September 6, 2025
I have often suggested, both in personal discussions as well as in public statements, that Suzanne Lummis would make a very fine poet laureate for the city (and the county!) of Los Angeles. I live in Long Beach, which is the largest southernmost city in L.A. County, and even though we poets in Long Beach regard ourselves as a separate enclave, we still have a vested interest in having the position of Los Angeles Poet Laureate bestowed on someone who is compatible — if not at least very familiar with — the Stand Up poetics that originated in Long Beach.
I ran across an interview with her the other day and wish to recommend it to my readers. It was conducted four years ago by Michael C. Baradi and is posted on the Los Angeles Public Library blog. In the years since, Lummis has edited yet another L.A.-based anthology, “POETRY GOES TO THE MOVIES,” which I reviewed for Paul Vangelisti’s Magra Books website.
LAPL Blog
Noir Goldilocks: An Interview with L.A. Poet Suzanne Lummis
Michael C. Baradi, Librarian, Mid-Valley Regional Branch Library,
Friday, April 30, 2021
https://www.lapl.org/collections-resources/blogs/lapl/noir-goldilocks-interview-la-poet-suzanne-lummis
I do have one quibble with two of the three sentences in a short paragraph in this interview.
“Important in such conversations to remember that Bill Mohr, now poet professor at CSU Long Beach, edited the first full-length anthology of Los Angeles Poets: Poetry Loves Poetry (1985). Many of those poets are now dead. Lucky me that I’m still here. Who woulda thought.”
While I appreciate being mentioned in this interview, Lummis gets two facts wrong. “Poetry Loves Poetry” was NOT the first full-length anthology of Los Angeles Poets. There were at least two shorter anthologies before my full-length anthology (well over 200 pages), THE STREETS INSIDE: Ten Los Angeles Poets appeared at the end of 1978. Robert Kirsch reviewed it in the Los Angeles Times and remarked that it served as evidence of a “golden age” in the poetry scenes of Los Angeles. Dennis Cooper also praised, in GOSH! magazine, a reading that marked the book’s publication with considerable appreciation. Lummis should have said that “POETRY LOVES POETRY” was the first full-length anthology of L.A.-based poets that included her work.
The other error concerns the implication of how many poets who were in POETRY LOVES POETRY are still alive. “Many of those poets are now dead.” Technically, true. slightly over one-third of five dozen poets are dead. However, almost two-thirds of the contributors are still alive. I am very happy that Suzanne is one of them, but her longevity is hardly a distinguishing retrospective feature of that collection. I have no doubt that the vast majority of its contributors will be dead by the book’s 50th anniversary, but as I privately celebrate its 40th anniversary, I send my fond thoughts to all who were part of that book’s ensemble, as well as to poets such as DEENA METZGER, who were in THE STREETS INSIDE in 1978, but whose work I didn’t include in PLP. Deena is still writing and teaching in Topanga Canyon. Finally, I still regret in particular that I failed to include the late Scott Wannberg and the late Manazar Gamboa in PLP; and it should be noted that there were poets I asked to send me work for this anthology, but who — for understandable reasons — decided not to submit.
What still pleases me the most is how many poets emerged in the decade after “POETRY LOVES POETRY” came out to complicate any assessment that poets elsewhere in the nation might make about the scenes in Los Angeles. In particular, I would mention Amy Uyematsu, Ruben Martinez, Marisela Norte, Will Alexander, and Terry Wolverton. Any account of poetry in the last century in Los Angeles would also, of course, have to include Kamau Daa’ood and K. Curtis Lyle. It is worth noting that Luis J. Rodriguez was published in Beyond Baroque’s magazine in 1980, but that he did not as far as I know have a sustained presence in the city in the decade in which PLP was published.
The youngest of the still living poets in PLP will turn 70 next year, and it should be noted that there are other poets not cited in this list who remember these poets in the exuberance of their youth. Dinah Berland, Denise Dumars, and Kita Shantiris share a collective private cinema of the conjunctions within PLP. Welcome, all, to this screening.
STILL CRAZY ABOUT WRITING AND READING AFTER ALL THESE YEARS
Michael C. Ford
Harry Northup
Paul Vangelisti
Martha Ronk
Dennis Phillips
James Krusoe
Ron Koertge
Amy Gerstler
Michael Lally
Doren Robbins
Eloise Klein Healy
Laurel Ann Bogen
Jack Grapes
Dennis Cooper
David Trinidad
Jack Skelley
David James
Brooks Roddan
Suzanne Lummis
Charles Harper Webb
Bill Mohr
Murray Mednick
Peter Levitt
Alison Townsend
Michelle T. Clinton
Exene Cervenka
John Doe
Dave Alvin
Peter Cashorali
Aleida Rodriguez
Jed Rasula
Lori Cohen
Paul Trachtenberg
Ian Krieger
Max Benavidez
Rob Sullivan
Joanna Warwick
Janet Gray
Terryl Hunter
REST IN POETRY
Holly Prado
Charles Bukowski
Wanda Coleman
Bob Flanagan
Ed Smith
Leland Hickman
Kate Braverman
Peter Schjeldahl
Dick Barnes
Robert Crosson
Lewis MacAdams
Austin Straus
Robert Peters
John Harris
Peter Schneidre
Gerald Locklin
John Thomas
Marine Robert Warden
Charles Bivins
Carol Lewis
Tim Reynolds
Nichola Manning
****
As mentioned earlier, “THE STREETS INSIDE” and “POETRY LOVES POETRY” did have predecessors. Two of the poets who appeared in PLP, Paul Vangelisti and Charles Bukowski, had collaborated with Neeli Cherkovski to compile an “ANTHOLOGY OF LOS ANGELES POETS” in 1972. That book is worth getting hold of just for Bukowski’s introductory essay, which sets the tone for much of what will happen in L.A. poetry for the next half-century. In fact, any assessment of Suzanne Lummis’s anthologies, “GRAND PASSION” and “WIDE AWAKE,” should include a substantial portion of Bukowksi’s commentary in its opening remarks.
In regard to Bukowski, I have recently finished an article on his appearances in anthologies that will be published in France in the coming months. Outside of the volume for which Bukowski himself was one of the editors, the only L.A.-based anthologies he appeared in while he was alive were PLP and Charles Harper Webb’s first iteration of STAND UP POETRY. Bukowski died in the year before Lummis’s “GRAND PASSION” was published.
Coming out ten years after PLP, Lummis was able to feature a considerable number of poets who had begun to shape the discourse of verse in the entertainment capitol of the world. Some of them were recent arrivals, having taken up academic positions and settled in Los Angeles after 1985. Preceded by Stephen Yenser, David St. John. Carol Muske-Dukes, Robert Mezey, Molly Bendall, Timothy Steele, and Gail Wronsky would be examples of poet-professors whose national recognition expedited their integration into the “local” scene. Ralph Angel had been here all along, of course.
Lummis has not been given enough credit for doing what I could not quite manage in PLP: assembling an ethnically representative ensemble of L.A.-based poets. While my total efforts as an editor do reflect a modest attempt at such diversity, I regret that I failed to transfer some of that focus in my magazine MOMENTUM to both of the anthologies I did. Carol Lem, for instance, whose poems I included in an issue of MOMENTUM magazine, should have been in POETRY LOVES POETRY.
It is Lummis’s credit that she not only include Carol Lem in GRAND PASSION, but has her work accompanied by the following:
Amy Uyematsu
Paula Gunn Allen
Aileen Cho
Gil Cuadros
Sesshu Foster
Manazar Gamboa
Richard Garcia
Liz Gonzales
Chungmi Kim
Lynn Manning
Keith Antar Mason
Russell Leong
Cherry Jean Vasconcellos
Eric Priestley
Willie Sims
Pam Ward
Ricardo Means Ybarra
All of these poets are added to ones I also anthologized, such as Coleman, Clinton, and Rodriguez. In my defense, however, the majority of the poets I just listed were not exactly giving a lot of poetry readings in Los Angeles in the five years before POETRY LOVES POETRY appeared.
Nevertheless, GRAND PASSION is a crucial anthology, and it is one of the important contexts in which the writing of the current poet laureate of Los Angeles, Lynne Thompson, can best find its critical footing. All this said, there is one thing that shows how difficult it is to be completely comprehensive. The year before Lummis’s GRAND PASSION appears, Charles Harper Webb publishes his second version of STAND UP POETRY, and one of the poets who appears in it is RAY ZEPEDA. Other poets Webb includes who are making their first appearance in a L.A.-based anthology are Sylvia Rosen, Joan Jobe Smith, and Fred Voss, so it’s obvious that Lummis has found points of continuity to build upon for her anthology. Editing an anthology is always already the climb to a reproachful summit, I’m afraid, and let it suffice as ameliorating justification for Lummis’s omissions that she did include Doug Knott and Cecilia Woloch, who were barely known at the time and yet went on to become among the most intriguing figures in Los Angeles poetry.
As I said at the beginning, Suzanne Lummis deserves to be the next poet laureate of Los Angeles. I hope I live to see it happen.
****
I would also like to live long enough to hold in my hands an anthology that would cover (and recover) the scenes in Los Angeles between 1945 and 2025.
Eighty years!
From:
Grover Jacoby, Jr.
Ann Stanford
Joan LaBombard
William Pillin
Gene Frumkin
Thomas McGrath
Lawrence Spingarn (who edited, let us remember, the anthology, POETS WEST)
Stuart Z. Perkoff
Bruce Boyd
Frank T. Rios
Tony Scibella
Eileen Aronson Ireland
Lawrence Lipton
William J. Margolis
TO:
Marisela Norte
Cal Bedient
Linda Albertano
Brendan Constantine
Douglas Kearney
Beth Ruscio
Alexis Rhone Fancher
Marsha de la O
William Archilla
Luivette Resto
Phil Taggart
Rick Rupert
Rich Ferguson
Richard Modiano
S.A. Griffin
Mike (“The Poet”) Sunksen
Yvonne de la Vega
Tony Barnstone
Peter J. Harris
Lisa Glatt
David Hernandez
Patty Seyburn
Adolpho Guzman-Lopez
Michlle Bitting
Gloria Edina Alvarez
Frank X. Gaspar
Kim Dower
R.D. Armstrong
Matt Cedillo
Henry Mortenson
A.K. Toney
Dr. Mongo
Iris Berry
Pleasant Gehman
Nicelle Davis
Brian Kim Stefans
Eric Morago
Susan Hayden
Phoebe MacAdams
Billy Burgos
David Lloyd
Donna Hilbert
Clint Margrave
Jeanette Clough
Rinse, repeat, reread.
Imagine you are limited to choosing only 100 of the poets named in this entire post. Which ones would you set aside, and why?
About Bill Mohr