Tag Archives: Charles Bukowski

Books

Gerald Locklin (1941-2021)

Sunday, January 17, 2021

Gerald Locklin (1941-2021)

The W-E Bicoastal Poetry Reading Series took place this afternoon and it went very well, though my heart was incredibly heavy. Shortly after 1 p.m., I learned that Gerald Locklin had died shortly before 8 a.m. Eileen Klink, the chair of the English Department at CSU Long Beach, sent out an email mid-day announcing his death, which was due to covid-19.

Most of the Los Angeles poetry community has heard the news by now. Out of respect for Gerry and his family and friends, I am not going to saything other than he was one of the founders of Stand Up poetry, a movement whose earliest practitioners were based in Long Beach. It became well enough known that Edward Field make a special point in his anthology A GEOGRAPHY OF POETS of mentioning the unlikelihood of anything poetic coming out of Long Beach. Poetry in California was supposed to have its pedigree in North Beach, not Long Beach, but Locklin had a gift for the comic poem that influenced an entire generation of poets in Southern California.

If Locklin went unrecognized by East Coast canon shapers, he didn’t let on that it bothered him that much. He was too busy working on the next poem. I’ll grant anyone that it’s impossible to publish 3,000 poems and have all of them be of equal quality, but it’s not necessarily the poet’s job to be the adjudicator. Some of his finest poems are his ekphrastic commentaries that he started producing in the last portion of his writing life, and I don’t believe he would been so deft at that form if he devoted himself to a poetics of casual improvisation.

If you are not familiar with his work, it shouldn’t be too hard to find one of his books or a few representative poems in an anthology such as Charles Harper Webb’s STAND UP POETRY or my anthology POETRY LOVES POETRY. or Suzanne Lummis’s GRADN PASSION and WIDE AWAKE: Poets of Losn Angeles and Beyond.

Gerald Locklin was born in 1941 in Rochester, New York and went to Catholic schools, an experience memorably recorded in his classic Stand Up poem, “The Criminal Mentality.” He earned a M.A. and Ph.D. from Arizona State University, which is where I believe he came to know one of his early compatriots in the Stand Up movement, Ron Koertge. Locklin started teaching college in Southern California in the mid-1960s and earned a formidable reputation as a professor whose knowledge of literature matched his willingness to spend time in local bars: one of his best-known early. poems was entitled “Beer.” His literary alter ego, Toad, never seemed to lack for anecdotal levity.

In an interview, Charles Bukowski was asked about his opinion of contemporary poets in Los Angeles. Bukowski dismissed them all as mediocrities, except for one: Gerald Locklin. It should be emphasized that Locklin did not earn that praise because he was Bukowski’s drinking buddy. Locklin more than once commented that the secret of his relationship with Bukowski was that he kept his social distance from him.

Fortunately for the rest of us in Los Angeles, Gerry embraced us with a Fastaffian generosity. I could say he will be missed, but that had already begun before he died. I am lucky enough to have those memories to console me. R.I.P,, Gerry.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

REPRINT FROM OVER FOUR YEARS AGO:

Dead Solid Perfect: Gerald Locklin’s memoir poem about John Thomas and Charles Bukowski (or, From Beef Tongue to Tip of the Tongue: An Homage to Bukowski’s Friend, John Thomas, by Another of Bukowski’s Friends, Gerald Locklin)

Tuesday, September 27, 2016

On the verge of turning 24 years old, in the early autumn of 1971, I was asked to become the first poetry editor of a magazine its founder and publisher, Ted Reidel, intended to call Bachy. The name was meant to be a diminutive of his bookstore, Papa Bach Paperbacks. He put an advertisement in the Los Angeles Times announcing his new magazine and submissions started arriving. He gave me a desk in the upstairs loft and I worked there in the evenings after finishing my shift as a blueprint machine operator. I myself was an unpublished poet, and cannot account for Ted’s decision to entrust me with this role other than he must have had a great deal of faith in his one of his employee’s opinions. I had gone into the store to buy some poetry books in the late summer and had struck up a conversation with William (“Koki”) Iwamoto, who was working behind the counter. He invited me to read at an upcoming open reading at Papa Bach, and it was in the week after this reading that Koki said that Ted wanted to talk with me. He said he couldn’t pay me to work as the poetry editor, but that he would be happy to offer me a job at the store. I was making twice as much money as a blueprint machine operator, however, and overtime was helping me accumulate some savings, and so I remained strictly a volunteer presence at the store. Koki left within six months to start his own store, Chatterton’s, on Vermont Avenue. He, too, offered me a job, but that would have meant moving to the other side of Los Angeles and made visiting the Beyond Baroque workshop a long trek.

One day, the pile of submissions included a fairly large number of poems from Charles Bukowski, whose poems I was not particularly enamored with. I did not own any books by Bukowski, but there were plenty of copies of Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame for sale at Papa Bach, and since I had heard other older poets at Beyond Baroque talk about his poetry, I spent some time with the book in the Papa Bach loft. His use of enjambment seemed far too arbitrary to suit my preferences for Hart Crane and John Berryman. On the other hand, I had seen some of his poems in the early issues of INVISIBLE CITY, and liked those poems much more. I was both excited and nervous as I read Bukowski’s submission. I knew that if I did not like the poems, I would face my first big challenge in writing a rejection note.

Fortunately, I liked several of Bukowski’s poems much more than I anticipated and ended up including his poetry in the first issue of Bachy along with the work of several young poets I knew from San Diego State College as well as some young poets (David St. John and Roberta Spear) to whom Phil Levine had mentioned my magazine after I had visited him in his office at Fresno State. It was Bukowski’s close friend, John Thomas, however, who ended up having a more profound influence on my development as a poet and editor. His first eponymous collection of poems was a spiral-bound publication that I reviewed in the second issue of Bachy. It was the general consensus in the community that Thomas was one of the best poets living in Los Angeles. He had stopped writing, however. Whenever a poem showed up in a magazine back then, it was simply a reprint of an earlier poem. No one seemed to mind. His poems were always worth rereading, and the respectful enthusiasm that Lee Hickman and Paul Vangelisti accorded Thomas gave his maverick aura a palpable voltage.

Recently, Gerald Locklin sent me a poem that reminisces about spending some time with Thomas. As anyone knows who has studied Bukowski’s career at all, Locklin is one of the few poets Bukowski retained any respectful affection for over any significant stretch of reading. Locklin has often admitted that the secret of their friendship was to limit the amount of time they spent together, and especially the amount of time that they spent drinking together. Thomas was not anywhere near as interested in alcohol as Bukowski, nor was he inclined (or so he once said) to indulge in marijuana. He liked to read, and he claimed to abstain from anything that would impede that pleasure. As testified to by Locklin’s poem, Thomas obviously retained much of what he read.

Once Again Bukowski Was Right On

In a poem called “Beef Tongue,”
About his old drinking buddy and fellow poet,
John Thomas, Buk speaks of his enormous
Intelligence: how he knew just about everything,
Had read just about everything,
And could discuss just about everything.
I’d met Big John (a pseudonym) a few times
And had taken a liking to him,
But I’d never gotten to know him well enough
To tell whether he was really as smart as
Buk claimed he was, or that maybe he had once been,
But had washed some of it away with the beer,
A substance that we had all consumed in quantity,

Then I was in a room with John once
When a bunch of other pretty bright people
Were displaying their erudition,
So I sprang on them, “What language is Welsh
Closest to? (because I had spent a semester there
On a teaching exchange), and, after a brief silence,
John answered, correctly, “Breton,”
And a few minutes later, John said something about
Byron having had a terrible voice, and someone asked him,
How he could possibly know that, and John said,
“Only from Trelawny, and the Countess Guiccioli,”
And he also cited the title of Trelawny’s masterpiece,
Which, frankly, I don’t remember myself anymore,
Now that I’m retired from teaching Brit Lit Survey Courses,
And thus have even less reason to carry relatively
Arcane knowledge on the tip of that tongue that has
Floated to the back of my brain. But when I looked
It up the next morning, John Thomas had gotten it
Dead Solid Perfect. So Charles Bukowski may not
Have had an encyclopedic memory himself, but he
Could sure spot the rare autodidactic friend
Who did.

For those who are curious about one of the poems by Bukowski that I selected for the first issue of Bachy magazine, here’s a link:
http://bukowskiforum.com/threads/purple-and-black-1972.1210/

Books

Paul Vangelisti’s Tribute to Holly Prado (December 7, 2019)

Wednesday, December 10th, 2019

Paul Vangelisti attended two memorials this past weekend. On Saturday, December 7th, a tribute and memorial for the artist and teacher Don Suggs was held on the campus of UCLA. Having collaborated with Suggs and Martha Ronk on several books, as well as co-editing various magazine projects with him, Paul first spoke at his gathering, attended by well over 400 people; he then drove to Beyond Baroque, where he guided the memorial for Holly Prado back to the early 1970s.

*. *. *. *. *

HOLLY’S MEMORIAL

I’m not very fond of memorials but Holly’s passing not only left me desolate, it was an indelible loss. If I can put it somewhat coldly, above all else Holly’s career was, no, is a touchstone for what it means to be an artist in Los Angeles, not the kindest and most welcoming place for anything outside of Hollywood’s Dream Factory. A place where, in Gore Vidal’s words, we “do well what should not be done at all.” And stepping even further back from this moment, I can’t help but consider today’s date, December 7. Pearl Harbor Day. That day in 1941 when the country changed, the West Coast came into prominence as the new focus of the American century and the American empire. The day my father, who’d just enlisted months before, was stationed near San Francisco, where he would, in a few years, meet my mother who’d immigrated there from Italy not long before.
Maybe memory, however byzantine and merciful, might be useful. I first met Holly in 1971 at the workshop Alvaro Cardona-Hine taught out of his house in North Hollywood. Alvaro had taken over from Gene Frumkin some years earlier, when Frumkin moved to New Mexico. Frumkin originally was part of a group, going back to fifties, that met at Tom McGrath’s place in Frogtown. Present at Alvaro’s that night were Barbara Hughes, Ameen Alwan, Rosella Pace, Sid Gershgoren and, of course, Holly, probably the youngest of the poets there. I was visiting to solicit work for a forthcoming Los Angeles anthology that Charles Bukowski, Neeli Cherkovski and I were editing,
One Saturday afternoon, we three met at Bukowski’s apartment to start puttting the anthology together. Bukowski had collected work by poets he knew and I did the same. We exchanged piles of manuscripts and sat in Bukowski’s small living room drinking beer and reading. It soon became obvious from the sighs and groans coming from Hank that he wasn’t at all pleased. Nor was I entirely happy with what I was reading, much too narrative and prosaic for my taste. Neeli fidgeted and I pretended to read carefully (both of us then in our mid-twenties), waiting for Bukowski to take the lead. When he finished, Bukowski stood up and took a few steps to the kitchen table where his typewriter sat, and dumped the entire bundle of poems into the wastebasket under the table. I took the bundle he had given me and did likewise. Bukowski then announced that we had made real progress and ought to get down to some serious drinking. Almost two hours and a couple of six-packs later, Bukowski went to the wastebasket and pulled out the manuscripts, and we began one by one discussing the poets and their poems.
Published by our respective presses, Laugh Literary and Man the Humping Guns and the Red Hill Press, the Anthology of L.A. Poets came out in 1972, the first book of its kind on the scene. Bukowski had brought the following to the venture: Gerda Penfold, Charles Stetler, Linda King, Gerald Locklin, Steve Richmond, Ron Koertge, John Thomas and himself and Neeli. I advocated William Pillin, Jack Hirschman, Robert Peters, Tony Russo, Stuart Perkoff, myself and three of the poets from Alvaro’s workshop, Ameen Alwan, Rosella Pace and Holly. The page right after Bukowski’s group of poems and just before Bob Peters’s – I can’t for the life of me recall how we decided on the order – ran two poems of Holly’s. First, “the garden”:

rilke has said that
each man will take with him
from the earth
one word that he loves most

I have been thinking all evening
just in case
and can’t go beyond
lizard

And then came this piece, “the forest covered with the moon,” still one of my favorite poems of Holly’s:

rocks at the edge of the fire
warm enough for my feet
you choose the right piece of wood
every time

the trout from the hidden stream
had a stripe of gold on his belly
we loved him
ate him without feeling sorry

it will rain all night
but we don’t know that yet.

— Paul Vangelisti

Biography Poetry

Dead Solid Perfect: Gerald Locklin Verifies Bukowski’s Praise of John Thomas

Dead Solid Perfect: Gerald Locklin’s memoir poem about John Thomas and Charles Bukowski (or, From Beef Tongue to Tip of the Tongue: An Homage to Bukowski’s Friend, John Thomas, by Another of Bukowski’s Friends, Gerald Locklin)

Tuesday, September 27, 2016

On the verge of turning 24 years old, in the early autumn of 1971, I was asked to become the first poetry editor of a magazine its founder and publisher, Ted Reidel, intended to call Bachy. The name was meant to be a diminutive of his bookstore, Papa Bach Paperbacks. He put an advertisement in the Los Angeles Times announcing his new magazine and submissions started arriving. He gave me a desk in the upstairs loft and I worked there in the evenings after finishing my shift as a blueprint machine operator. I myself was an unpublished poet, and cannot account for Ted’s decision to entrust me with this role other than he must have had a great deal of faith in his one of his employee’s opinions. I had gone into the store to buy some poetry books in the late summer and had struck up a conversation with William (“Koki”) Iwamoto, who was working behind the counter. He invited me to read at an upcoming open reading at Papa Bach, and it was in the week after this reading that Koki said that Ted wanted to talk with me. He said he couldn’t pay me to work as the poetry editor, but that he would be happy to offer me a job at the store. I was making twice as much money as a blueprint machine operator, however, and overtime was helping me accumulate some savings, and so I remained strictly a volunteer presence at the store. Koki left within six months to start his own store, Chatterton’s, on Vermont Avenue. He, too, offered me a job, but that would have meant moving to the other side of Los Angeles and made visiting the Beyond Baroque workshop a long trek.

One day, the pile of submissions included a fairly large number of poems from Charles Bukowski, whose poems I was not particularly enamored with. I did not own any books by Bukowski, but there were plenty of copies of Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame for sale at Papa Bach, and since I had heard other older poets at Beyond Baroque talk about his poetry, I spent some time with the book in the Papa Bach loft. His use of enjambment seemed far too arbitrary to suit my preferences for Hart Crane and John Berryman. On the other hand, I had seen some of his poems in the early issues of INVISIBLE CITY, and liked those poems much more. I was both excited and nervous as I read Bukowski’s submission. I knew that if I did not like the poems, I would face my first big challenge in writing a rejection note.

Fortunately, I liked several of Bukowski’s poems much more than I anticipated and ended up including his poetry in the first issue of Bachy along with the work of several young poets I knew from San Diego State College as well as some young poets (David St. John and Roberta Spear) to whom Phil Levine had mentioned my magazine after I had visited him in his office at Fresno State. It was Bukowski’s close friend, John Thomas, however, who ended up having a more profound influence on my development as a poet and editor. His first eponymous collection of poems was a spiral-bound publication that I reviewed in the second issue of Bachy. It was the general consensus in the community that Thomas was one of the best poets living in Los Angeles. He had stopped writing, however. Whenever a poem showed up in a magazine back then, it was simply a reprint of an earlier poem. No one seemed to mind. His poems were always worth rereading, and the respectful enthusiasm that Lee Hickman and Paul Vangelisti accorded Thomas gave his maverick aura a palpable voltage.

Recently, Gerald Locklin sent me a poem that reminisces about spending some time with Thomas. As anyone knows who has studied Bukowski’s career at all, Locklin is one of the few poets Bukowski retained any respectful affection for over any significant stretch of reading. Locklin has often admitted that the secret of their friendship was to limit the amount of time they spent together, and especially the amount of time that they spent drinking together. Thomas was not anywhere near as interested in alcohol as Bukowski, nor was he inclined (or so he once said) to indulge in marijuana. He liked to read, and he claimed to abstain from anything that would impede that pleasure. As testified to by Locklin’s poem, Thomas obviously retained much of what he read.

Once Again Bukowski Was Right On

In a poem called “Beef Tongue,”
About his old drinking buddy and fellow poet,
John Thomas, Buk speaks of his enormous
Intelligence: how he knew just about everything,
Had read just about everything,
And could discuss just about everything.
I’d met Big John (a pseudonym) a few times
And had taken a liking to him,
But I’d never gotten to know him well enough
To tell whether he was really as smart as
Buk claimed he was, or that maybe he had once been,
But had washed some of it away with the beer,
A substance that we had all consumed in quantity,

Then I was in a room with John once
When a bunch of other pretty bright people
Were displaying their erudition,
So I sprang on them, “What language is Welsh
Closest to? (because I had spent a semester there
On a teaching exchange), and, after a brief silence,
John answered, correctly, “Breton,”
And a few minutes later, John said something about
Byron having had a terrible voice, and someone asked him,
How he could possibly know that, and John said,
“Only from Trelawny, and the Countess Guiccioli,”
And he also cited the title of Trelawny’s masterpiece,
Which, frankly, I don’t remember myself anymore,
Now that I’m retired from teaching Brit Lit Survey Courses,
And thus have even less reason to carry relatively
Arcane knowledge on the tip of that tongue that has
Floated to the back of my brain. But when I looked
It up the next morning, John Thomas had gotten it
Dead Solid Perfect. So Charles Bukowski may not
Have had an encyclopedic memory himself, but he
Could sure spot the rare autodidactic friend
Who did.

For those who are curious about one of the poems by Bukowski that I selected for the first issue of Bachy magazine, here’s a link:
http://bukowskiforum.com/threads/purple-and-black-1972.1210/

Books Ground Level Conditions Poetry

Ted Simmons and the Venice Poetry Company

A FORGOTTEN ANTHOLOGY OF EARLY 1970s L.A. POETRY: Ted Simmons and the Venice Poetry Company

Even though I only vaguely remember meeting Ted Simmons in the early 1970s, I have half-convinced myself that he was still doing some occasional typesetting work at Beyond Baroque’s New Comp Graphics in the mid-1970s. If anyone has a specific recollection of him, please write me at William.BillMohr@gmail.com. I doubt that I will ever work on another book-length literary history, but I will keep whatever notes are sent to me in an archive so that others can draw upon them.
I was young enough back then that anyone over 30 did seem old enough to belong to the swamp of middle age. That much more in poetry was going on in L.A. County than I suspected back in the early 1970s is evidenced by an anthology edited by Ted Simmons, which encompassed the readings that were proliferating in Los Angeles County at the time. The book itself had an unwieldy title, but Simmons wrote a brief introduction that complements Joseph Hansen’s memory of the first five years of Beyond Baroque’s history in yesterday’s post. I reprint Simmons’s justification for his book:

“INTRODUCTION
“The Venice Poetry Company’s series of readings held variously in Venice, Santa Monica, Hermosa Beach and San Pedro reached at times those Orphic heights that a righteous setting, an audience of sense & sensibility, and poets of talent – some of genius – might promise.

“Poetry reading, while ranked hindmost in this day and age (far below ballet, even chamber music) is foremost as an art form. It is equal to drama in its drama; equal to music in its music; equal to ballet in gesture; in toto, foremost. Yet most poetry readings fail, and the worst are dreadfully boring experiences. There isn’t much one can do about it either. Poets are not trained seals and so there is no real place for direction. Actors sometimes give readings but these too often are primarily a presentation of technique and trickery. The poetry gets lost. A good poetry reading is a happening. Once in a while the chemistry is just right and you have an explosion.

“As for this collection, I hope it contain ‘explosion,’ however what works on the stage does not necessarily work on the page so I have not attempted a literal transcription of the readings – “The Best From…” This is a surrogate, yielding to the facts, yet attempting to transmit some of the tension, spirit, and excitement of the Venice Poetry Company series….”
(Signed) Ted Simmons

(Note: The numbers between titles and the names of the poets indicate the page numbers of this volume.)

CONTENTS
VALLEJO (7) Charles Bukowski
PINE KNOB MONDO (8) John Thomas
THROW AWAY THE KEYS (8) Michael Horowitz
SOMETIMES I GO TO CAMARILLO (9) K. Curtis Lyle
AMONG THE PEOPLE (11) Bill Jackson
THE LOS ANGELES TIMES (12) Jack Hirschman
TARZAN (12) Ronald Koertge
SOLDIER (14) Emmett Williams
FIRE SONNET (16) Ted Simmons
WAR GAME (16) Samuel A. Eisenstein
BIRTHDAY SONG FOR THE HOODOO POETS (17) Quincy Troupe
SONG OF DESTRUCTION (18) Anon.
IT’s ALL IN THE BURNING (19) Charles Bukowksi
ONE DAY, 1971 (20) Alan Brilliant
THE ASSASSINATED POET (20) David Valjalo
THE TOAD (21) Gerald Locklin
SOMETHING IS ALWAYS LIKE (22) Arthur Lerner
LEAVES (22) Barba Margolis
TO VINCENT’S EAR, LISTENING (23) William J. Margolis
IN ANGEL FLIGHT BEYOND, BEYOND (24) Ted Simmons
A POEM WITH ITS HEREAFTER (24) David Valjalo
CONCERNING HIS RELIGIOUS TENDENCY (25) John Thomas
ZYKLUS (25) Jack Hirschman
WHO COMES (26) Helen Luster
ANGEL OF MERCY! (27) Eugene Redmond
AT THE CHECKOUT STAND (28) John Montgomery
DAGWOOD (29) Ron Koertge
TRAVEL (30) Marguerie Harris
MY RUSSIAN GRANDMOTHER VISITS ME (31) Stuart Frieberg
GLAD DAY (32) Michael Horovitz
LA DOLCE VITA (35) Ted Simmons
GHETTO (36) Jack Hirschman
NOTES TOWARDS A HEADSTONE (38) Samuel A. Eisenstein
DUE ON TRACK 6 (38) Barba Margolis
THE BOMBING OF BERLIN (39) Charles Bukowksi
OF PASSIONS QUICK AND QUIET (39) Hilary Ayer
DUMPLING HILL (40) Gerald Locklin
THE WIND (41) Taliessin
JACOB’S LADDER (41) Yu Suwa
LATE FOR SEASONS OF LOVE (42) William J. Margolis
AN ANCIENT GOD (42) Helen Luster
A TALISMAN FOR THE NEW YEAR (43) Deena Metzger
JERUSALEM LTD. (45) Jack Hirschman
EXHIBITIONIST (46) R. Tevis Boulware
POEM FOR FRIENDS (47) Quincy Troupe
POEM ON GROWING OLD (51) Po-Chi-I

In alphabetical order, here are the contemporary poets appearing in this volume: Hilary Ayer, Tevis Boulware, Alan Brilliant, Charles Bukowski, Samuel Eisenstein, Stuart Frieberg, Margarie Harris, Jack Hirschman, Michael Horowitz, Ron Koertge, Arthur Lerner, Gerald Locklin, Helen Luster, K. Curtis Lyle, William J. Margolis, Barba (Barbara) Margolis, Deena Metzger, John Montgomery, Eugene Richmond, Yu Suwa, Taliessin, John Thomas, David Valjalo, Quincy Troupe, and Emmett Williams. Plus one by Anonymous, who should be at the start of the list, I suppose, along with the Master of Ceremonies in Eternity, Po Chu-I (aka Bai Juyi).

If I had been far enough along to coordinate a reading series back in 1972, I would probably be happy to have the overwhelming majority of the poets in this volume read. In particular, one notes the blend of the Beat (John Montgomery, John Thomas, and William Margolis) along with the proto-Stand-Up (Bukowski, Koertge, Locklin); along with Watts Writers Workshop progeny Quincy Troupe and K. Curtis Lyle, and British beat poet Michael Horowitz, and feminist poet Deena Metzger. To have a Chilean poet in exile worked into the mix is even more intriguing. Some people may not recognize some of these names, but for the record let me remind you that John Montgomery was the real-life poet who appeared in Kerouac’s “BIG SUR,” and William J. Margolis was a close poet friend of Bob Kaufman, a major Beat poet who is still a neglected figure.

In point of fact, was there a reading series organized by anyone in San Francisco in 1971-1972 that would have featured such a set of poets? I am not trying to stir up the sibling rivalry between L.A. and S.F. that Neeli Cherkovski and I tried to reveal as a media-stoked publicity gimmick through our editorial collaboration in CROSS-STROKES: Poems between Los Angeles and San Francisco. On the other hand, so many people (especially in Northern California) have a fantasy of that region being always much more active in terms of poetry readings that it gets a bit tiresome. A little fact-checking research proves the case to be different than expected. Thanks to the cultural work of Ted Simmons, we have evidence of one more distinguished reading series in Los Angeles County than has previously been acknowledged.

Books Poetry

“The Golden Age of Los Angeles Poetry” — Robert Kirsch on “THE STREETS INSIDE: Ten Los Angeles Poets”

TheStreetsInside

THE GOLDEN AGE OF LOS ANGELES POETY: The Streets Inside (1978)

The Streets Inside: Ten Los Angeles Poets (Santa Monica, CA: Momentum Press, 1978) was the first of three anthologies I either edited or co-edited in the past 40 years. While it was not the first book to group Los Angeles poets as a distinct ensemble in American poetry, The Streets Inside was, however, the first anthology of Los Angeles poets of any significant length. Earlier, very short projects of this sort included a collection called Poetry Los Angeles in 1958 that was scarcely bigger than an issue of a little magazine. A trio of Los Angeles poets, James Boyer May, Thomas McGrath, and Peter Yates, were the editors of that first Los Angeles anthology. According to World Cat, Poetry Los Angeles clocks in at 68 (unnumbered) pages. It is an interesting collection, however, if only because it reveals the fractures that existed in Los Angeles in the late 1950s. None of the poets in Venice West (such as Stuart Perkoff and Bruce Boyd) are included in Poetry Los Angeles.

Fourteen years later, Paul Vangelisti, Charles Bukoswki and Neeli Cherkovski partially rectified the omission of the Venice West poets from Poetry Los Angeles by including both Perkoff and John Thomas, who by that point had not only been part of the Venice West scene, but had also lived in San Francisco and then returned to Los Angeles. Although Anthology of L.A. Poets ended on the shelves of 90 libraries around the world, it didn’t attract much critical attention in Los Angeles, let alone elsewhere. In terms of local attention, I wrote one of the first reviews and published it in the second issue of Bachy magazine (July, 1973), and I recollect that a reporter named Jim Stingley wrote a series of articles for the Los Angeles Times in the spring of 1974 about “The Rise of L.A. Underground Poets” that cited that anthology. Unfortunately, Bukowski, Cherkovski, and Vangelisti’s anthology was not that much bigger than the volume published in 1958.

Over 250 pages of poetry in length, The Streets Inside implicitly made a claim about the significance of the “underground” poetry scenes in Los Angeles. In point of fact, my book featured fewer poets than Anthology of Los Angeles Poets, and therefore was a less representative sampling of the scene. In retrospect, it was an enormous error. to limit the anthology to ten poets. Perhaps I kept the number down because I was still editing Momentum magazine and I didn’t want the anthology to seem like a special issue of the magazine. The decision to have between 15 and 25 pages of work by each poet was one of the ways that I hoped to make the anthology distinct from the magazine.

It should also be noted that my desire to promote the poetry of Lee Hickman led to this large portfolio of each poet’s work. Without consciously copying Donald Allen’s New American Poetry, I placed the oldest poet first. Lee Hickman led off the book with five discrete poems from the manuscript I eventually published in 1980, Tiresias I:9:B Great Slave Lake Suite. Since Lee’s five long poems snagged 25 pages total, I could hardly have much smaller selections of poems by the other poets without distorting the sense of equivalency that was one of the central aspects of its self-identity.

Having Lee as the first of ten poets, however, helped solve the question of the rest of the order, for I wanted the poet who followed Lee to have a much quieter voice; few voices were speaking in the intricate yet subdued manner that had been achieved at that point by Jim Krusoe, whose second full-length book Small Pianos I published almost simultaneously with The Streets Inside. On a formal level, Jim’s writing also established just how unpredictable the Los Angeles scene could be in terms of a reader’s expectations. If opening The Streets Inside with Hickman’s highly oxygenated lyricism would startle many readers, then it should also be noted how truly unusual it was for an anthology forty years ago to follow up that bravura performance with poets who emphasized the prose poem. There is hardly any other anthology in the 1970s in which a significant number of the poets are represented by a substantial amount of prose poetry. In the selections of writing of Krusoe, Holly Prado, Deena Metzger, and Peter Levitt, the prose poem is an accepted variant of poetry. Of the first eight poets in the book, in fact, only Leland Hickman and Kate Ellen Braverman do not have any prose poetry.

A half-dozen anthologies of Los Angeles poets have appeared since The Streets Inside was published out of my bedroom apartment in Ocean Park, California (512 Hill St., Apt. 4). Many of them have received substantial praise from numerous reviewers and critics, but all of these subsequent anthologies are ultimately responses to the crucial “group show” of The Streets Inside. Robert Kirsch’s praise for this collection remains a clarion call to all subsequent projects involving Los Angeles poets.

“If Los Angeles were San Francisco, where these things are more readily recognized, what is happening in poetry here would long since have been hailed as a golden age. … This handsome and exciting anthology …… is a book worth pursing, even if difficult to find in your bookshop. If necessary, just send for it.” –
Robert Kirsch, Los Angeles Times, April 27, 1979

It should be noted that Kirsch was kind enough to put my mailing address in his review. The address was slightly inaccurate, but since I had lived there for a half-dozen years, the postman (an Atlanta Braves fan, as I recollect) unfailingly brought the letters requesting copies of the anthology straight to my mailbox. I therefore got some direct sense of how many people were reading Kirsch’s review and responding to it. I sold a couple dozen copies directly through mail orders and it sold very well at Papa Bach, Chatterton’s and several other independent stores.