Poet Eric Priestly Still Fighting The Power

from the LA Times

Rhyme and reason in Watts

Poet Eric Priestly is in a fight with City Hall to remain in the neighborhood he’s written about for decades.

By Erin Aubry Kaplan May 7, 2008

 

Eric Priestley is out of his place.

It’s odd to think of him being out. Eric’s a poet and writer who until recently lived in the heart of Watts, arguably the most troubled part of town. He’s been there since 1982. I used to puzzle over an idealist like him living there, but it made sense because Watts created him. A survivor (barely) of the Watts riots and an original member of the Watts Writers Workshop, Eric found his calling in the heated aftermath of 1965. I first encountered him on the page almost 15 years ago, reading a book of his collected poetry called “Abracadabra.” 

 

I was immediately startled by his work — images and observations of L.A. that were sharp and unsparing but at the same time grand and affectionate, an impassioned counter-narrative to all the literary cliches about L.A. that play up detachment and the pursuit of glamour. Eric’s poems about love and his Louisiana-born family, promise and social injustice, felt like the blood in the city’s veins, the coal-fired engine of a civic imagination that’s rarely acknowledged. Here are some sample lines from “Lament on 103rd Street”: 

homeless lay I high in the weeds

a seed in scorched soil

a bud in flames

amongst the other children

beneath the trees of night.

“Abracadabra” was magic, indeed. But the magic, or whatever kept Eric close to Watts, has run its course. The city that he rendered so vividly in his work has put him out of his place, which is not technically a residence but a warehouse adjacent to the Watts Towers Arts Center. The reasons why and how Eric lived there at all are complicated, but suffice it to say it was partly out of loyalty and partly out of fiscal necessity. 

[ click to read full article in the LA Times ]