Tony Scibella: the Poet in America
“O ocean
gull
poem & voice
adieu & adios
venice
pals: i
hope that that will do it.”
Tony Scibella, an artist and poet, (1933-2003) was one of the founders, along with poets Stuart Z. Perkoff, Frank T. Rios, John Thomas, Philomene Long, novelist Alexander Trocchi, and others, of the Venice West literary arts scene south of Los Angeles beginning in the 1950’s. This was the genesis of the SoCal Beat counter-culture in American letters, a short 380 miles south of Haight-Asbury.
Novelist/hipster/mentor Lawrence Lipton did his best to spotlight the Venice art scene with his ridiculous memoir, The Holy Barbarians, which did much accidentally to satirize the fairly serious culture of poets and painters for the tourists, who then flocked to Venice Beach in invasive pastel droves, looking for the beatniks. As Hillary Kaye put it in the Free Venice Beachhead, “It was a different Venice then. It was a breathing space between real estate booms. No bike path, no skate rentals, no sunglass vendors, no upscale restaurants, no valet service, no Hollywood celebrities, no gentrification, no ego sized mansions lining the canals. Venice was as simple as a Taoist dream. It was sufficiently primitive enough to pass for a seedy border town for Orson Welles’ classic film ‘Touch of Evil.”
As Tony himself wrote in his epic poem/autobiography The Kid in America (Denver: Passion Press, 2000) “…Venice was a summertown the locals rented rooms to vacationers from the city & then it closed in winter showed some snowcone life on weekends& drowsed u cd rent a whole house for 65$ …the people flee the city for the burbs forgetting the entire beach (bless em) a cheap pursuit of craft a place to do it described as a slum I never saw it thus: it is a bleedin paradise I reckoned salts on the sun oceanmotion gullquiet beach”
By 1960, outlaw bikers, drugs, sadistic beat cops and bad press put the brakes on this lively movement before it could gain any legitimate international traction. By then, the “San Francisco Renaissance” was attracting much of the mainstream media and featured a tested and savvy clique of literary gurus who had been battle-hardened by intense press scrutiny and such spectacles as the Howl obscenity trial and the soon-to-be-legendary Six Gallery reading.
Unnerved and enervated, by the early 1960’s, many of the writers and artists left the area and scattered across America in order to pursue their careers in relative peace. A few didn’t survive the psychic and physical onslaught of addiction, poverty and jail.
Tony continued making collage, writing and publishing his poetry and that of his friends. He helped poet William J. Margolis put out the literary magazine, Miscellaneous Man. He edited his own Black Ace imprint which published two of Stuart Z. Perkoff’s posthumous titles and contributed to that era’s irrepressible small press renaissance. Denver’s Alan Swallow, New Mexico’s Judson Crews, Diane DiPrima and LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) in New York, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and many others were all extolling the virtues of a new American poetry — anti-institutional, steeped in the vernacular of everyday life, spirited and experimental — that SANG!
Tony believed in community; he believed in a hip, Dionysian, creative-intuitive approach to writing that helped to access his Muse, who was sacred and fundamental to his growth as an artist and writer. His work came up out of the sea, the streets, his friends, he aligned himself with the more rebellious, like-minded, free-form individuals who relied on each other’s counsel and enthusiasm to further their artistic conjurings. After all, he came from Venice, California, a culture of creativity that spawned a beachfront of engaged raconteurs, renegades, writers and artists who found at least a couple of summers worth of magic in the hypnotic give and take of the tides, the climate, which was mostly ideal for living gratuitously just outside of society, and in the spirit of freedom and rebellion from the institutionalized conformist instincts of the desolate 1950’s.
Eventually, Tony moved his family to Denver, and lived there off and on, mostly as proprietor of his own bookstores on East Colfax and elsewhere, for 20 years. He was published in many of the classic lit mags and anthologies of the era, Passion Press, Mile High Underground, The Bowery, Moravagine, Miscellaneous Man, the Croupier, (Sic) Vice & Verse, HARP and others. He was joined in the late 1960’s by poet/publisher James Ryan Morris, editor of Mile High Underground, who instituted a series of “total theatre” events that began to shape Denver’s nascent literary character. Readings, gallery openings, and theatres were springing up all over town. At one point, he had invited his friends Perkoff and Rios to come to Denver and join him in his bookstore operation, which Perkoff did, with family in tow, upon his release from prison.
As John Arthur Maynard put it in his 1991 book, Venice West: The Beat Generation in Southern California: “In the mid-sixties, Scibella had moved to Denver and opened a bookstore; Frankie Rios eventually joined him. According to Scibella, the two of them were making nothing but money. With the hippie thing at its high-water mark, they were even minor celebrities —present at the creation, so to speak. Tony was offering Perkoff a place to live and a one-third interest in the store. The Three Stooges of the Promenade, (Rios, Perkoff and Scibella) would now become the new-and-used-book tycoons of Colfax Avenue.”
In 1991, Tony published the first of his eight volume art and poetry anthology Black Ace that ended with a 2007 tribute issue, following his death in Los Angeles in 2003. He published as fertile a roster of literary luminaries as you could find in the firmament of American letters at the end of the century: Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, George Herms, Jack Micheline, Charles Bukowski, Diane Di Prima, David Meltzer, Jack Hirschman, Janine Pommy Vega, Michael McClure, Stuart Z. Perkoff, Saul White, John Thomas and many others. Many were friends of his.
On a personal note, I first met Tony when I lived in Denver in the early 1980’s when he returned from the coast to open Black Ace Books on Colfax Avenue’s “book row.” He lived in the back of the store with his second wife, Gayle Davis. As was the tradition, he began to host poetry readings and publication parties. He helped me publish my first book which was a Black Ace/Long Road/Bowery collaboration. I loved and respected Tony because of his passion for the Word, his grace, his loyalties. The pursuit of literary fame and native prizes didn’t smolder within him, after experiencing some attention early on. (Although once it was discovered he was back in Denver, he was invited to read in Boulder with Reed Bye, hosted by Andy Clausen, with Anselm Hollo, among others, in attendance.)
As he said, reassuringly, in a magazine interview I did with him in Denver in 1986: “ . . its that everybody who’s tried to do this, everybody that you’ve never even heard of, that make the whole chain of doing & that fame or something is fate, chance, luck, it doesn’t matter, you know, if it wasn’t Ginsberg, it’d be somebody else, or what’s the difference? So that kinda passes you by . . you have to have that kind of personality to mail stuff out . . after a while you just kinda turn in; it’s just you do your work & the rest will take care of itself. Just do your work, She’ll take care of you somehow.”
Tony had five beautiful children. He was a gambler, loved games of chance and the track. He wrote like people talked. His last two titles, The Kid in America and I’m Afraid There Will be No Parade for Us were published by Passion Press in Denver in the early 2000’s. A small posthumous volume, Retirement Poems was published in New Mexico by Desert Shovel Press in 2005. He had an affinity for working Americans, (he painted houses for a living), the laborer, the “oaf” and professed his allegiance often. He devoured pulp westerns, the Sacketts, Dashiell Hammett. He had a great collection of vintage Ace paperbacks. One year, Tony and the artist Steve Wilson had a push-pin, “don’t tell know one” art exhibit and reading at a small gallery on South Broadway in Denver. The show featured mostly collage by both artists. He and Wilson served a red, white and blue themed snack array with crackers, assorted processed lunch meats, Velveeta cheese and Cokes. The spread was not without its conscious humor and patriotic irony. The art on the walls was, for the most part, sans frames: bold, brilliant and without borders. I once asked him what the meaning was behind his seemingly defeatist and slightly nihilist-nik mantra “don’t tell no one” and he replied: “Because you never know who might show up.”
A few poems by Tony Scibella
Monday here
this is Monday
lines before me
the first
poem
is there no excuse
for blunder
stabbed by the hand
with pen
so easy
of men
jungle green
in rows
of tabulation –
so many for us
too many of them
the sporting news
how unique
the abstract notion
today in moderate
action
the guerillas
beat the baboons
theres a tendency to sit
loaf w/life
see agony every day
pay no mind
as the news cast flash
the worlds on fire
that’s
endeavors lost
in winds
nobly considered
& cast in regrets
then: how is there
hope in my pocket
are we lonely animals?
never answers:
only when the worlds
in flames
only as the every day
beats us to dust
building boxes
w/no bottoms
for our possessions.
*
spring swing
rain wet
fresh born
the crop seeded
& brite green things shoot for the sun
lite winks on us
i am weak too
new
colt-like skinny legs
wobble bones in the air
tremble to support my own weight
chesty
heart-beat
new word world
springtime sattidy nite
fiddle-stringed knife notes
the wired fingers
box blowin
we seek to speak
to all green thumbs
who look to the sun
& feel the rain in the face
moon juice
partial to poets
the ladys tears.
*
in my life, my love
I’m clutching
in my life
my love
as it is the last
to last
not putting silk
on every one
I meet
nor edit
in my mind
whats left
to give
not given
*
drifter
(for bill dailey
no one made him go
i’m sure
it wuz something
not understood
tugged him away
beyond mountains
of rivers
some sweet song
some recall him saying
when he left
to seek the voice
that sang to him
he almost never found
but then its not the finding
it’s the search
made him drift
listening always
no one made him go
leave home
take to roads
to fail
& in some lock-step insanity
he marches still
& he will not stop
for he cannot stop
o! it’s such a bitter grave
*
tourista
(for gayle
each journey begins
as I tell her
I love her
crawling across
spain on my knees
while the man
w/the stick
pokes holes in my head
letting the sunlight in
the voice is saying: u
are allowed one love
& I know it as
the earth spins
beneath our feet
& new characters
appear in song
& we move
to find a closeness
not found thru
rooms we have known
forever & nothing
fits back
into each bag
as planned so carefully
we have walked streets
familiar w/their
strangeness
we have been
have we been?
down before
in laffter
& chilly rain
as warm as love
can make us
*
A Brief Scibella Bibliography
Big Trees Denver, 1972
Ace Is Black Of Course Denver, 1976
Turning for Home . . . Los Angeles, 1982
Bowery/West (editor) Denver, 1983
Two For Her (w/Frank Rios) Venice, 1989
Later Poems Los Angeles, 1990
The Kid in America Denver, 2000
I’m Afraid There Will Be No Parade For Us Denver, 2002
Retirement Poems, 2005, Santa Fe
Copyright 2019 by John Macker
###
Tony at The Ward Public Library Colorado, Fall 2001. Photo by Ed Ward
Photos by Marcia Ward
