Director is among poets scheduled to perform

Two up-and-coming poets will read from their works at Golden West College on Friday, the night of the Tebot Bach poetry organization’s monthly featured readings. One writes of the distance between Russia and America, and the other writes to bridge the gap between himself and his own life.

Stephen Gyllenhaal is better known as a film and TV director, or as the father of acting star siblings Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal. But it’s precisely the struggles with work, with Hollywood and with family that turned Gyllenhaal into a poet.

Poetry began as a kind of therapy, part of the free-ranging journal entries Gyllenhaal made to express dissatisfaction in his life.

“I found my life not answering some basic questions,” he said. “For me, like most people’s lives in 21st century USA, life wasn’t making a lot of sense — even though I was having a good amount of success.”

As time went on, he became fascinated with the shapes and sounds of what he was writing.

“I guess I would attribute it to a childishness,” he said. “Words were not appearing to me as data, but closer to music. A child doesn’t understand what a word means, or barely what it means — there’s only the sound.”

Gyllenhaal kept his writings private until his famous children gave him some encouragement, nudging him to try to get published.

After a number of his pieces showed up in literary journals, publisher Cantarabooks contacted him and released “Claptrap,” his first book of poems, in 2006.

Taking his work on the road is a release, Gyllenhaal said, calling it a performance on a very intimate level.

“I love reading out loud,” he said.

“I love it. The fact that I do it to strangers has been very invigorating and freeing. If I can do this, I can do anything.”

And “anything” is precisely what Gyllenhaal is doing right now, from experiments in writing prose to filming a comedy pilot for Showtime to making plans to direct film again.

“For a bunch of years I stopped, because I had nothing to say,” he said. “Now, I have plenty.”

Also reading is Southern California poet Carol Davis, whose manuscript “Into the Arms of Pushkin: Poems of St. Petersburg” won the T.S. Eliot prize and will be released on Truman State University Press this fall.

Davis’ poems, which stem from more than a decade of travel back and forth to Russia — whether alone, teaching on Fulbright grants, or with her children — speak of the struggle to “live in another language,” as she calls it.

At the same time, Davis called Russia a place where poetry is taken seriously — dissident poets were once jailed, but they have also served as the conscience of a nation.

“There’s such a tradition of poetry there,” she said. “It was such a revelation. I could say I was a poet and nobody ever asked me what I ‘really’ did, or expected me to be a dead white male drunk.”

IF YOU GO:

WHAT: Poetry by Stephen Gyllenhaal and Carol Davis

WHEN: 8 p.m., Friday

WHERE: Community Room 102, Golden West College, at Gothard Street and Edinger Avenue.

INFORMATION: (714) 968-0905