Mark Dixon: An interview with the urban poet
John R. Williamson interviews Mark Dixon:
1) Describe how you arrived at your subjects. Your book feels a bit like a cab ride sometimes.
That is the implicit metaphor of the book. I drove a taxi at night when I was in college, and the images of prowling those dark streets with one headlight out and the dispatcher muttering softly on the two-way radio have stayed with me all these years. The book is a late-night tour of the Los Angeles you won’t see on television, viewed from the back seat of my taxicab. You meet the broke film school student who steals across the alley with his biracial girlfriend late at night to explore the long-abandoned Ambassador Hotel. You witness the birth of a baby in the bucket seat of a stalled Ford Pinto in the tow-away zone outside County General Hospital, or a trumpet player stepping out the stage door for a smoke after the last show.
2) How long have you been writing poetry? Who or what led you to become a poet? How have your approach to your subject matter and your style changed through the years?
I’ve been writing poetry off and on since high school, but became what I’d call a serious poet about seven years ago when I started attending a local poetry reading. I met three very talented poets and formed a small poetry collective with them called the Furniture Guild, and since then I’ve done readings all over southern California, have discussed my work with English classes at several colleges, and of course published my first book. I’d say my poetry has been heavily influenced by the film noir genre, those great black-and-white Humphrey Bogart movies like “The Big Sleep”, and authors like Raymond Chandler who wrote the Philip Marlowe potboilers, Dashiell Hammett who wrote the Sam Spade series, and Erle Stanley Gardner who created Perry Mason. You’ll find a lot of the same kinds of imagery in my poetry:
the two-bit waterfront bar, the seedy motel, the shadows of Mulholland Drive, the hustlers and hookers and pimps that line the boulevards of Hollywood.
3) Tell us about the causes you are involved in.
I’m an activist for urban farming and community agriculture, and created a website and blog called New Farm City. I was involved in the struggle of the South Central Farmers to hold on to the two city blocks of land near downtown Los Angeles that they had cultivated as an urban farm for fourteen years. Sadly they lost the battle and ended up being forcibly evicted and their beautiful farm destroyed.
I’m a follower of Jesus, and am interested in starting a movement toward a more Jesus-based Christianity, showing today’s Christians a better path away from the ultra-conservative, politically charged belief system that marks much of evangelical Christianity today and is contrary to the compassion, tolerance and concern for the poor and outcast that Jesus himself taught and stood for. I have also been active in the gay and lesbian community, working to eliminate homophobia and discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation, and was recently invited to participate in a book project for the city of West Hollywood.
4) Where do you see justice in the world today?
I see efforts like American Apparel, a new sweatshop-free line of clothing being made in downtown Los Angeles. They’re providing affordable healthcare for the workers and their families, company-subsidized lunches, bus passes and classes in
English as a second language, as well as a working environment that is well lit, well ventilated and with safe, up-to-date equipment. They’re doing all that while also paying the highest wages in the local garment industry, and the clothing they sell is attractive, high quality and affordable. And successful — sales were over $250 million last year. It can be done.
5) Recommend a few books for us and tell us why we might enjoy them.
Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion. Her essays capture the mood of the Sixties with images that literally imprint themselves on your mind, introducing you to larger-than-life individuals that Dan Wakefield once described as “alive and botched and often mournfully beautiful.” Didion’s descriptions of life in America have never been far from my day-to-day thoughts ever since I first read that book.
I’m currently reading The Black Panthers Speak, edited by Philip Foner, it’s an astonishingly clear-eyed and brutally honest account of the origins of the Black Panther Party in the words of the men who created it — Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver. It shatters the current revisionist portrayal of the Panthers as armed thugs bent on destruction of the American way of life, and also takes you beyond the Party’s own self-serving political rhetoric into the heart of a movement that created free breakfast programs, neighborhood clinics and liberation schools, and where men quite honestly believed they were gearing up for a revolution.
6) Do you see any positive changes that are taking place in society?
Several large cities on the west coast have created special courts where homeless people charged with crimes can be diverted into programs to help them get off the streets and get cleaned up and rehabilitated instead of just doing another month or two in jail. That’s hopeful.
7) How do you expect your work to change in the future?
I’ve been talking with a couple of very talented friends about creating a media production and publishing collective that would take a stand and basically do action/advocacy media for causes and organizations that are too far left for everyone else. I imagine us fearlessly in everyone’s face, communicating.