For poet S.A. Griffin, bombing at a reading won't be bad

LOS ANGELES — Poetry readings have always been a blast for S.A. Griffin, but the tour that the venerable Los Angeles poet plans this spring may be his most explosive.

This time the author of such collections as "Unborn Again" and "One Long Naked Dance" will be packing his poems inside of a Cold War-era bomb and taking them on the road. The idea is to create the constructive from the destructive.

"I'm taking one of the most iconic images of destruction of the 20th century and turning it into something positive," says the strapping Griffin, who at 6-foot-3 is nonetheless dwarfed by the gun-metal gray performance-art companion that rises more than 7 feet tall when tilted on end. He found the dummy bomb, which contains no explosives, on the Internet and bought it for $100.

His plan: bring the bomb to a city near you, dropping rhymes and free verse by the hundreds on audiences everywhere from Atlanta to Montana, Oregon to North Carolina and points in between. His aim is to get people to wake up to poetry.

"What I'm really doing here is like publishing poetry in a journal," says Griffin, who is also coeditor of the 1999 journal "The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry," a sprawling opus of 720 pages that contains the works of everyone from the beats' Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso to modern-day writers like Luis J. Rodriguez and Jimmy Santiago Baca.

"But when you publish poetry in a journal, usually the only people who pay any attention to it are other poets," adds Griffin, 55, a member of the so-called outlaw generation of American poets that followed Ginsberg, Corso and the other beats of the 1950s.

Oregon-based poet Scott Wannberg, who has sent along a submission inspired by the bomb, agrees it's likely to get more attention than any of the work he's had published in nine volumes over the years.

"What's more devastating, a good poem or a good bomb?" Wannberg asks with a laugh.

Griffin has spent decades attempting to bring poetry to the masses, placing poems on the sides of buses, on billboards, in beer bottles. Several times he's crisscrossed the country in a vintage Cadillac convertible with a loose-knit group of fellow poets called The Carma Bums, giving readings at coffee houses and small theaters around the country.

He plans to go on the road for five weeks beginning in April, making more than a dozen stops around the country, but with just the bomb in tow this time.