Thursday, June 3, 2021
I received an email last night from Brooks Roddan that Fred Dewey has died. Brooks has been in steady contact with Fred’s family, and I have no other details to provide other than Fred’s friends from his many years at Beyond Baroque have been in renewed contact with him since mid-April.
Fred Dewey was born in New York City and educated there and at Brown University. He became involved with Beyond Baroque in the early 1990s and was more or less the only person around in 1994 who was willing to undertake the ordeal of keeping it alive. Despite Beyond Baroque’s legendary status, the decade between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s was a grueling marathon for poets in particular. The second term of Ronald Reagan’s presidency followed by G.H.W. Bush’s single term of office reflected an imaginative malaise in American culture that made it extremely difficult for an independent arts organization without any endowment to survive, let alone flourish.
Dewey single-handedly undertook the resurrection of Beyond Baroque and began to build up the Board of Trustees, which teetered in its support of him by the late 1990s. Fred wanted to emphasize Beyond Baroque’s roots in the poetry communities of Los Angeles, and eventually he prevailed and worked as the artistic director until almost the end of the first decade of this century. It was due to Fred’s efforts that Beyond Baroque was able to get its lease on the Venice City Hall renewed for 25 years, an accomplishment that is easy to take for granted when one attends events there in the third decade of this century. The magnitude of Fred’s legacy in getting the lease renewed will probably only be appreciated by the next person who has to navigate the continued location of Beyond Baroque at the beginning of the next decade.
Dewey subsequently lived in Berlin and North Carolina while working on various writing projects of political theory and social contestation. He was one of the best read and most thoughtful observers of public intellectual life I have met in the past half-century. He was that rare person — a friend and ally of poets who was not a poet himself. Somehow, that made his generosity in helping poets be more visible outside the academy all the more astonishing.
Rest In Power, as they say these days, my valiant one.
(Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center, Venice, California; Summer, 1997: from left to right: Paul Vangelisti; Jim Krusoe; Fred Dewey.)
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