On Sunday afternoon, December 7, 2025, Los Angeles area poets gathered at Beyond Baroque to read some of Cathy Colman’s poems. Colman was educated at San Francisco State University and she received her M.A. degree there in the mid-1970s after studying with Stan Rice. The poems in her M.A. these were already mature, memorable pieces of work and were far more substantial than one might expect of a person at her age.
Colman’s first book, BORROWED DRESS, did not appear until she was 40 years old, however, when her manuscript won the Felix Pollak prize from the University of Wisconsin Press. The book was popular enough soon after its publication that it made the Los Angeles Times bestseller list. Her poems were also gathered in two other collections, BEAUTY’S TATTOO (Tebot Bach) and TIME CRUNCH (What Books). Some of the magazines her work appeared in included Colorado Review, Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, and Plume. Her poems were also translated into Italian, Russian, and Croatian.
CATHY COLMAN
June 16, 1951 – April 30, 2025
BEYOND BAROQUE’S RECORDING OF THIS MEMORIAL EVENT:
(THE PROGRAM ON THE VIDEO DOES NOT BEGIN UNTIL ABOUT 17:17, so simply guide the red button to that point and Elena Karina Byrne will appear on the screen as one of the prime organizers of the event.)
I had hoped to attend, but I am no longer able to make long trips around Los Angeles two days in a row anymore. I had been at both DTLA and Beyond Baroque the day before, and traffic had been exhausting. Everyone at the Beyond Baroque event had spent at least an hour and a half getting to the event from where they lived.
The poem I had planned to read, if I could have attended as originally intended, was “While Deuterium and Tritium Spread,” which begins with an image from the 1950’s Cold War:
through animal and mineral, braiding
through my hair,
throwing open the window to the sky’s
cracked plate
of oysters and pearls, as
the clouds’ gold isotopes sail
through middle air’s
muddle, I can smell the wet pavement
from childhood rain
The poem ends with the kind of understatement that makes a theater script the most tantalizing form of imaginative literature. “the future waits offstage.” One feels the tremor of an haunting cue about to be spoken, and the effort it takes stay calm even as one knows that this Vesuvius will have a tsunami of lava that will obliterate almost all life on the planet.
Many of the poets who spoke at this event had known Cathy for years and spend considerable time with her or had studied at UCLA Extension with her or in private workshops, but I had hardly known her. I recollect once talking with her in the lobby of Beyond Baroque for about five minutes. Only afterwards did I revisit Suzanne Lummis’s WIDE AWAKE anthology and realize that Colman was inexplicably not in that collection, which came out in 2015. Colman was in Lummis’s most recent anthology, however, POETRY GOES TO THE MOVIES. with a two-page, three-part poem, dedicated to Chantal Akerman, entitled “News from Home.”
Colman’s metaphorical dexterity was on full display in the poems that her friends chose to read. One in particular stood out: “Happiness is a houseguest with an amiable smile after using all of the hot water to take a shower.” I don’t have the poem that image is from so that I can quote it exactly or with line-breaks, but I’ve not often encountered such a droll assessment of the motive and opportunity of happiness’s role in our lives.
Listening to Colman’s poems being read by her friends, nevertheless, will help assuage the sudden loss of yet another outstanding poet in Los Angeles.
Many thanks go out to Leslie Campbell and Elena Karina Byrne for making this event happen.
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