Tony Scribella: The Venice Beat Poets – The Great River Outside
the Mainstream
By Hillary
Kaye
Tony Scibella was both poet and
painter. Growing up working class, all he could see ahead was dead end jobs in
conventional postwar America, and he wondered where his true path lay. Following
clues he got from the freedom and creativity he saw in jazz clubs and in the
paintings of abstract expressionist and working class hero Franz Kline, he found
it as an artist.
Tony got out of the army in 1952, briefly
worked at an aircraft plant and attended SMCC before discovering Venice. There
he also discovered Stuart Perkoff. Scibella encouraged his friend to paint and
Perkoff taught Scibella to write down the words swirling in his imagination. The
two of them along with Frank Rios roamed the Venice oceanfront sharing poetry
making and camaraderie.
It was a
different Venice then. It was a breathing space between real estate booms. No
bike path, no skate rentals, no sunglass vendors, no upscale restaurants, no
valet service, no Hollywood celebrities, no gentrification, no ego sized
mansions lining the canals. Venice was as simple as a Taoist dream. It was
sufficiently primitive enough to pass for a seedy border town for Orson
Welles’ classic film Touch of
Evil.
Scibella’s autobiography,
The Kid In America, owes much to Joyce and Kerouac but in ways surpasses both in
being more real than Kerouac and more spontaneous than Joyce. In it he says this
about his new
digs:
“…Venice was a
summertown the locals rented rooms to vacationers from the city & then it
closed in winter showed some snowcone life on weekends& drowsed u cd rent a
whole house for 65$ …the people flee the city for the burbs forgetting the
entire beach (bless em) a cheap pursuit of craft a place to do it described as a
slum I never saw it thus: it is a bleedin paradise I reckoned salts on the sun
oceanmotion gullquiet
beach”
Scibella helped Stuart
Perkoff open the Venice West Café. They all made the scene they were the
scene, they lived it….used in it ….used it till they were part of
its “bleedin.”
Always it
was about making art….money a necessary evil was not easy to come by, as
no one of them wanted to give their valuable time to it…everything was
about the
muse.
------
poetry
is the game
who worked
hardest
abt the
poem
it
was supposed
to say yr
heart
simply-
in
all that
whirls abt
u
u
pluck
what u can eat
only
not
wasting
a
syllable
u
learned
to walk
on
knowing
most
of us
are
punished
for hoping
too
much
the
gratitude
sung to
her
is
habitual
as the
breath:
take
all u
want
: u
must
give it
back
& a
song
to her is this
Posted: Sat
- December
1, 2007 at 07:13 PM