Fred Dewey: Keeper of Several Flames

                                                         photo by James Allardice

Clara Sturak
Associate editor
  
   The newest member of the Santa Monica Arts Commission is one the area’s most important cultural figures – a keeper of the flame for poets and poetry, a man of letters, a lover of language, and a mentor to local writers and readers.
   Fred Dewey, Executive and Artistic Director of Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center in Venice, will likely blush as he reads this. He’s not the self-promoting type (he didn’t even have a photo of himself to give this paper) but he is fond of promoting two things: culture and community.
   Although he’s the great-grandson of philosopher John Dewey, the younger Dewey is quick to point out that pragmatism isn’t necessarily his strong suit. When it comes to culture, he says, commerce and practicality fall by the wayside. Art serves a higher purpose. “Culture is critical to a vibrant public realm, and a vital public realm is critical to a vital public life,” he says, explaining what could be called his own philosophy.
   In his seven years at the helm of Beyond Baroque, Dewey has preserved it as a serious working and learning space for aspiring artists and intellectuals, while also, for lack of a better way of putting it, upgrading it into a more welcoming, comfortable and engaging center for the community-at-large.
   Beyond Baroque holds two or three poetry and fiction readings a week, featuring top-notch poets and writers from around the world. It offers scores of writers’ seminars and classes – including the longest-running free poetry workshop on the West Coast. That workshop, legendary among local poets, has been taught by the likes of Dennis Cooper, Tom Waits, Exene Cervenka and Amy Gerstler.
   The Center also houses a small but infinitely interesting bookstore and an art gallery. An imprint, Beyond Baroque Books, was started last year, and Dewey intends to revive the center’s magazine this winter. Ask any local poet where they hope to someday read – and they’ll tell you: Beyond Baroque.
   A stroke of good luck and some ingenuity a few years back led Dewey to recover 65 folding movie theater-style chairs from the dumpster outside the Santa Monica Courthouse. A courtroom remodel and the City’s lack of imagination soon became the central element of Beyond Baroque’s theater/reading space. Beyond Baroque’s regulars debated whether the chairs might be too comfortable – no falling asleep!
   Though Dewey would never say this, I will: not all poets are great performers, and there’s no more Zen an experience than sitting through a slow, quiet, halting poetry reading on a metal folding chair. This listener can tell you, sitting in the new chairs is like being promoted from purgatory into heaven.
   Two years ago, Beyond Baroque received an anonymous donation of $50,000 a year for the next four years, which helped to launch Beyond Baroque Books, of which Dewey is the editor. Dewey is setting aside some of the grant money to fund a project close to his heart: Beyond Baroque’s poetry archives.
   Hidden behind closed doors in the Center’s bookstore are three small rooms – one holds a significant collection of poetry, experimental fiction and literary criticism titles, most of which have been donated to the organization over the years; another houses collections of literary magazines and poetry journals spanning decades.
   The third, and the one Dewey is most proud of, is a collection of poetry chapbooks – the small, often handmade (sometimes just xeroxed and stapled) publications of poets’ works. Dewey calls chapbooks “an ephemeral art form,” and adds that the archive serves as a “model for young writers, to give emerging poets a sense of the possibilities … and to remind them that in poetry it’s honorable to publish your own work.”
   Although he’s new to the Santa Monica Arts Commission, Dewey, a resident of Ocean Park, is excited about participating in what he considers a most necessary part of that “vital public life.” It does seem like a perfect fit. When he’s not mentoring young writers or preserving the works of Venice’s legendary beat poets, Dewey finds other ways to participate in public sphere. He was a leading proponent of Los Angeles’ Neighborhood Councils, and considers “building a tradition of safe public discussion” the only way that, “as a community, we can build support for the arts and make the argument that art is important.”
   As a commissioner, he hopes to be a voice for the spoken word – for stories, language, and of course, poetry.
   And please don’t stop at poetry readings, Dewey begs. Language can be used in so many other ways…
   Take for, example, the Venice Poetry Wall. Part of the City of Los Angeles’ upgrade of the Venice boardwalk, it was originally planned to feature quotes from historical figures. Dewey put in his two cents, and now it stands at the end of Windward Avenue, covered in the words of Wanda Coleman, Charles Bukowski, Philomene Long, Manazar Gamboa and other prominent Venice poets.
   The combination of metaphor and concrete (I mean actual concrete, what the wall is made of) works for Dewey. “One of the great things about language is the tradition of oral history, of recollection and description. That comes through words. Everyone shares language,” he explains. That commonality brings its own value to the world of art.
   He’s concerned about the recent departure of Commission liaison and City Cultural Affairs Manager, Maria Luisa de Herrera, and about rumors that her position won’t be filled.
   “Art invokes history and memory – and interpretating the world around us,” Dewey says. And like a library full of books, or a monument or a City ordinance, public art interprets and preserves a handprint of this place – Santa Monica — at a particular moment in time.
   With this firmly in mind, Dewey says, “I think it’s absolutely crucial that somebody with experience in the arts … who has a national point of view, and knows how to work with the public run [the department].” To leave the position empty would leave the City without its cultural librarian.
   Putting his money where his mouth is, Dewey welcomes comments or ideas from Santa Monica residents about what how they envision the City’s role in supporting the arts. He can be reached via email at frdewey@aol.com.