It’s not hyperbole to say that there’d be no poetry in Orange County, California if it weren’t for Marta Mitrovich. Mitrovich, who died March 25, 2002 of natural causes at age 91, may well have been Orange County’s most influential poet -- which is funny, because few of the poets reading around the County’s multitudinous readings today know who she was, and fewer still have met her.

But influential she was. Born in Yugoslavia, Mitrovich lived in London during World War II and the Blitz, relocating in 1941 to the US, where her career as a stage and screen actress included the 1953 version of Titanic. In the mid-1970s (the actual date varies depending on whom you talk to) she founded the current incarnation of Laguna Poets, California’s longest running weekly poetry series, bringing major poets like Allen Ginsberg, Charles Bukowski, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and others to read in Orange County. Mitrovich’s passion for poetry was the spark that ignited Laguna Poets and the dozens of readings that imitated it (knowingly and unknowingly) around Orange County and LA, and was matched only by her passion for free speech. (In the 1950s, she told the House UnAmerican Activities Committee to “stuff it.”)

I only met her a handful of times, back around 1987, when Laguna Poets was held at the Laguna Beach Library. I was a shy teenager in a Goth phase, sulking in back while the crowd of mostly aging hippies read poems. Mitrovich seemed somewhat aloof from the reading, in a “what if Grace Kelly had grown old and hosted a poetry reading” sort of way. Her grace and poise seemed... incongruous.

Local poet John Gardiner once told me that each time Marta introduced a poet, it was as if she were holding a diamond up to the sun: they seemed to just glisten in her presence. Certainly, most poetry hosts are obsequious, some even sycophantic in the praise they heap on their charges. Mitrovich was neither, but instead seemed truly awed at “these rough-hewed men,” to borrow Yeats’s phrase, who found the courage to speak whatever language they found in their hearts.

Says Pat Cohee, who currently hosts Laguna Poets, “One of Marta’s favorite characterizations of poetry was that it raises the expression of particular situations and emotions to a level of universal values which can serve to bring people together no matter what ideology they follow.”

Mitrovich retired in to Garbo-like seclusion in 1990, disappearing near-entirely. On a Saturday in May, Laguna Poets held a thinly attended memorial reading for her. S.A. Griffin, an LA poet who attended, was somewhat dismayed that so few of the contemporary poetry scene attended. “People in poetry these days really don’t know what happened before they got there. There’s a rich history of poetry in Orange County, and of vital human beings. Marta was definitely one of them. She was one of the 1st who believed in my work, and who fostered my work.... she was such a lightning rod of humanity.”

Victor Infante

Victor Infante was our Orange County Museletter correspondent until 2001, when he moved back to Worcester, Massachusetts and then became our New England correspondent. His collection of poems, Learning To Speak, was released by FarStarFire Press in 1999. His previous feature articles for About Poetry are:

• “Poetry in Times Like These,” a meditation on poetry’s place and the debt of our art in the post-9.11.01 time of war & crisis.
  
  
• “The Center Cannot Hold: Slam, Academia & the Battle for America’s Bourgeoisie,” an essay on the generational cycles of poets & poetic institutions, class & politics in American poetry, slam poetry’s evolution into a new establishment.
  
  
• “The Beat Goes On: Lawrence Ferlinghetti Is Still a Rebel,” an interview with Ferlinghetti on the Poet as Outsider.
  
  
• “Stranded: Poet Mark Strand Preaches Political Indifference at UCI,” a response to the effort to divorce poetry from politics.
  
  
• “But What If These Are Poetic Times?,” a commentary on the furor following LA Weekly’s fall 1999 review of local poetry.