On May 19, 2024 Alice Pero will pass on her Poet Laureate crown to Kathleen Travers in a joyous ceremony of music and poetry at The McGroarty Arts Center, 7570 McGroarty Terrace, Tujunga, from 3-5 pm. Alice, who is the 10th Poet Laureate of Sunland/Tujunga will be the last so named. Kathleen is the first Poet Laureate of the Foothills, the post given a new title in 2024 to be more inclusive of the whole Foothills area. Kathleen brings her arts history education and numerous community service endeavors to extend the reach of Poet Laureate.
Both poets will read their work and music will be provided by Dan West, pianist and Alice Pero who is also a flutist. Refreshments will be served. This is a free public event.
Founding board member of arts and equity non-profit ST Forward, and volunteer for various homeless charities for 35 years, she’s in her 3rd year on the Sunland-Tujunga Neighborhood Council.
She has read her poetry at venues as diverse as Maddingley Hall, Cambridge, England, and Gasoline Alley, the L.A. Times Festival of Books and the Iguana Café. She served on the board of the Los Angeles Poetry Festival in its glory years, and was a founding director of the Poetry Society of America in Los Angeles in the time of The Act of the Poet at Chateau Marmont. Featured in 49 local civic light opera and drama productions in decades past, and having sung with a bakers dozen of Los Angeles choral ensembles, her mezzo is currently in search of a choir, although she always has a song in her heart for life in Sunland-Tujunga.
Three Poems by Kathleen Travers
What Remains
to Itzhak Perlman for November 18, 1995, Lincoln Center
The great musician staged his entrance rites,
a halting broach of center, sat, and then
the solemn pageant pared the metal truss
from limbs, and lastly raised the violin:
the bow hit gut, exploding twang and snap
sharp echoes amid gasps. And wonder, would
he litanies of lurch repeat, or mute
await fresh fiddle or new string? Eyes closed,
he signaled to begin. And modulating
every step with ease and grace, he played
to awestruck hush. Applause! He smiled “In art
sometimes we find what music we can make
with what is left.” So life, we make at first
with all we have – and then, with what remains.
Stages of grief
v. acceptance
Tangled prone in August's
tawny grass
the marble trunks wait
and yearn to stretch upright.
Their ordered pride
and pediment crown
stained by sun cycles,
and the glint of their colors
on the sea they rose above --
these they have forgotten,
the pillars of Sounion
but not the feeling of whole,
or the need to be partnered,
roofed and sheathed
in seamless stone,
made new in union with each other.
So long since they have seen
beyond the hues of tall grass
to the source of sea-roar
and its endless reach,
things they once vowed to see again;
so long they have forgotten everything
but the longing so interminable
it seems the proper way of being.
The View from the Cross
The Cross of San Ysidro, Mt. McGroarty, Tujunga
San Ysidro, Patron Saint of Little Homes, was not a saint of the Catholic Church, according to John McGroarty . . . He was a Spanish peasant, and his name, McGroarty said, indicates he was probably a Jew. . . Thus the dedication of this monument was sponsored by an organization of laymen, held around a cross that was raised in honor of a “saint” who was a Jew, and blessed by a Catholic priest during ceremonies involving all Protestant organizations in the Valley.
– Wallace Morgan –The Record-Ledge
Booster Bard, wove the fabled life of San Ysidro – in which
the saint had ceased his work to help the grandam find her goat,
whereupon (in his absence) an angel took those labors up.
A parable in which self-interest was replaced by the
spirit of benevolence – For in the hard life of farming
dry and rocky soil, only with each others help could one survive
With the convert’s passion, and the spirit of a man reborn
(having thrown the shackles of nocturnal asthma in the sweet
and solemn-breathing air of the Verdugos) the Scribe sold
the broken colony his ecumenical hopes – so much so
they built his cross in weeks, and pledged to find the funds to light it.
Perhaps by raising it, a monument with manifest ideals,
a people perpetuate such standards. Perhaps not. But consider this: On the antipodal Verdugos in July of ‘24, the Times reported on quite different pageantry beneath a cross – rather, several – burning as eight hundred on the Glendale hills joined that city’s Ku Klux Klan.
or this: that when ‘30s Tujunga Jewry formed their Temple Shomrei Emunah, Guardians of the Faith, the Women’s Club gave them a home, five years, while they built. This while La Crescenta’schapter of the Bund held pro-Nazi rallies at their parks, and Pasadena practiced covenants excluding Jews and papists.
Four months, and they had lit the cross – and in a time when night pulled
a drape of perfect darkness on the hills, the Cross was more than
cross, but spoke of noble-minded roots, what they valued in others
and hoped for from themselves. And perhaps in those black nights, its light
was consolation for their failed Utopian dream, broken
by the harshness of life in a place known as the Rock.
In her four year tenure, as the 10th Poet Laureate of Sunland/Tujunga, (officially installed in 2022, two years late because of the pandemic,) Alice Pero continued her work with children teaching poetry in schools, took over the post of Artistic Director of the Village Poets readings, published “Beyond Birds & Answers” (2021, Elyssar Press) with New York City artist, Vera Campion, published poems in various journals in print and on line, including “Pratik”, “We Are Here,” “Crystal Fire” and she also began serving as Monthly Contest Chair for the California State Poetry Society. She frequently features in venues and festivals around Los Angeles and also appears as a flutist in a number of settings.
Three Poems by Alice Pero
Green by Water
It was today that all my
stories turned green
when I took a walk in the wash
where rain had made cracked brown earth
sprout green and yellow and purple
Leprechauns were disguised as mischievous lizards
scuttling across my path
The snakes did not bother any
They had been sent away by a being with a crooked
stick
The rushing stream at the foot of the hills
crashed noisily over the stones making nothing of
drought-disaster-sayers
who had been deposited in the ocean at end of
stream’s run
All our hot, dry fissures filled
published in California Quarterly
a thimbleful of now….
A thimbleful of now
with no dust or breath
I slurp it up, like nectar
of a sweet peach
On my windowsill
a potful of here
No flower grows
the air is fresh
I feel the green
Clear wind of present
blows in my garden
no one hears
no one sees the roses
nodding, “Yes”
Barter
I will trade a memory of oatmeal
(the one with the really sweet milk)
for a taste of potato chips, very crisp
The coffee on the airplane that
made me high I will give
for the belly laugh when George on Seinfeld
rescued the golf ball from
the whale
But if you didn’t save that one
I’ll trade an old Ernie Kovacs Show
for a glimpse of the Degas dancer girl at the Met
I will exchange the feel of satin
on my first prom dress (bright blue)
for six orange peels dried in the
softest sun of summer
Will you take the smell of asphalt in
spring, steaming after rain
for six ripe plums waiting in
the basket on the porch?
I can give you the grandchild’s shy smile
when I gave her a ballerina doll
but you must give me the sound of
oranges falling off the tree
with the slightest bit of wind added
There is a sprig of bougainvillea, very red
that jumps off the wall,
What will you give me for it?
published in Minnetonka Review
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