Poetry Los Angeles: Reading the Essential Poems of the City

Acknowledgments

343 Acknowledgments A study like this one depends principally on access to a vast number of books and journals published during the last seventy years—­volumes of poetry above all, and criticism that comments on them.As if the writing of Poetry Los Angeles had been guiding my professional life since I entered UCLA as an undergraduate in 1960, and perhaps it has, I accumulated a personal collection almost sufficient to serve as a private resource for my needs in selecting poems to analyze and for models of exposition. From 1960 to the present I have depended on the collections in great libraries to amplify my knowledge of contemporary literature and its treatment of the poetry of place. The libraries of the University of California, Los Angeles, Brown University, and the University of Michigan became the indispensable public resources for my research. I remember with special fondness the Harris Collection of American Poetry in the John Hay Library at Brown University, where I spent a plenitude of hours reading and taking notes on the works that would nourish my sense of the field and strengthen my desire to write some extended commentary deserving of attention about my city of origin. The Special Collections Library at the University of Michigan ,under the able leadership of Peggy Daub,has served my needs for more than forty years. Once I began to focus on the topic of poems about Los Angeles I relied on the advice and experience of many poets and scholars I had become acquainted with as editor for thirty-­ two years of Michigan Quarterly Review. One of these was Charles Harper Webb, with whom I exchanged views about poetry about Los Angeles, on numerous occasions. He directed me to some of the obvious places to spend time and buy many poetry journals 344 Acknowledgments and books by Los Angeles poets, such as the bookstores Papa Bach and Beyond Baroque. Through the latter institution I came into contact with many poets and some scholars who challenged me usefully as my ideas about the relation of the city to its poets, including the“carpetbaggers” who visited the city and wrote compellingly about it, took form. Estelle Gershgoren Novak contributed to my understanding of the topic as well, in conversations and by way of her excellent anthology of the California Quarterly and Coastlines poets of the 1950s. Thanks to her I was able to meet some of those poets and try out theories that advanced my understanding of local literary history in the process. Leo Braudy has been a valued friend and an expert on the subject of Los Angeles, who over decades encouraged me to undertake this project and helped steer me toward the issues I needed to engage in order to make my opinions credible and persuasive. Carolyn See, my freshman composition instructor in 1960 and a valued friend ever since, provided irreverent commentaries on authors whom she nevertheless accounted indispensable for sustained treatment in this book, and in several cases brought me together with poets I needed to interrogate not only about their work but about the attitudes of two generations of authors fashioning texts destined for posterity ’s regard.I am thankful also to good friends such as William Baer,Charles Baxter, George Bornstein, Alice Fulton, Linda Gregerson, A. Van Jordan, Lawrence Joseph, Laura Kasischke, David Lehman, Helen Marlborough, Khaled Mattawa, J. Allyn Rosser, Barbara Zeisl Schoenberg, Barton St. Armand, Keith Taylor, Gillian White, and Steven Zwicker for conversation, letters, and advice on the issues arising in this study. The Department of English, University of Michigan, has been generous in indulging my ongoing obsession with this general area of studies. I received exemplary support for my numerous courses, especially during the last ten years, on the undergraduate and graduate level: The Literature of Los Angeles, Modern Poetry and the City, Hollywood and Visual Culture, Modern Poetry, and Contemporary Poetry. I need hardly say that my students in those and other courses rank among my most essential helpers in this enterprise. They spoke and wrote passionately about many of the poems and authors I discuss in this book. I single out Nick Richie, my research assistant, for his help in identifying relevant poems, as well as libraries that could and did provide me with esoteric literary magazines and poetry volumes . I am grateful to the Department of English as well, and to the College of Literature, Arts, and Sciences at the University of Michigan, for research [3.15.221.136...