Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center has presented thousands of poets in public readings since it was founded, in Venice, California, in 1968 by George Drury Smith, whose primary interest was not a cultural center but a magazine that focused on avant-garde writing. Beyond Baroque’s survival during its first half-dozen years depended entirely on George’s determination and a handful of donations from compassionate arts advocates. What needs to be emphasized at this juncture in American literature is that Beyond Baroque was quite different from another project that was founded in NYC in the mid-sixties. The Poetry Project was started with funding from the federal government. Beyond Baroque idid not receive a penny of federal grant money for its first haff-dozen years.
Smith died two weeks ago, in Los Angeles, and I learned of his passing soon after it happened. I was asked by Beyond Baroque, however, to withhold any public statement until the organization had released a public tribute. A friend alerted me to a short statement on an Instagram account, so I assume I have permission tcall attention to Smith’s extraordinary accomplishments as an editor, publisher, and arts curator, in addition to being a writer himself.
In this post, I am going to take the liberty of letting George speak for himself through the biographical sketch that he posted to accompany the publication of his book, The Slant Hug o’ Time. I have memories of George that I would prefer to include in my own memoir rather than reveal them now. I do want to say, for the time being, that I would never have been able to come to the assistance of so many other poets in Los Angles unless George had empowered the small press scene in this city by securing the funding that started New Comp Graphics, a typesetting and book production facility at Beyond Baroque that stared in the mid-1970s. When the communities of poets thank George, it should be not just with a general nod toward Beyond Baroque, but to the very specific ways he invigorated a scene that could easily have withered in its earliest stages.
***
George Drury Smith (in his own words):
I currently divide my time between Los Angeles and Amsterdam, where my now-husband had several post-doctoral research teaching fellowships at Dutch universities after completing his PhD in theoretical linguistics at UCLA. He now has a language services business.
I occupy myself with writing, editing and reading. My novel, “The Slant hug ’o time,” was published by Kitsune Books in 2012 (available on Amazon).
I worked with Sophie Rachmuhl editing a translation of her French doctoral dissertation on the Los Angeles poetry scene which was published as “A Higher Form of Politics: The Rise of a Poetry Scene, Los Angeles, 1950-1990” by Otis College of Art and Design’s Seismicity Editions in late 2014. I am listed as co-translator.
My interest in experimental, “avant-garde” writing spurred me to start the magazine Beyond Baroque in 1968 and I opened Beyond Baroque Center in Venice, California, which focused on literature, publishing, poetry and fiction readings and workshops, art exhibitions and musical presentations. In 1972 this became Beyond Baroque Foundation, a nonprofit tax-exempt educational organization. Around 1980 Beyond Baroque moved into The Old Venice City Hall, 681 Venice Blvd., Venice and I resigned as president and director of the foundation, but stayed on its board of trustees for another decade. What became known as Beyond Baroque Cultural Arts Center has survived, and is still in the Old Venice City Hall in Venice, said to be one of a handful of such institutions in the country.
I am currently working on what I call “memoires” relating to Beyond Baroque.
I am interested in languages, which I studied in Europe for three years as an undergraduate. I am still reasonably fluent in French, but much less so in Spanish and German, which I once spoke fluently. I studied in France, Spain, Austria and Germany for three years as an undergraduate and I received a Bachelor of Arts cum laude with majors in French and Spanish and a minor in German in1953 from Marietta College, and went on to the University of Minnesota as a graduate teaching assistant, but did not complete work for an M.A. Later I entered the Graduate Internship Program in Teacher Education at the University of California at Berkeley, and then did some graduate work in French, German and Spanish at the University of California at Los Angeles.
My careers have involved being a trainer and reservations manager for Pan American World Airways in Los Angeles, Chicago and Dallas; teaching foreign languages and ESL in San Jose and Santa Monica, California; working for The Argonaut, a weekly newspaper in the Los Angeles coastal area in various capacities, including copy editor, associate publisher and CFO.
I enjoy reading, movies (especially foreign and “far-out”), theater, classical music and art, and spend a few weeks in Paris several times a year while in Europe.
***
PRAISE FOR “The Slant Hug o’ Time”:
“HOWL meets ULYSSES in a book like no other! George Drury Smith, iconic founder of the Beyond Baroque magazine and Literary/Arts Center in Venice, California, crafts an amazing alternate-history tale of invention, corporate control, and hidden agendas, all told through Smith’s tour-de-force wordsmithing. “Playfully earnest and pleasantly baffling, ‘The slant hug o’ time’ is a work like no other. Enabled by rhymes, puns, anagrams, science, pseudo-science, reason and unreason, it joyfully elides the past, present, and future… In other it’s a slippery world out there, and welcome to it.” -Jim Krusoe, author of ‘Toward You’ (Tin House Books)
About Bill Mohr