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Another Life in Public

Salvage some scrap-wood boards from the custom cabinetry workshop in the Fan. Fill as many in your courier bag as your back can handle. Get back on your bike and be grateful the ride home is a gentle downhill descent. Unlock the shed in the backyard. Pull the boards out and line them up. Marvel at the beauty and inspiration of the blank slates staring back at you. Thumb through the folders until you find the one that says “LL Cool Mustache.” Pick out some pattern stencils too. Pick out your colors from milk crates stocked with spray paint.

Larry Levis, this is one way I know you. You are a crude, one color, stencil portrait I made in haste after reading Elegy again late one night. You deserved grayscale, a skillful, multilayered stencil reflecting the depth of your poems. I lacked the patience and skill that night. Instead, I was consumed with feverish urgency. I had spread your poems beyond the bookshelves. They had to live another life in public.

I cut two stencils freehand. First, “Winter” from Wrecking Crew. Economical in language (read: shortest poem in the book). I finished it the same night I made your portrait. I wanted something to put out quickly, even if I still don’t quite understand the poem to this day.

Next, I wanted something more reflective of your style. I kept coming back to one of my favorite poems. Oftentimes I would find myself muttering, “big deal” when I was getting wound up about something. It helped give me perspective, to zoom out and see the bigger picture. The sun always comes up. The mist always evaporates. It all goes on without you one day.

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I knew the “Boy in Video Arcade.” I grew up in California in the eighties. Too young to have pimples, still on my parents’ short leash, but I had an older brother. He would take me to the arcade and leave me unattended while he did mysterious, big brother things. Video arcades were where the long hairs smoked while tilting pinball machines. It was where the alienated commiserated, or just passed through to make a deal. You could hear kids learning how to swear, emphasizing God not damn it in the clumsiest way. I connected with that poem as a memory I could’ve had, if I was just a little bit older. If I had pimples and listened to Metallica instead of my brother’s U2 cassette tapes.

I spent weeks hunched over my desk, cutting tiny letters out until the X-Acto knife blades were as dull as my mind. But I could see the progress, the long form lines appearing in their own absence on the card stock. The painstaking, meditative practice of cutting stencils always put me in an odd place. It was a place of mild suffering for the mild accomplishment of finishing something that would last for a little while. I operated in that space quite well. Every time I used a stencil, it came closer to its end. They get more brittle. They get heavy with layers of spray paint and break. There was some comfort in that. These things have a life and a death and were never to be repeated. I liked watching the art I put up deteriorate.

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The nom de guerre I chose, Larry Lorca, was a nod to my favorite poets at the time. Larry Levis, of course, and Federico García Lorca por supuesto. It was a nod to my Spanish heritage and my American birthplace. I lived in Andalusia for a year and a half and felt very much trapped in between these two places. I wanted the best of both worlds, but couldn’t have both.

I eventually settled back in Richmond, inspired by the street art I saw in Spain. It was not uncommon to see people writing on the walls in Spain. Visual resistance was normalized stretching back to the Franco dictatorship. People were used to seeing representation of points of view oppressed by the fascist government. They were also very accustomed to seeing professions of teenage love and adult heartbreak scribbled on walls. I dreamed of seeing people in the United States simply not have a brain hemorrhage because someone wrote something semipermanent on a public wall. That anyone with an idea and some paint could be heard. But we have to start where we are at, not where we want to be. So I bolted these boards up all around town to warm people up to the idea of unpermitted expression. It wasn’t hurting anyone’s (gasp!) private property. It was truly a victimless crime. The city of Richmond, at one point, did take the boards down, but it was evident that they deprioritized them at some point. Some stayed up for years.

~

I attempted to share just a little bit of some with anyone that would stop and read your poems I bolted onto street signs. At best, a shared epiphany between the person willing to stop and read your poem and myself, the artist. At worst, one less advertisement polluting the visual cityscape.

There isn’t a time in history that has needed more advertisements than poems in the streets. So, to stem the tide, I put these poems up on street signs. Futile, I know, but I felt one less visual image that was not trying to sell you something was a victory, no matter how small.

It’s a hack bit, but it’s true: the streets need poetry. We have enough advertising. We have enough cookie-cutter condos and constant reminders which university campus we are walking through. Spontaneity and surprise are at a premium these days. Think of all the things you saw on your phone before seeing them in real life. These moments of genuine surprise are what spark my imagination.  

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   Contributor’s notes

   Levis Remembered 

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