Poetry Los Angeles: Reading the Essential Poems of the City

9. Conclusion

284 Nine Conclusion This book has argued that despite the lingering charge that Los Angeles has been insufficiently brought into focus by its poets, there persists among them an invigorating desire to examine closely the sites, persons, and presumed identity of the city, if only to compensate for the long absence of high quality loco-­descriptive poetry about the region. In conversations and correspondence with poets who have written about L.A., whether they live there or not, I’ve heard constantly the sentiment that the city is extraordinarily attractive to the eye and mind and challenging to the poetic imagination. It offers provocative surfaces to match its historical depths. It compels attention and like all inspirational subjects it encourages linguistic enterprise. Whether in or out of fashion, poems that model for readers fresh views of remarkable locations maintain a lasting value. Probably it is this infatuation with place that lends such poems a retro glamour pleasing to readers who grew up with the modernist tradition. I refer to the poetics evoked, for example, by William Carlos Williams’s “Preface” to Paterson: “To make a start / out of particulars / and make them general. . . . Sniffing the trees, / just another dog / among a lot of dogs,” and by the manifesto declared by Virginia Woolf ’s character Lily Briscoe, a painter, in To the Lighthouse:“to be on a level with ordinary experience, to feel simply that’s a chair, that’s a table, and yet at the same time, It’s a miracle, it’s an ecstasy.”1 My contention in this book has been that, beginning with objects as familiar as trees, a chair or a table, a freeway or a beachfront, poets engag- Conclusion 285 ing Los Angeles interiors and exteriors have constructed a canon of texts evoking the past, present, and future of this city. If the reader is a resident, or anticipates a visit, then his or her recognition of the location being described in such poems amplifies their satisfaction with living in that place or any place capable of being so legitimated as a vital source of authenticity, of revelation, even of ecstasy. A useful commentary on this psychological process appears in Walker Percy’s novel The Moviegoer, when Binx Bolling, the narrator, takes his cousin to see the film Panic in the Streets, set in the city where they live, New Orleans. He remarks on her curiosity about his joyful responses in the movie theater: She refers to a phenomenon of moviegoing which I have called certification . Nowadays when a person lives somewhere, in a neighborhood, the place is not certified for him. More than likely he will live there sadly and the emptiness which is inside him will expand until it evacuates the entire neighborhood. But if he sees a movie which shows his very neighborhood , it becomes possible for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere.2 Just as Binx claims that the streets and docks of New Orleans are more real if you are a resident and see them depicted in a film, so Los Angeles becomes more fascinating, more present to the imagination, thanks to the poems written to inscribe its locations deeply into personal and collective memory.As in Binx’s case, the individual undergoing this ceremony of identification and legitimization feels less lonely in the universe, companioned now with more of the eidetic imagery of a tangible reality. Other cities’readers of poems about Los Angeles will be happy in knowing that everyday reality can sponsor profound engagements of subject and object in satisfying works of art. If, as scholars often argue, the modern lyric poem commonly represents a standoff between the poet’s sense of solitude and the overwhelming crowdedness and accelerating flux of the modern and postmodern world, this stabilizing process of certification, a testimony to our ability to imagine Anywhere as Somewhere (and vice versa), restores a vital sense of pleasure in living. I have written this book as if it were a Los Angeles novel and the poems are characters who interact in very human ways to their co-­ presence between covers or on a screen. Los Angeles should be more firmly anchored, more interesting, more satisfying to intellectual curiosity, for those who have 286 Poetry Los Angeles considered carefully the poems in this and kindred books.To the extent that the poems contain...