Back in the daze when I was known only as Raindog, I lived in a little town at the end of the Harbor Freeway. I was blissfully happy. Then something happened and everything changed, forever.
This collection originally appeared, in part, under the title Pedro Blue (published by VHP Press). I have republished it with some updates and new poems, because it had gone out of print and the previous publisher had no interest in reprinting it.
It contains some of my earliest poems from around the time that I came out of poetry-hybernation in 1993-94. Many of these poems still hold up today, in my opinion.
The theme here, loosely, is life in a small town: the characters, the locales, the insights and delusions. San Pedro, it's not just for breakfast anymore.
Excerpt
6th & Mesa, Halloween
White gulls like bits of confetti
scatter overhead
seemingly startled by
blue sky and jet's traversing
path.
The postal mouth accepts my offering.
Professional Reviews
The San Pedro Poems
Readers who enjoyed Armstrong's two 1,000-line 'road-poems' (A Journey Up the Coast [CA] and On/Off the Beaten Path [CA to NM and back]) will enjoy these 38 shorter poems showing the origin of this poet's clear and strong poetic voice: his 6-year stay in San Pedro, CA - its bars, rentals, lonesome dreams and the street. Not strangely, there are 8 'car-poems' - cruising the city's roads - where the author makes some pretty astute observations: "She stumbled down the sidewalk / fighting with a large white 'sports' bag. / She wore a tight knit black dress / that seemed determined to ride up to an interesting height. / It was late, nearly one AM…". She brings to memory other such women met in first settling down in San Pedro. The poet learns to understand the hardness of their lives, but also, "I saw the comedy amidst the ruins… / waiting for a phone call to make her one fuck closer to that final fix… / a woman drunk on sex (or whatever) / stumbles home, her skirt heading North faster than she can." Pueblo de las Putas effectively shows a tough side of the coastal city.
But most of the poems reveal the poet's daily life, his own mind and dreams. In While Reading Lorca, "Often I am thinking of you / …alone in the house / washing dishes / or taking a leak… / listening to my friends / bantering / or conversations overheard / at a bar / or a café…". Line-lengths, random activity, are well-ordered to speak of this longing for a mysterious love, "rushing into / and through my life / on your way to somewhere else." Love is a sometime thing in these poems. In Future X, "My future ex-wife and I have been spending / a lot of time together, lately / Tongues are beginning to wag / in the local 'hangs'… // So I wait for my number to be called / as the tongues wag / and the hands sweep…". Loneliness, too, is a recurrent motif floating through much of this poetry - and it bears down hard: "Four in the morning / and I am awakened by the / staccato dripping of water / not from the tap / but rather / from the eaves / above my bedroom…[a foghorn sounds, then the memory of a] "woman several blocks away / grieving for her animal / killed on the coast highway." This 100-line poem moves through a litany of "lonesome things," and their strength is that they are plainspoken images - unrefined; not oblique, esoteric or academic. In Love, Pedro Style, another try at bliss bites the dust, but the poet's personae are tough - aware, witty - and will survive: "I was just a comfort station on / your way to Easy Street… / But do not be concerned about me / I'm gonna be just fine / You were just the broom / that I forgot to duck under / Just the other shoe dropping / Just the shit hittin' the fan / Nothin' much at all…".
This good-natured persona - its knowing wit - is what will always lift Armstrong's poetry above the ordinary, the reader comfortable (ever welcomed into a poetic home of clear image and emotion). That is important, for both reader and poet, because what unfailingly emerges is Hope and Dream: "The night is unfolding around me / and I am on the bridge / and the lights in the bay are calling / and the ripples make the lights dance / and I am pleased… / and I am pleased as I ride home / and life is finally making some sense / and I am pleased / and it is rare that I am pleased / on the bridge / as the night unfolds inside me…". This poem, of course, is entitled, AND. There is no unclimbable, impenetrable, brick wall; there is no enervating cul-de-sac or dead end. There is failure, hurt, confusion - a constant restlessness; yet all these very human scars are slowly healed by a daily persistent observation and consideration (active thinking); and by tomorrow's possibility. That's good poetry, and I recommend The San Pedro Poems.
Tim Scannell
