Suzanne Lummis

They Write by Night: Noir Takes on Art or Good Times for Dark Times

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6

Noirairians, the whole damn world’s going to hell in a little red wheel barrel. However, noir’s doing O.K., cracking and popping, lurking and stalking. Also, it’s expanding. For the first time, TWBN phones in to another location in LA—a pay phone of course—to reach this episode’s poet, Lois P. Jones, in the booth. The wooden phone booth at Philippe the Original, East Downtown LA.

Also, for the first time I introduce an area of exploration that might interest the art aficionados milling around out there.

Art.

The world’s going to hell, and many sensible people would agree this country’s bolted ahead of some others. And yet, still, there’s poetry, there’re movies. And art. And They Write by Night has all that sort of thing. Additionally, this episode includes solid advice.

Beware Great Artists Who are Bad Boyfriends.

Plot Update: For those who’ve missed a couple episodes, I, the protagonist, am no longer underground around the clock in order to avoid the Feds. In this episode I’ve emerged from my secret location and am above ground, but in a clever disguise.

    — Suzanne Lummis

(Top image credit to Poetry.LA)

Suzanne Lummis

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Suzanne Lummis, noted practitioner and exponent of NOIR POETRY, unpacks a genre infused with the ethos of mid-20th Century hard-boiled fiction and crime movies, presenting examples from poets both living and “quite dead.” An influential teacher through the UCLA Extension Writers' Program and co-founder of the Los Angeles Poetry Festival, Lummis produced a 2011 city-wide, 25-event series, “Night in the City: L.A. Noir Poetry, Fiction and Film.” Her 2012 essay “The Poem Noir — Too Dark to Be Depressed” (Malpais Review, Vol. 3, No. 3) is essential reading on the subject. Lummis was awarded a 2018/19 C.O.L.A. (City of Los Angeles) fellowship to create a series of new poems. Her most recent collection is Open 24 Hours (Lynx House Press). Her poems have appeared in three Knopf "Everyman's Poetry" anthologies, including Killer Verse: Poems of Murder and Mayhem, and in The Antioch Review, New Ohio Review, Plume, The American Journal of Poetry and The New Yorker. She edited the anthology "Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond" (Pacific Coast Poetry Series/Beyond Baroque Books) named one of the Ten Best Books of 2015 in the Los Angeles Times. (Photo by Alexis Rhone Fancher)

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