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LYNNE THOMPSON: Hello! My name is Lynne Thompson, Poet Laureate for the City of Los Angeles and I’m so happy to welcome listeners to this installment of Poems on Air, a podcast supported by the Los Angeles Public Library. Every week, I’ll present the work of poets I admire, poets who you should know, and poets who have made a substantial and inimitable contribution to the art and craft of poetry.

LYNNE THOMPSON: Continuing the celebration of National Hispanic Heritage Month, this week’s poem was writ-ten by William Archila. An L.A. resident, he was born in Santa Ana, El Salvador in 1968 and immigrated to the United States in 1980 with his family. The author of two collections of po-etry, Archila is the winner of the International Latino Book Award for Poetry for The Art of Exile and the Red Hen Poetry Prize for The Gravedigger's Archaeology. In an interview with the Poetry Society of America, Archila stated, “To me the function of poetry is about naming the truth. It is about constructing a new language…”

LYNNE THOMPSON: Today’s poem is "Echo Park Poem" by William Archila.

Echo Park Poem

I’ve got that Johnny Pacheco
kind of feeling tonight
and I want to drop it
like a 4 x 4 in the middle
of the road, break it down
like it’s Africa, 1974.
In Angeleno Heights,
from my bungalow window
strung with retro Christmas lights
I can see in the dark
the buildings, downtown, sick
with their own sweats, indifferent
to the shopping cart, monolith
of a mattress beneath the palm tree.
There’s an international agitator
in my kitchen who’s got
the blues and his alligator boots,
a blathering feeling that matinées
are the best time for b-movies,
for the most part film noir.
Everything in my Echo Park
bungalow is an off rhyme.
Not like the oblique Emily
Dickinson, but more like
Antonio Carlos Jobim,
Desafinado, Cheo Feliciano
scrolled tight into a bass line,
terse, imaginative
and utterly funky. It’s true,
my bungalow was a nightclub
in some hole in the wall
in Havana, but this time
everyone gets to keep
their money, carousing
like trains by the turntable,
some wrapped in tobacco
leaves, some a bit of rum
to unloosen the tongue,
others philosophizing about home
and whiskey, top shelf. All the shots
are the same and all the shots
are good. I got that saying
from a little Irish man
outside Dublin. Such is the story.
Today the gentrified streets
of Echo Park are far
from my feet. Now I know
I want my hands over the table
the way Bill Evans hunches
over the piano. All night,
I’ve orbited the moon
of my inheritance,
three parts coffee, two parts milk,
a pinch of sugar to beat
the devil out of his mind
and come up complete.

LYNNE THOMPSON: The Los Angeles Poet Laureate was created as a joint program between the City’s Depart-ment of Cultural Affairs and the Los Angeles Public Library and this podcast will be available on the Library’s website. In the future, episodes will be available on iTunes, Google, and Spotify. Thanks for listening!

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• Back to Poems on Air: Episode 27



DISCLAIMER: This is NOT a certified or verbatim transcript, but rather represents only the context of the class or meeting, subject to the inherent limitations of real-time captioning. The primary focus of real-time captioning is general communication access and as such this document is not suitable, acceptable, nor is it intended for use in any type of legal proceeding. Transcript provided by the author.