overseas and they started
giving women these jobs that opened up. The job description back in those days
was “secretary,” but she once remarked to me – “the truth is Lois and Diane and
I ran that office”.
When Keith – all his children called him “Keith” because he
always he felt the word “daddy” sounded silly, “Dad” too glib, and “Father” too
grave and formal – when Keith first set eyes on my mother he was still heart
broken after the death of his first wife several years before . He was
devastated -- it almost killed him. He was not interested in women for a while.
But, as he tells it, when he first walked into the Secret Service office and
saw my mother sitting at the front desk, the thought went through his mind -- I wonder if that will be the girl that I’ll
marry. Later, he couldn’t explain to himself why he had that thought
because he didn’t think she was a beauty, that she was some lush babe.
They dated for a long time. My mother did not particularly want to get married,
ever—that was highly unusual in those days, almost unheard of. She wanted to be independent. And my
father really courted her, pursued her, worked to convince her. After both had died we found letters
going back and forth between them – my father persuading her, allaying her
doubts, telling her how much he loved her. My mother was afraid she wouldn’t be
a good wife and mother. In fact she proved to be wonderful in both areas. Once
she committed she gave it a hundred and ten percent – she put others happiness
before her own, sometimes too much.
But thank goodness my father was a persuasive and eloquent letter writer
or I would not be sitting here today with you. You’d be in some other coffee
house interviewing a different writer.
Click below for the rest of the interview.....
Click below for the rest of the interview.....
NS From
what you’ve said, your mother encouraged you to write?
SL Certainly
she was quite interested in my writing, so was Keith. What they wanted most for
me though -- and I was never able to really calm their deep concerns regarding
this, or my own deep concerns -- was security. And their questions tended to
concern, how are you going to pay your rent, where is your salary coming
from? They would have been proud
of me if I’d just worked in a shop.; they didn’t care if I made lots of money,
they just wanted me to make enough money. They had both lived through The
Depression and like everyone who survived the 30s had been deeply and
permanently instructed by the suffering they saw. Both of my parents had a job
through the depression, that is what they were like, and that they hung on but
they saw people who were ruined. Especially my mother – she came away with the
feeling that nothing was certain, that everything was temporary, that there
almost was no true security. When
I was a child I remember whenever a newspaper report indicated that stocks had
dropped a bit she’d say We’ve got to hang onto everything, we can’t overspend
-- there could be another depression. She wouldn’t say that to my father,
because he didn’t overspend. It was more likely to be a situation when I was
asking for money for Barbie doll clothes.
NS I
had the impression you were first into acting and then writing.
SL And
I am now again acting, oddly enough, in a new odd format which I’ll tell you
about in a moment. But yes, it was largely the acting prospect that drew me to
Los Angeles. That and the fact of I love the vastness of the city, the variety
of the city. Also, I was drawn to
the movies. In the 80s and 90 I did a fair amount of theatre as well as
writing… Right now I’m working
with a wonderfully idiosyncratic ensemble of actors in an outrageous, giddy,
over-the-top, YouTube series, written by a playwright, Justin Tanner, who’s
quite visible and successful in the L.A. theater world. Extremely prolific. You
can turn up his YouTube series by searching Ave
43 (Ave not Avenue) Justin Tanner,
and you’ll glimpse me in most episodes from Chapter Thirty on. Be aware that it’s got a kind of
pan-sexual sensibility, lots of supernatural goings-on – time-travel and
witchcraft (in Highland Park, L.A.!) and it’s darkly, hysterically comic. I’m using the word “hysterical” in the
Freudian sense; all these characters have gone off their rockers – if they were
ever on them to begin with. They
keep trying to murder each other. Justin writes and shoots these episodes to
resemble movie trailers – you only get the high points. I play this character
named Dahlia, whose a nice woman, or was, until she went to sleep in a room
that had been painted with an especially malevolent lead paint and woke up
crazy.
NS You
are able to stretch yourself as an actress?
SL Yes,
a lot of madcap things I’ve never had a chance to do in theater, because I
wasn’t cast in this sort of role – few people are. The last little scene he
gave me I found most intriguing because I don’t know why in the world I’m
stabbing this man. It’s a character my character is in I’m in love with – and
of course I’m insane, so that explains a lot. But it’s an interesting challenge for an actor – you’re
playing mostly the high points without the background and build-up, so you just
take the situation and do your best to make it truthful and convincing. And
funny, but the funniness kind of takes care of itself; it’s in the writing and
the absurd situations.
NS I’ve
gotten a lot already. I’m hoping the recorder works because I’d like to get
every word.
SL Well,
you know, if there is anything. But I noticed you have very good handwriting.
If there is any part of it you can’t read I’m sure I can fill it in, so you
don’t need to worry about it.
NS Is
there anything else you’d like to mention about the early days?
SL What
people must understand about me: I did not grow up in L.A. People keep assuming
– those who don’t know me too well -- I was born and raised in Los Angeles.
I’ve always been from Northern California. Never moved to Southern California
until I was right about 27. I grew up age, 6 – 14, in the Sierra Nevada
mountains at a ski lodge, The Clair Tappan, a Sierra Club Lodge about nine
miles from Truckee. So, back then,
being stuck in deep snow country far from the city, nothing was more thrilling
than visiting the big city was like a dream – and that would always have been
San Francisco, which seemed to have everything The mountains, on the other hand
were sparse. Every morning I’d look out the window and saw the same pine green
trees, brown bark and white, white white, or if it was spring and the snows
were melting, mud colors. Many
years later I decided that as a child I’d been color famished – not enough of
the red end of the spectrum, the plums, the fuchsias, magenta. Now, see these big Bakelite bangles?
I’ve got my color with me at all times. In the Bakelite lexicon, this is called
cherry, this is cinnamon, and – I guess I’d call this burnt umber.
I chose Los Angeles in part because I had the impression it
was the biggest city in the world. Later I realized there are bigger cities.
Had I known that before, who knows . . .? I might have gone to Bagdad.
NS As
you know, Bill Mohr’s book Hold-Outs
just came out. From his suggestions, I have some related questions. One is, how
do you feel you work, style or purpose in your work, is related to, and/or is
different from the Beat generations. For instance, Allen Ginsburg wrote that at
one point he decided he would write what he wanted to write without fear, let
his imagination go open, magic of lines for my real mind. The idea that freedom
is doing what makes you happy.
SL I’m
the diametric opposite. However, I respect Ginsburg. I think Ginsburg was
probably a very nice man. I kind of like that most about him – that he was a
nice man. We don’t put enough value on niceness anymore, but when you look at a
lot of prominent artists and poets, people in the arts, sometimes they’re
people of terrible character; they’re mean to their wives, they betray their
friends. But I haven’t heard many bad things about Ginsburg. But getting back
to your question, no, that Beat era, and that notion of “First thought, best
thought,” has no influence on my poetry because I was schooled in Fresno, under
Philip Levine, and the other two fine teachers there Chuck Hanzlicek and Peter
Everwine. Phil Levine, who as we
know is now Poet Laureate, demanded a lot of his students, not that he was a
task master. It’s that if you brought a poem in that just didn’t work from the
get-go, he wouldn’t let you walk out of that class thinking you’d written a
really good poem and all you had to do was drop two lines, revise two lines,
and switch two stanzas around and it’d be perfect. You walked out knowing you had to start all over again,
either scrap that poem and work on something else or make another start on that
subject, because this just was not it. Sometimes the experience was emotionally
tough, but you got the truth. I feel some creative writing classes are somewhat
deceptive, maybe because the teacher doesn’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings --
something like that. I had a student who went off, a student who had worked
with me a long time, I wrote her a strong reference letter and she got into an
MFA program. In fact I’m
constantly losing UCLA Extension students because I help them development
strong manuscripts, write them a reference, then when they get into a program
I’ve lost a student. I’m in danger of teaching myself out of a job. Anyway, she
wrote to me after she’d enrolled. She said, “I always remember what you taught
me, the poem has to be lively enough, vigorous and engaging enough that we want
to keep reading from beginning to end. In this workshop everybody is trying to
be so nice. They’re so worried about hurting anybody’s feelings. I feel a lot
of weak writing is slipping by, and no one’s addressing it, so how will anyone
get better?” But then she said “I remember what you taught me. I’m doing my
best to be completely honest in this class, telling people what I really see in
their work, the strengths but also the areas that need attention.” later she
wrote me saying the class had gotten better. “People,” she said, “ are starting
to be more honest. I hear your voice in my head all the time”.
Now I believe I got that largely from CSU Fresno. And the
teachers were the ones who held us to that standard. But it’s tough at the
beginning. Emotionally it’s tough.
NS Did
you ever consider quitting?
SL No,
I got very scared, but I never considered quitting. I think I wrote my first
not-too-bad poem, anyway a poem better than anything I had brought in so far,
after I got so terrified of writing another poem that failed that the fear
propelled me into writing better. Why not – poetry can come out of any sort of
emotion. I would’ve been 22 then.
Now, Ginsburg, the reason I say I’m temperamentally opposite
to him and the idea many of the Beats embraced -- First thought/best thought –
in other words, Whatever popped into your head first is the best it’s going to
be – is because I haven’t found that to be true. I’ve found that‘s just a way
to get around the hard revision work. Usually you must keep returning to the
poem. Every now and then I will get a series of lines that seem to come out of
an mysterious inspired place. When that happens I don’t mess much with those
lines, just tiny fixes, little adjustments. But often I go back to a first
draft and I think O.K., fine, but this needs to be much much better. Writers,
poets, say joke about this all the time, how the new poem, or prose piece, that
seemed so brilliant and luminous when you went to bed looks suddenly so dingy
in the a.m. light.
From that era the poem closest to my heart is Gregory
Corso’s—“Marriage”. Have you ever read this? A wonderful poem. It’s not a
“Great Poem,” but it’s immortal anyway, even without being Great. Fifty years
old and it’s as fresh as if it were written last week. It is not really a Beat poem but it’s
identified as such simply because Corso fell in among the Beats. Really it’s
closer to what Charles (Webb) and I call Stand-Up poetry, actually a precursor
to Stand Up poetry. The language is so funny and inventive, mischievous and
alive. Also, it captures what much of the country, the culture, looked like in
the late 50s, the choices that faced men and women. Around 1960, which I think is about the time “Marriage” got
into print, James Wright came out with “This Branch Will Not Break” – and that
also heralded a new approached to poetry, clear, directly spoken, unrhymed. But
in that age, Corso’s “Marriage” would probably have struck people as equally
surprising.
NS The
Noir Festival.
SL “Night
in the City”
NS You
organized a 25-event, city-wide series called…
SL “Night
and the City: L.A. Noir in Poetry, Fiction and Film”
NS Regarding
the work-load to do anything worthwhile it requires a tremendous amount of
work, but I’m curious, your turn out, because the events were spread out all
over, and how you decided to do the project, and the attendance.
SL Well,
one last thing about work—I’ve got no problem with working hard or being busy,
if I enjoy the work that is. What
I don’t like, what really gripes me, is working for gratis, for no pay. That’s
not okay. For Night in the City my only remuneration, from my own organization,
I’m the director – the Los Angeles Poetry Festival paid my health insurance,
for about six months. I told the board -- actually it’s the organizing
committee which functions like a board --I said, “If we want this to happen
you’d better keep me alive.” So it basically that just took one bill off my
back, that’s all. But because I had all these other medical bills that I was
paying, it didn’t actually raise my living standard in the least, because the
money I was saving on my health insurance I then used to pay exorbitant medical
bills for an overnight in the hospital last year. So it’s gotten… Well, any major festival or series of
events I organize in the future can’t be done on that basis, ever again. It’s unsustainable.
In terms of audience, certain ones drew especially well.
Almost all of them got decent audiences. “Alternative Noir- not your Grandma’s
Noir” (and then it, in parenthesis, says “but on the other hand, how much did
you really know about your grandma?) attracted a robust audience to Beyond
Baroque. That night featured great performance art, Linda Albertano, Philip
Littell, and a screening of several episodes of Justin Tanner’s Ave 43. Most in the audience didn’t know about
this aspect of my life, so my first appearance on screen drew quite a
reaction. That must be what they
mean when they say “a murmur ran through the crowd”.
And, let’s see, opening night, “Noir Immersion,” with Robert
Polito all the way from NYC attracted an amazing variety of poets, all dressed
noir. Never in its 40-year-history has Beyond Baroque looked so glamorous. The
PEN sponsored event at The Last Bookstore had a really nice turnout, and “Full
Moon Noir: The Lighter Side of Noir” filled up Avenue 50 Studio in Highland
Park. At The Japanese American Cultural Center, Alan Rode -- such a terrific,
warm guy -- introduced “The Crimson Kimono”. The audience included a number of elderly Japanese people
who’d heard about the film but never seen it. In the middle of the movie someone cried out “That’s Riku!
(Or something – a name I couldn’t catch.)
It turns out an old local character whom everyone knew had made a brief
non-credited appearance in the movie when it filmed in Little Tokyo back in the
late 50s.
Earlier that evening mystery series writer Naomi Hirahara
read, and I, and others presented the poetry of Carol Lem, who was too sick to
make her last reading. She died of
cancer about three months later – so this was the last reading of her poetry
while she still lived. - One of
several reasons I’m so glad I launched this noir series of events.
A number of events were filled to capacity – of course, in
most cases they weren’t huge venues. A couple or three should have gotten a lot
more people, and I think it’s ridiculous that they didn’t, and in fact I’m a
bit irritated. A scrumptious
event—food for the body and nutrients for the mind—took place on a Sunday a.m.,
the Noir Continental Breakfast with Eddie Muller. He’s founder and president of
Film Noir Foundation, Host of Noir City Film Festival in San Francisco, author
of Dark City, the lost world of film Noir. James Elroy’s called him “the Czar
of Noir”. And, really, who wouldn’t want to have a Sunday brunch in a lovely
historic venue with the Czar of Noir, especially when he’s so much warmer, more
generous and interesting than an actual Czar. I mean we had – I don’t
know—twenty-five people, and he was totally understanding and fully engaged. He told me he’s used to all sizes of
audiences. But we should’ve
had twice that.
I discovered that I really like the noir crowd. Noir may
mean “dark” but for the most part they’re really vibrant, the least gloomy
people, except for James Elroy. He’s, well… He’s got a darkness about him all
right. Of course in his presentation, his act, the show he puts on, he goes on
attack mode – faux attack. Then
outside his act he has a guarded, blunt, rather anti-social quality. But his
mother was horribly murdered, so – that explains a lot. Or, who knows, maybe
he’d be that way anyway.
The two panel discussions – with noted authors and crime
writers who’ve never spoken at Beyond Baroque – they drew O.K. audiences,
solid. And I was grateful to, and delighted to see, the folks, poets and
regular folks, who did come--but I noticed that quite a few poets who’d been
scheduled to read at events, were actually a part of Night and the City, didn’t
bother. And these panels explored the meaning of Noir and its particular connection
to Los Angeles. That struck me.
That’s a barometer of sorts. A few poets didn’t come to any event they weren’t
scheduled to read in.
You know I tend to champion Los Angeles poetry, but
sometimes I don’t just want to be a booster. Sometimes I want to talk about
what’s absent, what’s wrong and what’s missing. And I feel that that we’re
probably running behind, for example, New York City in terms of intellectual
curiosity. Now I may go to New York City and be utterly disappointed, I don’t
know, maybe I’m idealizing that place -- I’m imagining first-rate intellectuals
pouring through the streets. O.K.,
I’m not imaging that—I’ve seen Scorsese movies. But the New York Times can
sustain its pull-out book review section, whereas Los Angeles let its book
review section die, because the readers didn’t support it. The L.A. Times’ market research
repeatedly showed that it was the least popular section. And sometimes Los Angeles poets didn’t
even read it. So—I mean, what’s
with that? I got kind of vexed at
a couple people, two or three. I
said,’ O.K., when you have a book come out don’t complain if there’s no place
for it to be reviewed, because we’re lucky enough to have one of just three
pull-out newspaper book review sections in the country and you don’t support
it.’ Now, though, I think it’s
down to one.
NS How
did you get all these people on board for the Noir series?
SL For
those I didn’t know personally: Facebook.. That turned out to be a great gift
to me even after I resisted it for so long and swore I’d never sign up. I’d be
the last person on earth not on Facebook – that was my goal. I felt that being
on Facebook would expose me in some way, but now I’ve discovered how, oh gosh,
I can control it! I wish I could control and design my whole life the way that
I can manage my Facebook page. Strange, this was one twist of fate that worked
in my favor. (Numerous twists of fate have not worked in my favor.) Cece Peri,
my long time student and friend who’s been a valuable assistant to me, was
setting up a Facebook page for “A Night in the City”. Because she’d never done this before it defaulted, took my
information that she’d put in, and instead of creating a page for L.A. Noir it
created a page for me.
Suddenly I started getting email requests -- it uses your
email. Friend requests. People from all over emailing me wanting to be my
friend! I was horrified. Then I went around to my newly created page and
thought, well, I can’t have this page with my name on it no friends. That looks
pathetic. So I went— okay, I’ve got to make this work for me. I’ve got to
create a page that really expresses my sensibility and is not pathetic. At that
time I didn’t realize I could delete it; I thought I was trapped. I built up a
sizeable list of friends fairly quickly then I started to play around -- who
can I find? I began to search out various names in the literary noir world and
discovered I could reach them, and quickly. That was a revelation. Before, if
you wanted to reach an author you didn’t know you’d have to write their publisher,
or find someone who knows them. But I went, wait a minute! I can send messages
to all these noir writers.
I contacted Gary Phillips, Judith Freeman, Dick Lochte and
others via FB. But not Robert Polito, author of various books and noir
explorations, and director of the Creative Writing Department at New York
City’s New School. That came about in a different way. Cece was heading to New
York, and I said, half kidding, “See if you can meet Robert Polito—I’d love for
him to headline in the Noir series”.
Two days later the phone rings, “Suzanne, I’m in New York. I’m just
about to meet Robert Polito.” By
pure chance—another instance where the dice fell in our favor—Robert Polito had
organized an in-house noir festival at The New School just at that time. Cece spotted it in the paper, noticed
RP would be introducing a speaker, and had gone straight there. Now, at the end of the event, she was
about to approach him. She wanted
to know what to say. I said “Tell
him what we aspire to do, a multi-event noir series of readings and
performances, film showings. Ask
him if he might want to come to L.A. to headline an event. Tell him we’d love to have him. Ask him if he’s expensive.”
All went well. That marked the beginning actually—he was the
first notable person we scheduled.
He got eleven hundred dollars, and was the only person who really got
paid—‘cause we had no funding and had simply broken open a long-standing CD.
When Cece returned she told me that he’d responded warmly to the possibility. Then I wanted to know if he seemed nice. Many years back we, The Los Angeles Poetry Festival, brought in an out-of-town poet in who turned out to be a nightmare. A crazy person. A crazy, crazy, insane person. Later we learned many people knew this person was insane and we were among the last to find out what was already fairly common knowledge—in some parts of the country at least. So now, when I consider bringing in a poet I don’t personally know, I ask around to determine that they’re nice and not insane.
When Cece returned she told me that he’d responded warmly to the possibility. Then I wanted to know if he seemed nice. Many years back we, The Los Angeles Poetry Festival, brought in an out-of-town poet in who turned out to be a nightmare. A crazy person. A crazy, crazy, insane person. Later we learned many people knew this person was insane and we were among the last to find out what was already fairly common knowledge—in some parts of the country at least. So now, when I consider bringing in a poet I don’t personally know, I ask around to determine that they’re nice and not insane.
Cece said—yes, he’s really very nice. And I said—then I’m going try to make
this happen.
Are there any poems that you liked in In Danger?
NS “Femme
Fatal”. I love it, and I’ve underlined different things that I love especially.
I guess you come across really strong on your endings, besides the rest of the
poems. “Even now you’re beginning to/ Even now you’re in danger.”
SL I
always say to my students: There’s nothing, nothing,
that will be as important in the poem as the end. Except for the beginning. And
the middle. But the end is big. The end is very
big.
NS You
have to get there.
SL That’s
right. And regarding “Femme Fatale,” a woman friend once made a point to me I
thought was very shrewd. She said what interested her is that various poems in
the book pertain to danger, my facing danger, earthquakes, assault, crime,
emotional danger, economic peril,
dangerous men. And this friend said, but you know what’s interesting? The title
of the collection comes from a closing line in a poem which describes danger to
a man. It warns the man, “Even now you’re in danger.”
I found that a compelling observation. The man is in danger
from the woman who is herself perpetually in danger, right? People who are in
danger can become a danger to somebody else. That’s interesting—to me
anyway.
NS In
one of your poems, the one about the fish that you take to Laguna Beach…
SL That
is an old poem. That is a very old old old poem.
NS Well,
I like that poem, but in it you say that you clamber from the sea as a woman.
SL How
does that poem go? I haven’t read
that poem for so long. At the time I wrote it I felt it took my writing to
another level. But I’ve gone to many other levels since then, so I never read
it anymore.
NS “Fish
I Remember”
SL Yeah
(reads from the NS’s copy of Stand Up
Poetry), “I had to clamber from the sea as a woman, not a new thing, drive
home through the gritty air, not step from this earth and soar.” Yeah, that
comes up in my poetry. If you’d asked me, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you
how this poem ends. I didn’t remember that, but, boy, that recurs in my
poetry--that inability, that desire not only for transcendence, but for
exultation. I find—I don’t know about you—but I find transcendence and
exultation hard to come by. What about you? Is it easy to come by for you? (NS
answers) O.K., then I’m not alone. Here it is again, “Your heart in your mouth,
for an instant you were precious metal, a star, you were manna falling from
heaven, you were like the life that burst into mysterious splendor long ago from
the sea.” Ah yeah, that’s Lummisian, I have to say, which is a term coined by
the fellow who produced my first plays—Ted Schmidt was his name. We were
sitting around at The Cast Theater and few people started wondering, “How do we
define Suzanne Lummis’ style? She has a voice, she has a quality, a certain mix
of edginess and humor, absurdity and gravity...” They starting trying to come
up with a term. And Ted Schmidt said, “I know what it is, it’s Lummisian.”
An excerpt of this interview is featured in RipRap Journal #34.
Nicole Martine Street obtained her MFA from CSULB, where she founded HipPoetics – Creative Writing Club, was awarded the William T. Shadden Memorial Scholarship for poetry, and taught poetry as an Associate. Her poems have appeared in Prospective Journal, Carnival Lit Mag, Bank-Heavy Press, CSULA’s Significations, and Pigeon Words among others.
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