Interviews with Luke Breit

Sacramento Magazine Interview

LUKE
BREIT

OCTOBER 1999

by ken august

On this day that the California State Legislature is out of session, Luke Breit -- like most who are working at the Capitol -- is dressed casually: black blazer, untucked white shirt, ripped blue jeans and sandals. Although he looks more poet than political mover and shaker, he's both. Breit serves as director of the legislative unit for the Speaker of the Assembly's Office of Member Services and president of the Sacramento Poetry Center. In addition, he has just published his fifth book of poetry, Unintended Lessons. After growing up in New York, Breit followed the migratory trail of the Beat poets to City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, where he had his first job. His travels later took him to Mendocino County, where he had a hand in running successful political campaigns until former Assembly Speaker Willie Brown brought Breit to the Capitol in 1981.

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How did your life as a writer begin?

I had a lot of writing in my background. My father was the assistant editor of the New York Times book review section, and my mother was the literary editor of Harper's Bazaar. Our house in New York was filled with people like Ernest Hemingway and Dylan Thomas and Norman Mailer, William Faulkner, James Agee. There was a lot of writing in my background, although I was resistant to it for a long time, sort of as a response to that. Then I found myself starting to write. I don't even know what got me there.

I had a great teacher in high school named Mr. Nicolosi. He had us read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce, and it was just awesome to me. As he began to show us the symbolism inherent in the book and how the whole opening paragraphs are the symbol of the artist's awakening senses the eyes open, the ears open, the olfactory senses, all in the context of this sort of fable, that was very heady to me as a young man. I began to hang out with a group of writers in New York. We were sort of halfway between Kerouac and the Beats, but also seeing that as too sort of anti-intellectual and being very attracted to Joyce, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and William Butler Yeats. It was sort of a mish-mash of interests but it brought me to a lot of writing and a lot of reading, which was very important in my development as a writer.

How does your life as a poet fit with your life in politics?

There are really two very important but very different aspects of my life. My poetic life is the life into which I go to nurture myself and to make myself whole. It's a healing process to write. But if I won the lottery or something like that, I would not leave the political arena. I love the political arena. It appeals to the chess-playing side of my nature, to the strategic and Machiavellian side of my nature. I love electoral politics. I love the mix of it and the intellectual wars that take place. It appeals to a different side of my nature. But my life would not be complete without either one of them. I wouldn't want to give either one of them up.

When you're in your late teens or early 20s you get into this fantasy about becoming the great poet of the 20th century, writing the great American novel, and I think over time those fantasies are mitigated by reality, by the limits of one's own talent and by the needs of one's life in terms of having to work and this and that. So something else awakens. For me, it was the growing realization that as much as I love to write, I also love to encourage writing and encourage writers. My love was really as much for the art as it was for my being a practitioner of it. So, that got me into teaching in California Poets in the Schools; it got me involved in the Sacramento Poetry Center, where I could use some of my other skills to help nurture writers, poetry.

Tell me about your friendship with Norman Mailer.

We go back a long ways. He was friends with my father when I was a kid. Then after my dad died, he made a couple of very personal gestures to me that one just doesn't forget over time. In that sort of distant way of living on opposite coasts, we've retained a really strong friendship. And he really is a great admirer of my work, for which I'm enormously grateful. It's a wonderful relationship. I think he gives me more than I give him, but I try to give him back what I can. I love him very much. He's a dear and sweet man. There's a poem for him in [the new book] on a horrible night when the TV news teased with a headline, "Famous author dies." It turns out it was James Michner.

Why do you write poetry?

When something comes out that works, it feels great. It's a wonderful experience. I think my gift as a poet is a limited gift, but it's a good gift. It's the gift of being able to take rather personal kinds of experiences and make them quite universal for people. One of the experiences that I have fairly often at readings is to have somebody come up to me after a reading and say, "I didn't know other people felt that way, too," or "I've never been able to articulate it and you've opened up that feeling for me." I love it when that happens. It's as nice as getting a good review someplace for a book, to have somebody who's not really that into poetry and is at his or her first or second reading and is moved by something you did and have it become a reflection on something important to her in her own life. It feels like a good thing to be able to do. I really believe that.

Unlike some contemporary poetry that seems intentionally obscure, yours is accessible and speaks to universal experiences.

I have the great advantage of not ever having had a college education [laughs], so I have to write fairly simple work. For me, the poetry that I love now as a grownup is poetry that is expressive and available and accessible. When I taught poetry in schools, I would try very hard to get the kids to not look at poetry the same way they would look at reading a novel. You don't have to understand every line literally.

Poetry is as different from prose as prose is from music. When you listen to music or look at a painting, you're not saying, "What does this brush stroke mean? Why did he put that color there?" You're taking the whole thing in and absorbing it, getting a feeling from it, understanding -- at least from your perspective -- what it was that the artist was trying to say in the aggregate, but not so concerned about whether you understand every single aspect of the painting.

The same thing is true of a poem. You don't need to necessarily understand every word, every line, in some sort of literal sense to get a real feeling from the poem and a sense of what the poem is about. I can think of marvelous poems that, to this day, I don't understand certain lines. But, nevertheless, the poems as whole entities are fantastic to me, just miraculous, beautiful works.

I like to be accessible. I'm pleased that most people who have not been students of poetry can read my work and get it. At the same time, I don't think that if you don't understand something it necessarily means that you should stay away from it. Norman Mailer once said to me that one of the problems with American book-reading audiences is that they don't want to have to do any work anymore. They've gotten so used to television and movies just handing everything out to them, that they don't want to have to take a book and actually do some work to get it. And that it's not a bad thing for people to do a little work. I think that intimate time that you spend alone with a really good author, discerning what it is that makes that work so important, is not a bad way to spend some of your time.

An Interview with Luke Breit

By Heather Hutcheson

Most of you know the name Luke Breit (pronounced Bright). If you haven't met him, chances are very good that you have heard something about him. He is the President of the Sacramento Poetry Center (SPC), Executive Board member and Chair of the Communications Committee of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), Member of the Sacramento Metropolitan Arts Commission and Chair of the Advocacy Committee, and Secretary and Legislative Chair of the Environmental Caucus of the California Democratic Party. He has two children, Yannis (17) and Nicole (12) who live in Mendocino, where he lived for almost 15 years. This month, I had the opportunity to find out a little more about him: his strengths, his weaknesses and his goals. Most importantly, what he loves about poetry. I was deeply impressed by his sincerity and honesty.

Heather Hutcheson: Why are you involved with the SPC?

Luke Breit: I came to Sacramento in the early '80's as a Special Assistant to Willie Brown when he first became the Speaker of the Assembly. I had been very involved in Mendocino in promoting poetry. I ran an alternative cultural center called The Well and we had regular poetry readings. I was very interested in finding who was doing poetry in Sacramento. It didn't take me too long to track down the Sacramento Poetry Center, which was then called the PoetTree. I gravitated to it and shortly they asked me if I'd be interested in serving on the Board. I have been involved with the Poetry Center ever since. I went away for about five years right in the middle of that time (back to Mendocino) but stayed on the Advisory Board, and then when I came back to Sacramento in '92, I was asked to return to the Board. Then, I became President of the Board a couple of years ago.

HH: How would you describe your role as the President of the SPC?

LB: Well, I know to a certain degree that it [my presidency] has been controversial. There is a group of people in the community who would like to see the Poetry Center be all things to all people and simply be a conduit for any kind of poetry and anyone who writes poetry or feels that they write poetry. Our charter says and our by-laws state and I believe that our goal is to promote quality poetry in the community. That, to certain people's distraction I know, has really been my goal.

We can not simply say that anything anybody writes down on a piece of paper is poetry and ought to be treasured in that way. I believe that poets, like any other artists, ought to be pretty serious about their work. They ought to have studied, they ought to be reading other people's writing. Just like a musician has to learn to play an instrument, a poet has to learn the language, has to learn to play his/her own instrument and sometimes that does not happen.

There has been an ongoing debate in the community and even at the Center about what the Center's role ought to be. I think the current Board feels as I do, by and large, with some exceptions, that we ought to continue to work very hard to nurture poetry in the community. We need to promote it and to help emerging artists that are serious about their work become better and better at their craft.

Plus, we should continue striving to bring the best poetry that we can, given our budget limitations, to Sacramento. For example, in the last few years, we brought Lucille Clifton to our Writers Conference and Gary Snyder as a benefit for the Poetry Center. Over the years, readers have included Robert Bly and Galway Kinnell and Carolyn Forche and just a large list of first-rate writers, not to mention our local giants like Dennis Schmitz and Jose Montoya. That continues to be our goal. That is one of the things we can do that is harder for some of the smaller organizations or loose affiliations of people to do, which is to be able to bring into the community poets of that stature. That has been a key role for us.

HH: Define quality.

LB: There is obviously a certain subjectivity there and I have tried to make sure, as we have expanded the editorial staff of Poetry Now, to the extent that I have control over it, that there is a wide variety of opinions on that editorial board and also with our reading series concerning what constitutes quality writing. But you could start out by saying the people who simply don't take writing very seriously or who use it as a therapeutic means to get out their emotional issues of the time, but are not serious students of poetry, who don't read -- those are not serious poets.

I have been involved in studying and writing poetry for all of my adult life and I think that you develop a certain eye for people who have talent and people who are serious about what they are doing. Anybody who has done this for a long time, whether it is me or Dennis Schmitz, or Mary Mackey or anyone who has been involved with writing for a long time knows good work when they hear it or see it -- not that you don't miss stuff because you do, but you catch a lot of it. Poetry is a more difficult art to judge than music or even painting because the tool of poetry is the language that we use everyday in communicating with each other. Anybody can sit down and just write out of stream of consciousness what is going on in their mind or what their emotional state is at the time. That doesn't necessarily mean it is good work. It may have value to them as a person. It may be important to exorcise whatever feelings or demons are in that person's life at that moment, so it certainly has value.

For example, I taught for many years in the Arts in Corrections Program in the prisons. You try to give the prisoners a tool to exorcise their demons. You don't go in there thinking that you are likely to turn out a great poet necessarily. I mean, if that happens, great. But that's not the role of poetry in that kind of setting. There, it is meant to be a tool to help people get their issues to the forefront.

But if you are a musician or a visual artist, it goes without saying that you have to spend a serious amount of time in your life studying the tools of that art. It is easier to say you are a poet without ever having to go through that discipline. I try, in my own way, to discourage that. I try to encourage people who feel that they are serious about writing to take the time to study, to read, to know what other people have done, to understand what some of the progression of poetry in America in the 20th century has been, to see what some of the influences are -- how they have come from Latin America and Central America, China and how that has been effected by the European influences on our culture.

All of these things are really important if you are going to be a serious writer and if you are going to advance poetry. Ezra Pound once sent a wonderfully sardonic letter to William Carlos Williams. Williams, as a young poet, had sent Pound a manuscript to look at and critique and Pound wrote back this long criticism in which he said to Williams (who was also a medical doctor): "Had I written a treatise in which I said mercurochrome was good for cuts and bruises, one might say that I had learned something about the field of medicine, but no one would say that I had added anything to it." So, that is what I am saying. If you want to advance your art, if you care about your art enough to want to advance it, then you have to take the time to study, to have discipline, to learn about writing, to learn what goes into it. I don't want to imply that this all ought to be about technique, because it ought not to be. The content of poetry is just as important, to go deep into a subject is one of the great blessings of poetry. It is what helps teach us and inform our lives about many things. But without developing those technical skills, it just won't have the impact as a work of art.

HH: What do you consider your greatest strengths?

LB: A lot of energy. I am willing to do a lot of the work other people aren't willing to do. I am not afraid to take on a challenge, not afraid of controversy. I have pretty thick skin, so even when people are not particularly happy with what I am doing, I can persevere; it doesn't destroy me or set me back a lot.

Another of my strengths for the Poetry Center is that I straddle a number of different worlds. I am clearly a poet and in the world of poetry, but I am also in the political world. I run campaigns, I am involved with elected officials (especially Democrats), I am on the Arts Commission, so I move in several worlds that are helpful to the Poetry Center, helpful in moving us forward and being credible in the eyes of funders and other people that aren't specifically into the arts.

I must have some other strengths, but they don't immediately come to mind.

HH: What are your greatest weaknesses?

LB: Sometimes I have a level of intolerance -- I don't think it's as bad as it used to be -- but I am still impatient with people and things and that sometimes comes back to haunt me and by extension the organization. Also, because I live in these different worlds and am involved, especially in politics, I am very suspect to a large number of people in the poetry community, especially the so-called "street poets," who are very suspicious of anybody who has a foot in the establishment, which I clearly do. Therefore, my actions become suspect and my motives become suspect to some people because they fail to see the big picture of what I am trying to accomplish. That's why there has been some controversy, which has sometimes been bad for the Poetry Center, and which I greatly regret. Any time I have caused the Poetry Center any harm, it has certainly not been my intention to do so. And, I guess the present Board and the membership continue to feel that I bring greater pluses than minuses. Until that changes, I will stay on the Board.

HH: What are you trying to accomplish?

LB: The large goals are going back to what I said originally: the idea of being a force for nurturing good poetry and trying to get poets to become better and better and more practiced in the craft and perhaps to help nurture the potentially great poets in our community. So those are sort of big picture goals.

Small picture goals: I'd love to increase the membership of the Poetry Center. It has hovered around 200 for some time now and I'd love to see us go up to 300 or 400. I'd like us to be more stable in our funding, we obviously have had difficulty sometimes. The public funding that we receive has not gone up for many years even though we have been ambitious in some of the programs that we have tried to initiate. So, I would like to see us be more stable, more self-sufficient -- have a greater amount of our money come from the community with people becoming members or making donations, or having fundraising events that move us forward in that way. Those are my smaller goals in helping the Poetry Center evolve to the next step. I'd love for us to get to the place where we are able to hire a part-time (maybe even full-time someday) executive director so the implementation of work that the Board ends up having to do (because there isn't anybody else to do it) could be done by a paid staff person. That is a big big step any arts organization has to consider making at a certain point. We are not there yet, but in the next few years, we may be able to get there.

HH: What is the single most important thing you can contribute to the community?

LB: Assuming that I remain in a position of leadership with the Poetry Center, if I am reelected President next month, I want to continue to work on the areas where I am strong. This means working toward gaining more credibility for the Poetry Center, helping to put it on a more firm and stable funding basis. At the same time, I want to have more people around me who can help compensate for some of the areas of weakness that I have and to remind me when I am making a mistake. If I can minimize the number of mistakes I make and the number of tempers that flare when they hear my name, I will be doing the Poetry Center some good. By and large, we have been moving in a positive direction. As any organization, we move a couple of feet forward, then move a foot back. That is partly due to things that I have done wrong and partly due to the fact the Board just doesn't always have a lot of energy to do things. There are a lot of factors that go into that. So, I'd like to compensate for those factors both in terms of trying to concentrate on my weak areas, but also in terms of trying to put together a Board that is really positive and energetic and has a lot of time and energy to put things together and make things happen with the Poetry Center.

HH: Help me understand what you mean by "things you have done wrong"?

LB: First of all, I should say that there are things which people in the community feel I have done wrong. I don't always necessarily completely agree with that. For example, I was castigated by a number of people for having failed to turn up at the Marathon reading. People said that meant that the Poetry Center did not have a presence there and that's why they were so angry at me for not showing up. In point of fact, a number of people from the Poetry Center and from the Board did show up and read there. I had personal reasons for not going that didn't have anything to do with dismissing the Marathon or anything like that.

But I have to say, in all candor, the quality of work in this town should not be judged by the length of our readings any more than the quality of a political speech should be judged by its length. I am sure there was lots of good work at the Marathon and I am sure there was lots of work that wasn't so good. So, the fact that it went on for a long time isn't particularly impressive to me. The Guinness Book of Records is pretty dumb, basically. We live in a society where things are measured by ludicrous standards and on a personal, human, artistic level, I don't feel any need to be a participant in those types of things. I don't want to dwell on this, but that was one thing I did that people were upset about and maybe in retrospect I should've put in an appearance. Although I'm not sure if that would have made anybody that much happier. It is just not my kind of thing. People from the Poetry Center were there and I don't think that the Poetry Center ought to be viewed as me. It ought to be viewed as everybody who is a member and all of the Board Members, so we were very well represented at the Marathon.

The point I am trying to make is that we live in a small community and everybody in the Sacramento literary world knows each other for the most part, but if you are a relatively high-visibility person it is easy to inflame passions and to make people upset and I regret, to the degree that I have done that, I regret that. It has not been my intention to hurt people's feelings or to make people think that I do not care about them.

On the other hand, I am not going to change or lower my standards. I am not going to try to turn the Poetry Center into an institution that is meant to be all things to all people. That is not my intent. And, if that is what the community wants, they need somebody else at the Poetry Center's helm because that is not the direction I intend to take it in.

HH: What do you have to say to your critics?

LB: Over the last year, numerous times I have heard about how people were disgruntled about something that I have done. Almost never did I hear that directly from the person involved. That is cowardly. I'd like to recommend that if people have a grievance against me or anybody else in the poetry world or in whatever world they are engaged in, or involved in, they ought to take it directly to that person. Give that person an opportunity to refute it if it is not true, apologize for it if they are sorry for it, or to say, "Yes, that's what I said and I stand by it."

But a lot of people in the poetry community, I've noticed, don't want to give you that opportunity. They 'd rather talk about you behind your back, make comments about things that are not true. When you finally do address people about it, sometimes they apologize to you and they say: "Oh, gee, that's what I thought," or "Gee, I am amazed to find out I was wrong." In point of fact, if they were to come to you and treat you as a friend, then you would have an opportunity to make amends, if amends needed to be made or to explain why you had made that statement or had done that deed. I really encourage people to, if they don't like something I have done, just tell me about it. They don't have to talk about it behind my back. I don't do that to them and I'd appreciate them not doing that to me.

HH: What do you have to say to those who claim that the SPC is a separatist and elitist organization?

LB: We are not separatist or elitist at all. We are an organization that wants to promote and to support people who are serious about writing good poetry. That doesn't mean just my taste, and it doesn't mean just your taste, and it doesn't mean just Patricia D'Alessandro's taste, and it doesn't mean just Be Herrera's taste, or anybody who is involved with our publications or readings. This is why we put together groups of people to work on these things. There isn't a single group of writers writing in town that we haven't represented. Certainly, all of the schools of poetry in this community, the street poets, the academics and everything in between have been represented in our reading series and in our publications. I don't see how that is elitist.

On the other hand, to reiterate, it is our job as I see it and as our charter says and as our by-laws say and as our statement of operations say, to promote good poetry, to promote quality poetry in our community. That is something I insist is the right direction for us to take.

HH: Why do you write poetry?

LB: I love it. It is the place that I go to find the deepest truths about myself and the things that connect me most deeply and the most completely to the rest of the universe, to the rest of the people in the world and the planet and beyond. It is where I go to search for answers to things that I am not clear about. I love how language sings when it is written well and I strive for that. I certainly don't always achieve it, but I strive for my poetry to do that. I love how images and visual things in language can lead to immutable truths. at least for yourself if not anybody else. I can't imagine my life without poetry. Even if I couldn't write poetry, I couldn't imagine my life without having poetry around me, in my bookshelves and by my bedside and out by my hot tub, and wherever. It is an important and major part of my life, it always has been. It always will be.

HH: What's next?

LB: On a personal level, I have a new book coming out later this year called Unintended Lessons (this interview points to the fact that there have indeed been some unintended lessons in my life). I am really excited about that. I hope it is going to be the best book that I have ever written. It is always hard to tell until you get a little bit of distance from it, but my editor believes that it is very strong, so I am very excited about it. I hope to do a series of readings around the state or even out of state. There seems to be some movement in setting up a tour of readings when the book is published.

After that, I am hard at work on a novel that I am about 150-pages into and I have elicited some interest form a New York publisher, so I am hoping to at least have the first draft of that by the end of this Summer.

From the Poetry Center perspective, the Duke's reading will be going into its third year. It has had a very strong lineup [of featured readers] and I can't believe that after two years, I still feel as committed to it and as enthused about it as when I started it, but I do and I am hoping that series is as strong. And, I am going to be involved in the editing of Tule Review, a new project for me that I feel very enthusiastic about. I also plan to continue evolving the web site I designed for the Center (http://www.quiknet.com/spc/), and have been receiving a lot of suggestions from folks about how to do that. Lots of interesting and exciting stuff, I hope and believe.