Frank Rios (2009)

Frankie Rios is the author of eleven books of poetry. One of the last Beat poets of Venice Beach still with us today, his reading presents a special opportunity to hear poetry that helped to shape a generation of American poets, novelists, songwriters and artists.

Frankie Rios was born in the Bronx in New York in 1936. Abandoned at birth, he spent his first two years in a Catholic orphanage and was then moved to a foster home. He did not speak until the age of 6. By the time he was 12, he had a serious drug addiction and was transferred to a recovery house. Under the guidance of a teacher there, he became interested in acting, and went on to study at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York City. Later, Rios turned his attention to poetry. In 1956, he wrote "The Ball Poem," a poem Rios says he "received," rather than wrote.

Feeling as though he were being "guided," Rios arrived in Venice, CA in 1959, and joined a community of Beat poets, prominent among them, the late poet-painter Stuart Perkoff and the late Tony Scibella. On a moonlit night in Topanga Canyon, in the company of his friends, Rios had a mystical experience in which he felt chosen by the Muse to receive poetry.

The poetry of Frankie Rios, as well as his life, is suffused with the mystical. His work is enigmatic, using religious terms paradoxically contained within a context of hard living, drug addition, trouble with the law. Sensuous and symbolic, Rios straddles the border of stark human realities with the mystery of divine possession, an experience of poetic inspiration that seems to rise anew from the ancient Greek tradition.

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