Chiwan Choi is subverting the tropes and expectations of a poet, using innovative new outlets -- including through Facebook -- to get his work to a broader audience.

Poet and publisher Chiwan Choi had just finished a reading in Highland Park and was riding the bus back to his downtown L.A. apartment when something changed.

It was one of those picturesque days when the city seemed too perfect; the sky looked as if it had been painted by Rembrandt. Choi was excited, because the reading at Avenue 50 Studios had been packed, hinting at an epoch when poets were respected and idolized.

He found himself thinking that he was reaching a point of success as a poet. And that's when he realized, "Wow, I'm done."

"The stupid Facebook posts I write are probably seen by more people than all those who have read both my books combined," he says today, two months after his bus-ride awakening. "And if poetry is about getting to the reader and the world, then doesn't that defeat the point to write poetry and put it in a book that no one would read?"

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Kevin Scanlon

Eloise Klein Healy

One of the fascinating Angelenos featured in L.A. Weekly's People 2013 issue. Check out our entire People 2013 issue here.

"I could go on about the choices I've made," Eloise Klein Healy writes in her 1991 poetry collection, Artemis in Echo Park, "and all the other elements of my landscape / emotionally carved out or artfully decorated, / but the real truth is, here you can see / the ribs showing through." Healy, who was recently named Los Angeles' first poet laureate by outgoing mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, has made the kind of choices that define a career, although perhaps that has become clear only in retrospect — as is often the case with the choices that define us.

Now 69, Healy has had a long and successful academic career, directing the women's studies program at Cal State Northridge, founding the MFA program in creative writing at Antioch University Los Angeles, where she is now a professor emeritus, and founding Arktoi Books, a Red Hen Press imprint that specializes in the work of lesbian authors. She's written seven books of poetry, the most recent of which, A Wild Surmise, was published in March. And then there's the poet laureate honor, which Healy says took her by complete surprise, "because I didn't think they'd choose a white lesbian."

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Michiel Hendryckx

Allen Ginsberg

When most people envision the Beat Generation, they probably start with a vision of Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady and Allen Ginsberg, stumbling into a bar in New York City, rambling on about Nebraska and staring into the electric religion of the American plains. Or perhaps people think of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, printing copies of Gasoline or Howl and handing them out to the citizens of San Francisco.

Well, it's easy to forget a group of Southern California Beats were creating a renaissance right here in Venice. And in celebration of the Beats, the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA will be performing a live staging of Ginsberg's Kaddish at Royce Hall on Wednesday, in the midst of many other Beat-related events UCLA is putting on.

We put together a list of 10 essential Beat landmarks in Los Angeles to celebrate the tradition. Thanks to William Mohr, Mike "The Poet" Sonksen and Pegarty Long for their help.

See also:
*Best L.A. Novel Ever: The Tournament
*10 of Charles Bukowski's Dirty L.A. Haunts

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See also:
*Best L.A. Novel Ever: The Tournament
*5 Artsy Things to Do in L.A. This Week

Los Angeles readers may be forgiven for thinking that Dana Goodyear is a food writer. In The New Yorker, where Goodyear has been a staff writer since 2007, she's written about Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo, the chefs who own Animal and Son of a Gun. She's cataloged the dining habits of Jonathan Gold, trailing the restaurant critic from restaurant to San Gabriel restaurant for months, pen and notebook in hand. Most recently, she chronicled the guerrilla dining world of Wolvesmouth's Craig Thornton.

But Goodyear is many things to many people. To those at USC, she's a lecturer in creative nonfiction. To young-adult writers, she's the co-founder of Figment, an online community for YA fiction. To compulsive channel surfers, she's the owner of a website that somehow functions as an Etch-a-Sketch. But to those of us who read her poetry in The New Yorker, she's a poet.

Maybe because she's been busy trailing itinerant chefs, Goodyear waited eight years after her debut poetry collection, Honey and Junk, published in 2005 by Norton, for the follow-up. The Oracle of Hollywood Boulevard comes out later this month, also from Norton. And the wait, in addition to giving us all fun nonfiction to read, has been worth it.

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Nanette Gonzales

Jeremy Radin at the old zoo in Griffith Park.

"Why is no one laughing?" the actor asks. He's sitting under stage lights, wearing a robe and a pair of pajama bottoms.

"Have you earned it?" the teacher responds, sipping from a fast-food coffee. The audience murmurs with understanding.

This is the scene Thursday night at the Beverly Hills Playhouse Acting School at the Skylight Theater. The teacher is critiquing two students' performance of a scene from Neil Simon's play I Ought to Be in Pictures. Scattered among the audience are the other students: young and old thespians working on their craft. They are actor-musicians or actor-comedians — some amalgamation of L.A. dreaming.

But sitting in the back row is Jeremy Radin, who's something different: an actor-poet. While many aspiring actors in L.A. tend bar or wait tables to survive, Radin actually acts in order to write poetry.

Physically and personally, Radin, 29, is larger than life. Not quite overweight — but burly. People often say to him, "Man, you're a big-ass dude." His beard is trimmed, and he's wearing corduroy pants and a brown sports coat. He's not quite good-looking enough to be a leading man; he happily considers himself a character actor.

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Photo by Colleen Rooney

Eloise Klein Healy

See also:
*Best L.A. Novel Ever: The Tournament
*In Defense of the Future L.A. Poet Laureate
*Celebrating Poet Robert Burns With Whisky and Sheep Innards
*Los Angeles Limerick Fest: Sex and Sheep and the Man from Nantucket

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is set to announce that Eloise Klein Healy will be the first L.A Poet Laureate during a press conference at the Los Angeles Central Library this morning. The selection process was overseen by a Poet Laureate Task Force, appointed by Mayor Villaraigosa in March of this year, and the position comes with a $10,000 annual grant for a two-year term awarded by the Department of Cultural Affairs.

"Eloise Klein Healy's work highlighted the truly innovative and imaginative nature of our City's literary genius," Mayor Villaraigosa said in a written statement released earlier. "I am proud to have her serve as the Ambassador to our City's vibrant poetry and literary culture."

Born in El Paso, Texas, Healy moved to Los Angeles when she was ten-years old. She has written seven books of poetry, including her latest, A Wild Surmise: New and Selected Poems & Recordings, which will be released from L.A-based Red Hen Press in February. She is also the founding chair of the MFA program at Antioch University and founder of Arktoi Books, specializing in works by lesbian authors. She often writes about Los Angeles, including everything from baseball to the super highways "lifting off the landscape like dreams of the future."

Clearly, Healy has cemented her influence on the city of angels, and the position, according to her, comes as a surprise, but it also makes sense. "There's never been a Poet Laureate before, so it wasn't something that I grew up having as an aspiration," she says. "But I've been here a long time....I've done all my work [in Los Angeles]...People know who I am here in the poetry world. That's the part of it that doesn't surprise me. It's logical and rational that I would be a candidate."

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Joseph Lapin

In August, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa announced the creation of the first-ever Poet Laureate Program, and nominations for the poet are open until 5 p.m. on October 10. The future poet laureate will be announced in October, and the poet will receive a $10,000-annual grant for a two-year term from the Department of Cultural Affairs.

Some Angelenos are wondering: How can you give money to a poet during the Great Recession? What does a poet laureate actually do? Can a poet laureate mend the broken economy with a villanelle or sestina? Can a poet laureate rescue properties from the grip of foreclosure or protect gangs and drug addicts from squatting in blighted homes?

No, a poet laureate can't do any of that. So why, some have been asking, would the city of Los Angeles give $20,000 to a poet? What real substantial and civic value does a poor-old wordsmith bring to our city?

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"A poetry reading is like a painting," Philip Levine says in regards to his upcoming reading in downtown Los Angeles. "Somebody asks you, 'What do you hope to accomplish with that painting?' Come on." He starts to laugh. "You want it to be admired. ... I go there with my poems."

Levine -- the 18th poet laureate, and a part-time California resident -- will give a reading at the Mark Taper Auditorium in the Central Library tonight at 7 p.m. as part of the ALOUD series, and will discuss life, literature and his time in California.

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YouTube

People started reciting poetry in the middle of Barney's Beanery last night

It's not every day that a random old guy announces to a group of strangers that he likes tight pussy.

Actually, that happens all the time in Los Angeles. But this was different, because it wasn't an offer, but a performance. The man, actor Richard Large, was reciting poetry from the late Charles Bukowski: "What counts now is one more tight pussy before the light tilts out," goes the line from the famous Bukowski poem, "Crazy as I ever was."

Bukowski, who died in 1994, published thousands of poems and other creative works throughout his life. He is beloved by many for his focus on sex, alcohol and grimy Los Angeles life.

Legend is that Bukowski used to hang around Barney's Beanery in West Hollywood, getting wasted and writing his poetry on napkins. In keeping with that tradition, Barney's Beanery hosted a secret Charles Bukowski flash mob Thursday night.

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A.C. Thamer via LA Weekly Flickr Pool

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LA Weekly is now taking poetry submissions. Interested in having your work posted right here on our arts blog? Send previously unpublished poems along with an image to go with it to poetry@laweekly.com. Check out today's poem after the jump.


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