If I were in a coffee shop on a listless morning with the sky turning damp outside, I would probably want to hear Norah Jones' voice more than any other. Adele would be too dramatic, Fiona Apple too deadpan, Taylor Swift too mercurial. Put on "Nightingale" or "Painter Song," though, and then picture the counter dwellers in jogging suits, the steam, the rugged chairs and folded-over newspapers of a place that prides itself on imperfection. There's no voice that scores the scene better, especially at a volume just loud enough to hear. It's the voice of soft rain and lived-in shoes. Of course, in my mind, it should play in the background at Alta Coffee, the earthy neighborhood spot in Newport Beach where I attended my first poetry open mic, met the two people who helped me to co-found Moon Tide Press, even met my wife for the first time. In my very personal experience, good things happen at Alta. I'm not sure if I ever actually heard Norah Jones here, but my memory is happy to make concessions.
My poem this week in the Journal of Radical Wonder, "Coffee Shop," is about the denizens of the location mentioned in the title, but it starts and ends as an ode to Norah Jones. Really, it's an ode to her recorded voice, which plays on a portable radio while the characters go about their business. A girl with a stutter helps to wipe down the tables, even though she doesn't work there, at least for pay. A man at the counter rants about baseball. A group of people stop by from a local shelter, and the owner mutters Another lost morning to himself. A construction foreman enters feeling generous, orders coffee for everyone, and beckons the stuttering girl to dance. The poem ends with absolutely nothing being resolved, but everyone is pleased momentarily: They're alive, Norah Jones is singing, and the coffee must be at least decent. This isn't a terribly profound poem, unless it's profound by accident. It was a fun one to write, though (I used a semi-pantoum style that I haven't used before or since, with line endings recurring in the next stanza), and sometimes it's enough simply to capture everyday life without a grand statement attached. Evidently, the subject of hard-luck characters gathering for a smile and a drink has a lot of appeal to artists; I think of Billy Joel's song "Piano Man" ("It's nine o'clock on a Saturday / regular crowd shuffles in"), the sitcom Cheers ("Where everybody knows your name") -- maybe even Edward Hopper's painting Nighthawks, although we can only speculate whether his subjects hang out at the bar on a regular basis. I have been to many restaurants over the years and ordered many cups of coffee, but I have never been a "regular," with an affable group of friends always waiting at the bar to share a story and pontificate about life. I have my wife and daughter, not to mention fellow teachers, to play that role. I'm sure I could make arrangements at the local Starbucks if needed. Actually, I would more likely pick Alta -- or the Ugly Mug, another marvelously rustic coffeehouse in Orange that became the indirect subject of a poetry anthology in 2011. That year, Ben Trigg and Steve Ramirez celebrated their tenth anniversary of running the Two Idiots Peddling Poetry weekly reading series, and Tebot Bach published an anthology that featured "Coffee Shop" and a slew of other works by poets who commonly appeared there on Wednesday nights. OK, so I have been a regular somewhere, kind of. The anthology's title, Don't Blame the Ugly Mug, came from the words that Trigg said every night in his introduction to the crowd: "Don't blame the Ugly Mug. We're the idiots running the reading." Well, I never heard anyone blame anybody. It was a warm, spontaneous, and nurturing atmosphere (Trigg, who did emcee duty while Ramirez operated the sound system, called for a special round of applause for any first-time open reader), and I'm pleased to say that it's not a thing of the past; the series recently celebrated 22 years, which is literally twice as long as the run of Cheers. The appeal of that kind of show (or song, or painting, or whatever) is that it features a group of characters from different walks of life who might never meet if not for this particular venue. That's the poetry world in a nutshell. None of us made a living off of the tip jar or the few books that we sold; we came in after a long day of being nurses, accountants, stay-at-home parents, landscapers, financial consultants, or whatever else paid the mortgage. We bonded over our love of a craft, and the camaraderie took care of itself. Sitting at this keyboard right now, I can rattle off a list of names and faces: Ricki, Lee, Jaimes, Eric, Kate, Brendan, Murray, Mindy, probably two or three people named John. Thursday morning would come with demands, but we made a beautiful Wednesday night. I'm sure Norah Jones played in the background at least once.
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This is the blog of Michael Miller, a longtime journalist, poet, publisher and teacher. Check here for musings, observations, commentary and assorted bits of gratitude. Archives
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