Poetry Los Angeles: Reading the Essential Poems of the City

Notes

303 Notes Preface 1. James D. Houston, Californians: Searching for the Golden State (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), 222. 2. Fredric Jameson, “Reading Without Interpretation: Postmodernism and the Video-­Text,” The Linguistics of Writing: Arguments Between Language and Literature, ed. Derek Attridge,Alan Durant,Nigel Fabb,and Colin McCabe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), 222. Jameson extended his critique of the“new kind of flatness or depthlessness” he perceived in all postmodern artistic forms, including poetry, in his classic text, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Post-­ Contemporary Interventions) (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 9. Marjorie Perloff has synthesized this line of thinking into its most comprehensive form in Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 3. Ron Silliman,“The Chinese Notebook,”Anthology of Modern American Poetry, ed. Cary Nelson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 1112 [Entry # 117]. Though Silliman scorns the realistic tradition in poetry, he demonstrates in his prose memoir Under Albany (Cambridge, UK: Salt Publishing, 2004) an enthusiasm for vivid autobiographical detail in his depiction of his early life in the Bay Area. Likewise, Lyn Hejinian, another Language poet, produced a classic of regional literature in her memoir of growing up in northern California, My Life (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1987). 4. Jed Rasula, This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002). “I do think of poems as ecosystems,” he remarks, and later,“The work of poetry is less to entertain images than to pass human order through the mulching of language” (7, 90). 5. Bill Mohr, Hold-­ Outs: The Los Angeles Poetry Renaissance 1948–­ 1992 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011), 3, 123. Even Mohr, an enthusiastic advocate of the city’s poetry, raises the question about labeling poets after their often temporary residence: 304 Notes to Pages xvii–6 “[I]s ‘Los Angeles’ a code word for marginality, an ironic inflection of [the poets’] relationship to the culture at large as well as to the layers of poets and artists elsewhere, both experimental and traditional? Above all,what advantage do we gain by categorizing them as Los Angeles poets?” (42). 6. Guy Debord defines the term as“the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment . . . on the emotions and behavior of individuals” in his essay“Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography” (1955). The essay can be found, along with an illuminating history, in the Wikipedia entry for “psychogeography.” Guy Davenport’s phrase provides the title to The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays (Boston: David R. Godine, 1997). 7. Leonard S. Bernstein, “Los Angeles,” The Black Snowman (London: Abelard-­ Schuman, 1971), 24. Introduction 1. Thomas McGrath, Letter to an Imaginary Friend, Parts I & II (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1962 & 1970), 124. All citations in the text are to this edition. Amy Wilentz provides a recent gloss on McGrath’s statement:“Although I came from Perth Amboy, New Jersey, I really grew up in California, like all Americans.”I Feel Earthquakes More Often Than They Happen: Coming to California in the Age of Schwarzenegger (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), 148. 2. Randall Jarrell, Letter of August 1954 to Philip Vaudrin and Harry Ford, Randall Jarrell’s Letters, ed. Mary Jarrell (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985), 401. By contrast, James M. Cain had noted in an essay of March 1933 that the citizens of Los Angeles spoke excellent English, and “These people read, they know what is going on in the world.” See Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, ed. David L. Ulin (New York: Library of America, 2002), 113. Robert Peters offered a much-­ discussed rebuke to Jarrell’s kind of snobbery by imagining a seemingly dopey married couple, Dick and Jane, sitting on their beach patio and trying to grapple with John Ashbery’s long difficult poem,“Litany.” Dick, a plumber, and Jane, who recalls how in college she much preferred playing tennis to any “tennis oath” (an allusion to an inscrutable poem by Ashbery),do in fact come to appreciate the poem. Their sprightly dialogue became a paradigm of support for poetry in Los Angeles. See Robert Peters, “Dick and Jane at Home in Southern California,” The Great American Poetry Bake-­Off, 2nd series (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1982), 2–­ 15. 3. Estelle Gershgoren Novak, Poets of the Non-­ Existent City: Los Angeles in the McCarthy Era (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002), 5. 4. Ibid., xvii. 5. Alfred Kazin, A...