Roll Call

Monday, December 2, 2013

My second anthology of Los Angeles poets, “POETRY LOVES POETRY,” came out in 1985. I am hoping to have a reunion reading at Beyond Baroque in 2015 by the contributors to that book to mark the 30th anniversary of its publication. As part of that celebration, I hope that Sheree Levine will be willing to mount an exhibition of all the photographs of the poets that appeared in the collection’s rear section. At the time, I got some criticism from Joe Safdie for not including poetics statement in the book and instead giving that space to a portfolio of full-page portraits of each poet. In retrospect, I wish that I had done both, but at the time I was hard-pressed just to make the book happen. I still profoundly regret the absence of Scott Wannberg’s poems from PLP. That was an inexcusable lapse on my part.

The death of Wanda Coleman made me pause for a moment and realize how many poets in Los Angeles have died since PLP was published. The roll call follows; exactly half of the list (nine of 18) were poets who appeared in PLP.

Dick Barnes

Bill Bitting

Charles Bivens

Charles Bukowski

Wanda Coleman

Robert Crosson

Maria Fattorini

Bob Flanagan

Manazar Gamboa

Robert Greenfield

Joseph Hansen

Lee Hickman

Carol Lem

Steve Richmond

Peter Schneidre

Ann Stanford

John Thomas

Scott Wannberg

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