(Editor Note: Saturday and Sunday marked the 13th annual Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at the UCLA campus—J.F.)*
The LA Times Book Festival—the inaugural event to a long, barbecue-filled summer! This particular festival is one of my favorite events in Los Angeles. It brings together an incredibly broad range of people—families, professional writers, students. It was great to board the Westwood-bound bus in Echo Park and see at least ten other people dressed for the event: bags, sandals, visor hats. Official “Book Buses” launched from other parts of Los Angeles and Orange Counties—some with spoken-word poets or community book talks on board.
On Sunday afternoon, I took a seminar with Robert Pinsky—small enough to move from a lecture hall to one of the graduate roundtables in Haines Hall. 13 or 14 participants gathered around (MFA students, graduates, teachers—even a high school principal) as our former U.S. Poet Laureate spoke about the musicality of poetry and the texture of language. Professor Pinsky typically asks his graduate students to compile a 40-page booklet of poems that are important or significant to them. He suggests either typing or writing the poems out by hand, updating it occasionally, and binding it into a personal commonplace book of modern times. I figured I could learn something from this and so have begun my own personal anthology. It’s not often you write out poems by hand anymore…and I’ve found it helps more clearly understand the “feel” of the poem.
* Robert D. Montoya is a poet and manager of reader services for the UCLA Library Department of Special Collections. He contributed this report.