No post for over a month, but a good half-dozen have been kicking around in my head.  Just no time with the holidays and other good things.  But with the new year comes the calm of winter, our slowest season at Rattle, so maybe I’ll have time to catch up.

Two weeks ago I stubbed my toe really bad, and the nail finally fell off today.  Later that afternoon, I did a poetry reading at the Baines’ house, in Azusa, CA.  Los Angeles has a ridiculous number of venues that feature poetry (and I mean ridiculous).  As with all things, I blame Bukowski — the one unique aspect about the LA poetry scene, I think, is that it’s cool to be underground, to be a creature of the night in your little corner of this big conglomerate rock of a city.  And that actually is cool.  If you really love poetry, you could hear it performed here twice a day at least, nearly  365 days a year.

But with all the venues, all the low-brow open-mics and high-brow stuffy-types, nothing tops the Baines’ house.  There it sits, unassuming, at 10 o’clock on the cul de sac.  Could be any house, any of the hundred thousand you pass on the way, and that’s what’s so great about it.  Anyone could clear out their living room, set out chairs, tape up flyers.  Anyone could open their doors to friends and neighbors once a month, invite artists to come and share their work.  Anyone could do it — but Joanne and Ed Baines actually do.

They call it the PondWater Society, named for the swimming pool out back, long ago filled with fishes and flora in favor of chlorine.  The series only started in October, but they’re already booked through June.  Much of LA’s new literary guard, many of them on the Red Hen label (you can read the list yourself) are on the schedule.

My reading took place in the middle of a rare SoCal downpour, but the room was still full, and there was plenty of merry mingling beforehand.  I got to talk to sister Terri about her stained glass, and mother Jeanette marrying a sailor.  Neighbor John brought a handmade floral arrangement for the raffle, and two newcomers from down the block brought each other — Teresa and Spencer, an engineer who builds custom car accessories in his garage…I wish I could find his website to link to.

It’s just such an eclectic mix of people, such a contrast to the regular poetry crowd, their interest so casual and genuine.  It gave me hope for the future of literature, which, like the future of all things, is going to be found in the unique niche, in the personal and quirky and selfless and free.

Last night I saw some commercial for Sears that mentioned at the end their Twitter page, and I wondered, “Who the hell would want to follow Sears?”  So I went there, and sure enough, 3,000 tweets, but less than 2,000 followers, despite the kind of massive exposure and brand-recognition that a blogger can’t imagine.  The show I was watching wasn’t even primetime, and still, at least a half-million people saw that commercial.  And no one cares about their corporate Twitter.  What is Sears going to say that might be interesting?  “Check out the lucky winners of the Sears shopping spree with Selena Gomez!”

I looked up other retailers, car companies, product lines — none of them can compete with the grassroots of personality.  The “dlisted” twitter account has half the followers of Sears, without ever posting anything, just because it uses the handle of the popular blogger, and people mistakenly think it might be him.  And if Michael K really did have a Twitter, it would be hilarious, and genuine, and the opposite of everything that a big corporation is.

In the new world, it’s going to be the PondWater that thrives — the small presses and open sources, the regular people doing good for the sake of good, just having fun for the hell of it.  When I need to look something up, I use Wikipedia.  When I need computer virus protection, I use AVG-Free.  I type this up on Open Office, and paste it into WordPress.  All these things are PondWater.  Real people doing stuff for the reward of stuff itself.  Life for its own sake — that’s PondWater.

And Rattle is PondWater — Alan Fox founded Rattle 16 years ago because he thought, why the hell not?  Why should I go somewhere else to read poetry, when I can do it just as well myself, and make it the way I want it to be?  That’s the PondWater spirit, and that’s what matters to me.  Other editors, tied to universities, have ten times the budget to work with that I do.  Virginia Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, the Kenyon Review, Agni.  Great magazines, and I could never really get a job there — but I wouldn’t want to even if I could.  Give me grassroots, not Goliath.  Give me the Baines’ house, not the Geffen theater.  I’ll always work for PondWater.