Towards an Impossible Anthology

By Bill Mohr (March 2002)

Very few group photographs of Los Angeles poets have ever been published except in the occasional anthology which focuses on Southern California poetry. The average number of poets in these photographs is less than twenty, and none of the photographs are accompanied by a list which identifies the assembled figures. The visual historical record, then, is very thin, compared to the quantity of material published by poets living in Los Angeles since the end of World War II. One of the first of these anthology photographs was included in a collection edited by Paul Vangelisti, Charles Bukowski, and Neeli Cherri in 1971, entitled simply, ANTHOLOGY OF L.A. POETS. Bukowksi contributed a thoughtful introduction which praised the flexibility of Los Angeles as a city which allowed poets to be aloen or to find each other's company with equal ease. The book itself had a plain, dark brown cover with no art or blurbs whatsoever, as if to insist that the poets were not interrested in participating in any kind of marketing campaign whatsoever. By the early seventies, even the underground had begun to perfect and copyright its scruffiness, but these poets seemed reluctant to acknowledgte any need to be visible other than in their own writing. Nevertheless, Vangelisti seems to have coaxed most of the poets who were in town at the time into gathering on a bright afternoon on what looks like an outdoor plaza. The setting, according to Vangelisti, is actually the front of a Greek Orthodox church on DeLongpre Ave., a few doors away from Bukowski lived in the late 60s and early 70s. Vangelisti went on to edit another anthology which featured many of these poets, but the photographs for this larger collection were individual shots.

The first group photograph which featured poets at Beyond Baroque was used as the cover of a small anthology of the Wednesday night workshop members edited by Lynn Shoemaker. The picture appears to have been shot at night, perhaps on a mid-winter evening, as some of the poets are wearing stocking caps, and several have heavy jackets on. Once again, one is left to guess at how the faces on the cover might correlate with the authors inside.

The third anthology with a group photograph is significant for its emphasis on the phenomenon of multi-cultural poetry in Los Angeles. The photograph by Marlene Alvarado includes about half of the 33 poets whose work appears in INVOCATION L.A., edited by Michelle T. Clinton, Sesshu Foster, and Naomi Quinonez. The backdrop of the photograph appears to be downtown Los Angeles, in the form of several office towers.

All of these photographs give little indication of the scale and intensity of the communities of poets in Los Angeles during the past fifty years. Only a month of daily study of magazines such as INVISIBLE CITY, RARA AVIS, ONTHEBUS, BEYOND BAROQUE NEW, BACHY, TEMBLOR, ARSHILE, THE SUNSET PALMS HOTEL, BARNEY, VARIEGATION, COASTLINES, CALIFORNIA QUARTERLY, TRACE, MOMENTUM, LITTLE CAESAR, and SANTA MONICA REVIEW could begin to yield a sense of the extraordinary diversity of writing which has occurred in this region. How much is currently going on in Los Angeles. I would estimate that there are at least 300 poets in the Los Angeles area whose work has appeared in magazines all across the United States, as well as in anthologies and recordings. Almost all of these poets know at least one other serious poet in the area whose work is unknown except to the reclusive coterie, which is to say that there is a indeterminate second layer of poets in this city poised to release a large body of intriguing work.

The difficulty of establishing any precise census is in part due to the culture industry of the music and film business which dominates the cultural economy of Los Angeles. Any attempt to survey poets in Los Angeles will inevitably collide with the limitations which any given group of poets will impose on their definition of "poet," especially if the work of any given writer smacks of theatricality. Some poets are extremely skeptical about the claims which performance poets make for the value of their work. Other groups savor the work of performance/oral/spoken word poets, while still insisting that their own poems must work on both the page and out loud. Regardless of whether the poets fall into the spoken word or the "stand up" poetry group, the poets in Los Angeles have earned a remarkable reputation for being consistently vivid readers of their poems.

The need for a comprehensive anthology of Los Angeles poets is greater than ever before, and yet the scenes continue to multiply at a rate which would defy anyone's ability to orchestrate such a gathering. Perhaps the group photograph which Mark Savage will soon take will be the closest anyone can come at giving the city of Los Angeles an estimate of how many of its citizens believe in the imaginative potential of this city.

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