Cover Story : Poetic License : Beyond Baroque center in Venice has helped nurture and launch the careers of aspiring writers. More than two decades later, the avant-garde still reigns.

By PENELOPE MOFFET

May 1, 1994 12 AM PT

In the late 1970s, when poet Amy Gerstler began attending events at Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center in Venice, she had never spent much time with other writers.

That soon changed.

“It had a real impact on my work habits,” said Gerstler, 37, who lives in Echo Park. “I felt less alone, less like I was working in a vacuum. It made me work a little harder.”

She has published 10 books, eight of them collections of poems. Her 1990 book “Bitter Angel” won the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry; her most recent poetry collection, “Nervestorm,” was published by Viking/Penguin.

Gerstler is one of a number of artists who went on to gain literary recognition after honing their craft at Beyond Baroque, a quirky writing center in an old Venice building where the avant-garde reigns.

The 26-year-old nonprofit arts center, familiar to writers around the country yet unknown to many Angelenos, offers budding writers a place to read their unconventional works, hear criticism and find coaching and other support.

It’s home to the longest- running free poetry workshop in Los Angeles, and on weekends presents poetry readings and performance arts events.

Lodged in the former Venice City Hall, a two-story 1907 building with a bell tower and a sloping roof beloved by pigeons, Beyond Baroque has hosted an extraordinary range of radical and conventional writers.

Dennis Cooper, known for his writings on young gay males, has passed through Beyond Baroque’s doors. So has Bob Flanagan, who used the center to fine-tune his poetry and performance art on masochism. And the late Raymond Carver, whose works are relatively more mainstream, has read there too.

Beyond Baroque is “the leading literary organization in the city,” said Adolfo V. Nodal, general manager of the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department.

“I don’t know of anything in the country like Beyond Baroque,” Nodal said. “It’s really a unique organization, devoted to the writer and run by writers.”

Begun in 1968 by George Drury Smith as a literary magazine, Beyond Baroque evolved within a year into a workshop and performance art venue on what is now Abbot Kinney Boulevard. A writer and publisher, Smith wanted to provide local poets an informal place to meet and discuss their work. Beyond Baroque incorporated in 1972 and a few years later moved to its current location on Venice Boulevard.

Smith, who runs a small newspaper in Playa del Rey, has always been a key donor to Beyond Baroque, but has let others run it. When it incorporated, he served on the board of directors until last year, retiring to become an adviser.

Today, the center is run by Tosh Berman, a puckish 39-year-old who had run Beyond Baroque’s film series for five years before assuming his new post. He is a poet and the son of the late Wallace Berman, a seminal Los Angeles artist of the 1950s and ‘60s.

He oversees four employees plus volunteers--the center has always had spartan staffing--and plans to make sure Beyond Baroque always will sponsor “things that are maybe not totally popular, but really interesting.”

The interior of Beyond Baroque is bare-bones. In the main performance space, rows of metal chairs (half of them with cushions) are set out before readings. A short, creaky platform at the front of the room serves as a stage.

The walls and floor are black, and black shades are pulled down over the windows facing the street. A red velvet curtain behind the stage provides a splash of color.

The fare at Friday night readings can range from Los Angeles literary couple Holly Prado and Harry Northup reading recent poems, to Flanagan performing his “super-masochist” poetry and performance art to nationally known poets as Jerome Rothenberg and David Antin.

On a recent night, before an audience of 30--roughly the average--writer Jamake Highwater read from his recently published novel “Dark Legend” and talked about how mythologist Joseph Campbell influenced his writing.

Speaking on how hard it is to describe a dream to someone else, Highwater told the audience: “This language upon which we depend is not capable of expressing our experiences. And so what most of us do is change the experience so we can talk about it. What artists do is change the language rather than changing the dream.”

Afterward, Shana Olson, a West Los Angeles poet, and Ellyn Maybe, a Venice writer, spoke about what they get out of Beyond Baroque.

“This is more the space for the hard-core intellectual than the scene-maker,” said Olson, who attends readings at many Los Angeles venues.

Olson heard about Beyond Baroque while a student at Columbia University in New York. A Los Angeles resident since 1982, she likes the literary center because “it’s not attached to the movie industry; it’s real pure.”

Maybe she appreciates Beyond Baroque’s mixture of performances, art shows and unusual books for sale.

“What makes it neat is it has it all in one. It’s like an island, with everything under one kind of odd chippy roof,” Maybe said.

Although a wide range of writers read at Beyond Baroque, it has become known for showcasing avant-garde scribes.

Nodal of the Cultural Affairs Department said that the organization has “supported writers no one else in the city would support” because their work, often written in experimental forms, addresses thorny issues.

“Over the last five years, many groups like Beyond Baroque (have been) subjected to silencing through the shrinking economy,” said Nodal, whose department gives the group $15,000 to $25,000 annually. “It was called censorship a couple of years ago; now it’s called economic restructuring. Many small presses and literary groups have suffered greatly. It’s doubly important for us to finance these institutions.”

For those who organize the readings, the more unconventional they are, the better.

“I like the meaner writers: people who are willing to go out on a limb and be monsters, kind of lose it on the page,” said former readings series director Benjamin Weissman, whose first book of stories, “Dear Dead Person,” will be published by Serpent’s Tail Press in June.

Flanagan, a director of Beyond Baroque’s long-running Wednesday night poetry workshop, credits the group with helping him to develop his own writing during the 18 years he has been with the center.

It “turned my life around. I came from knowing nothing about poetry at all--from writing awful rhyming stuff--to poetry as a life style. It was an incredible learning experience,” said Flanagan, 41.

Many writers have participated in a key program at the organization: the workshops where poets gather to critique each others’ work.

One recent Wednesday, 17 writers gathered to read short pieces and hear the verdict of their peers. In two hours, six pieces were read and dissected.

After a young woman read the evening’s first poem, Ocean Park writer Frances Dean Smith, 71, who has attended the workshop for more than two decades, praised a few phrases but said of the overall piece, “I can’t think of a good reason why I don’t like it, but I don’t.”

Others suggested some word changes.

Dafydd McKahray, 23, of Hollywood, shared a darkly funny, poignant excerpt from a work in progress about social interactions between retarded adults and others.

A few days later, McKahray said, he had already incorporated some of the workshop suggestions into his writing.

McKahray has been a Beyond Baroque regular for two years since moving to Los Angeles from New York City. He seldom misses a Wednesday and often attends the weekend public readings, even though he’s working two jobs and attending night school at Santa Monica Community College.

“What I get out of the workshop are these simple fine-tuning kinds of things,” McKahray said. “The people try to edit as if they were me writing. They’re right maybe nine times out of 10.”

Behind the scenes, Beyond Baroque has not been beyond turmoil. Administrative problems in recent years have prompted much soul-searching.

The most extreme of the problems resulted in last year’s firing of D. B. Finnegan, who had been executive director for five years, and the hiring of Berman.

The struggles, according to several insiders, resulted from long-running personality conflicts among the staff. Last year, at one point Weissman was fired, several staff members speeded up already planned departures and others quit.

The crisis spurred Beyond Baroque into a prolonged self-examination. Ultimately, Weissman was temporarily rehired and several new staff members were brought in.

Berman has sought to shore up the literary center’s $200,000 annual budget. Beyond Baroque occupies the old City Hall, owned by the city of Los Angeles, rent free in exchange for keeping up the property. Grants from government agencies and corporate and private foundations, plus individual donations and admission fees, generally $6, cover performers’ fees and the salaries of the three full-time and one part-time staff members.

Still, there’s no money for such basic repairs as replacing letters that have fallen off the front of the building or fixing malfunctioning toilets in the women’s room. (“There are no fix-the-toilet grants,” Berman quipped.)

In the past, the organization published literary magazines and managed a small press library, but the magazines ran out of money and the library is in storage due to lack of demand, Berman said.

While Beyond Baroque wins much praise from those who know it, sometimes the organization is criticized for being cliquish and insufficiently multicultural.

Michelle T. Clinton, a Santa Monica poet whose second book, “Good Sense & the Faithless,” has just been published by West End Press, said some longtime Los Angeles poets have never read at Beyond Baroque--and harbor resentment about that.

Clinton, along with poet Akilah Nayo Oliver, in early 1991 initiated multicultural writing workshops, funded by a California Arts Council grant. But she stopped working with Beyond Baroque last June due to health problems. The workshop ended as well because funding ran out.

Now, with no Beyond Baroque programming specifically for minority writers, Clinton worries that “when they don’t set aside the time for multiculturalism, it will evaporate.”

She and others also are concerned about the organization’s movement toward more performance-oriented events.

“Poetry should remain minimalist: language and a writer and an audience,” Clinton said. “There are so many venues for performance. I’d like Beyond Baroque to make more of a commitment to pure poetry readings. That’s what I need, and that’s what the L.A. literary community needs.”

For his part, Berman said he likes to mix genres, to put different elements together “like chemistry, and hopefully something will happen.”

Berman wants the literary center to become a place that welcomes a wider variety of writers.

With the new Saturday lecture series, Berman said: “I’m interested in getting people from the academic world and sort of bringing them down to the street level, or to our audience.”

On the Cover

Joseph Goodrich, with large cup of coffee on hand, reads his poems at Beyond Baroque in Venice, one of Los Angeles’ leading writing centers. Beyond Baroque, on a meager budget and staff, has cultivated avant-garde poets and artists for 26 years. Based in a 1907 building, it has hosted both radical and more established writers.