Laurel Ann Bogen: An Interview

by

Daniel M. Jaffe    

Laurel Ann Bogen has authored ten books of poetry and short fiction including Washing a Language; The Last Girl in the Land of the Butterflies; Do Iguanas Dance, Under the Moonlight?; and Burning New and Selected Poems, 1970-1990.  Her work has appeared in over 100 literary magazines and anthologies such as California Poetry From The Gold Rush to the Present, The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, Pearl, Yellow Silk, Los Angeles Times and Chiron Review.  Also, she has been awarded the Curtis Zahn Poetry Prize from the Pacificus Foundation and two awards from the Academy of American Poets.

Laurel Ann started writing poetry as a freshman at USC in 1967.  “I was 17,” she recalls, “and filled with teenage angst, away from my parents who had a tight leash on me, and completely unprepared for the counterculture/anti-war universe into which I was suddenly thrust. I didn’t know what I thought about anything. As a child/adolescent I was not allowed to speak. I know that sounds weird, but in my family, ‘children were to be seen and not heard,’ and if I was too visible I might be the target of some of the violence that would probably be now called abuse. I had attended a rigorous college prep high school—Marlborough School for Girls—and had studied and been enthralled with T.S. Eliot and e.e. cummings. Shortly after I started at USC Sylvia Plath's posthumous novel, The Bell Jar, was published. I started writing poetry to figure out who I might be. I didn’t know what I thought inside my brain, and I wrote to discover who I was. I probably would have stopped, but at the end of my freshman year I won the Academy of American Poets (college) award at USC. This poetry stew fermented, I think, perhaps out of default as much as anything else. As a silly 17-year-old, I might have been as happy being a cheerleader, but because I was plain, kinda nerdy, and the most romantic scenario I could envision for myself was being a Famous Los Angeles Poet. Which—to digress for a bit—is a slogan I wrote across a t-shirt I used to wear to make fun of myself and my pretensions in the early-to-mid 1970s. The thing that happened though is that people believed me and started referring to me as such.”

A look at some of Laurel Ann’s poems published online reveals her skill in conveying rich emotion without a hint of sentimentality. “Imprint, May 1970” feels like an elegy to the student protesters against the Vietnam War; “The Witness Tree” bears a restrained mournful quality; and “The Nameless Poem” conveys a mix of sadness and anxiety. When writing these and other poems, I wondered, does Laurel Ann start with a mood or a subject?  How do mood and subject find each other? “For me,” she answered, “the bane of my existence is to be considered ‘self indulgent.’ I’d rather cut off my arm than be thought so. In poetry, I am able to explore the emotion surrounding events or ideas more easily than just thinking, which tends to make me very anxious. The discipline of writing focuses my attention in a way that gives that emotion structure so that I can deal with it.”
 
Laurel Ann wrote “Imprint, May 1970” at a time “when I was very discouraged about how our country was turning out and very disappointed in our younger generation that seemed to be dropping the ball. Having been a college student during the Vietnam years and an active member of the counterculture, I found all that idealism and passion we felt had gone nowhere turned into rampant materialism.”

Readers might notice religious motifs and imagery in some of Laurel Ann’s poems—e.g., “Hope Leaps From Her Chair,” and “The Last Girl in the Land of the Butterflies” (both here). “I have little formal religious training,” said Laurel Ann. “My father was Jewish; my mother was a practitioner of the Church of Religious Science, whose founder, Ernest Holmes, baptized me when I was a baby. We were a rag tag lot when it came to religion—the only time I went to church was on Easter. I guess I’d say I was a secular Christian . . . I mean I celebrate Christmas, so that counts?”

Another characteristic of Laurel Ann’s work is its sensual vividness, e.g., “Hollywood Hills Noir.” To what  extent do sensory images, particularly sound textures, strike Laurel Ann automatically as she writes, and to what extent does she find herself searching for them?  “I’m a woman with many strange talents,” she explained, “. . . one of which is that I can remember lyrics to songs after hearing them once or twice.  And music has always been an important part of my life. As a Baby Poet, I aspired to be a poetic version of Joni Mitchell, who greatly influenced my early development as an artist. I also had been a painter early on in my life. In fact, I had hoped to get a degree in Fine Art, but my parents nixed that idea saying that there was no  money in art—so I became a poet, where the real money is! But back to the question at hand, I’m not sure how to answer that. Part of my process includes a certain amount of creative hocus pocus if you will.  If I were to have a formula of how to write poetry, I’m sure both I and my readers would suffer. I just know that I let my mind go blank and try to see what image comes up and where it takes me.”

How does a poet support herself financially? Laurel Ann offered a candid reply: “When asked, I call myself a ‘working poet.’ I returned to graduate school 30 years after receiving my BA from USC because it felt like all the jobs had dried up.  Not that it did much good. I’m sort of out of the mainstream in terms of lifestyle, I guess. I’ve done all sorts of things while trying to make a living as a poet—sold greeting cards door to door, worked at the William Morris Agency, the Herald-Examiner newspaper, made tacos in the Farmer’s Market, worked in a variety of bookstores. One of the talents I perfected at the time was being able to write poetry during my lunch period. As for my current ‘job’, I have started my own company—Baubles by Laurel Ann Bogen—and design and create one-of-a-kind handmade jewelry .

In addition, Laurel Ann teaches in the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program and served, from 1996 to 2002, as literary curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.  While there, she “coordinated the Writers In Focus Poetry Series—a monthly reading series, wrote press releases, did fundraising for the series, hosted the events. It was a wonderful experience because I felt I could give back to the poets of Los Angeles some measure of the gratitude I felt for them.”

When not struggling to pay the rent, writing poetry and seeking publication, Laurel Ann creates her art through a poetry performance troupe, Nearly Fatal Women, that Laurel Ann co-founded with Suzanne Lummis and Linda Albertano. At an event sponsored by the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program, I attended one of their performances and found myself laughing loudly at the troupe’s deadpan deliveries, at the wit, insightfulness and social criticism.  Readers can hear a sampling of  their work here.    

The overall sensibility of the troupe’s art reminds me of the Absurdist theater so popular in the 1970s. Did Laurel Ann and her colleagues consciously look to that literature as an influence? As a general matter, to what extent is Laurel Ann, as poet, aware of cultural influences on her work?  
     
“Well,” she replied, “theater has always had a big influence on my artistic life. In the 1970s through mid-1980s I was a member of the groundbreaking seminal Company Theater in L.A., one of the first experimental theaters here, founded in 1967. I was not an actress, but I did everything else—sewed the costumes, built sets, ran the box office, wrote some plays. The Company was a surrogate family for me. My life was in upheaval—dare I say this?—and  had just gotten out of Camarillo State Hospital and needed something to give me a reason to keep on. I had attended many of their plays as an audience member and thought that if I could volunteer my time there, be around creative people it might help me feel better. It did, although mental illness is a problem I struggle with and which informs much of my work. In 1978, I founded (with p. schneidre) the Los Angeles Poetry Theater, an adjunct of the Company Theater. We produced a number of shows using poetry that revolved around a specific theme. For example, we had one show called ‘Live and Death Matters—Poetry Noir and Other Mysteries’, and we used detective poems, film noir poems, monster poems by such poets as Lawrence Raab, Sharon Olds, and Edward Field. Another show was ‘No Reservations—An Evening at the Sunset Palms Motel’ with actors breathing life into work by L.A. poets who had been published in that great literary magazine that Michael C Ford edited in the 1970s—poets like Wanda Coleman, Ron Koertge, Kate Braverman, John Harris and Harry Northup.

“I probably should mention that I spent some time in England in the late 1960s as an exchange student at Cambridge, and I would take the train to London whenever I could to see as much theater as I could cram into my weekends. As for the cultural influences on my work, I’m not exactly sure. My life is the influence on my work . . . everything I’ve experienced, read, felt, dreamt, the whole ball of wax is the influence.”


Dan is the author of The Limits of Pleasure, a rather controversial novel nominated by some for awards and by others for public burning (well, almost).  A former corporate lawyer, he shed his suits to become a rebel with a cause—creative freedom in life and art. Dan frequently publishes short stories and personal essays in literary journals and newspapers such as The Forward, Green Mountains Review and The Florida Review. He compiled and edited With Signs and Wonders: An International Anthology of Jewish Fabulist Fiction, and translated Here Comes the Messiah!, a Russian-Israeli novel by Dina Rubina. He also teaches fiction writing for UCLA Extension. Dan can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it and his web site is here.