Poetry Los Angeles: Reading the Essential Poems of the City

Introduction

1 Introduction “Everything’s been Los Angelized,” complained Thomas McGrath in his personal record of wartime and postwar America, Letter to an Imaginary Friend (1962).1 Readers of his book-­ length poem in every part of the United States did not require a gloss for this outraged statement, especially if they knew that McGrath, a North Dakota native, considered himself a proletarian forerunner and exemplar of the counterculture taking shape in the 1950s along the West Coast. In the twenty-­ first century we may need reminding precisely what McGrath intended by that nasty epithet. Had Los Angeles truly become the twentieth-­ century agent of commercial, political, and consciousness-­ altering forces that would harrow the world ever afterward ? Did he mean that this one amorphous city at the edge of the continent reigned absolute and irresistible, having eclipsed the coherent America of patriotic textbooks, speeches, and poems? Whatever he meant to say, his alarm awakens us to the central issues informing almost all of the significant poems written about Los Angeles in McGrath’s lifetime and following his death in 1990. Los Angeles, renowned for its social history of prosperity and corruption , was easily stigmatized as the metropole of a new kind of evil empire, extending its values and lifestyle by means of Hollywood movies, television, Top 40 radio, and other popular culture. Los Angeles made a narcissistic fantasy of the so-­ called California Dream, ran the charge, and reinvented itself continually as a site of ostentatious privilege in an enviable place on the map that drew millions of people from regions where life was harsher. 2 Poetry Los Angeles Waves of immigrants who poured into Los Angeles before, during, and after World War II might have protested that, if truth be told, everything back home was insufficiently Los Angelized. But prophets seldom look on the bright side.In Letter to an Imaginary Friend McGrath chose to steer his verse to the dark side of what he called “the vast dream foundries and mythical money go-­ downs / Of the city of death.” (118). For decades before McGrath published his magnum opus in 1962,amplified in 1970 and thereafter, poets had pondered how best to represent Los Angeles to a world already being transfigured, if not converted, by the gospel , consumer products, and fantasies of the Golden State. If, like McGrath, lyric poets considered the city as a bellwether in the “entropy of the failing system” (50), they tended to leave the subject alone, for systemic problems are best described by novelists and sociologists. And there was no lack of both, after the Great Depression impoverished so much of America and made coastal cities shine more tantalizingly, and deceptively, as pockets of opportunity. The exodus of the peasant class from the Dust Bowl toward California in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath is an epic treatment of this theme. How much the Joad family wanted to be Los Angelized, to be reborn at the frontier of history, rather than foundering in their Midwestern wasteland! And how much Los Angeles poets would have liked to write a volume of lyrics with the range and profundity of Steinbeck’s novel, or the moral and verbal complexity of Nathanael West’s novel The Day of the Locust , also published in 1939. But poets had no first-­ rate poetry about Los Angeles to draw upon as models, and the city was a source of confusion to poets who visited for a spell, to script a movie or dry out in the desert sun. No Hart Crane or Federico García Lorca or Vladimir Mayakovsky had arisen to hymn the sublime architecture and ascendant spirit of a local monument, as they did the Brooklyn Bridge. No Carl Sandburg or Gwendolyn Brooks had walked the streets of the city—­ it was too spread-­ out!—­ as they did the downtown and neighborhoods of Chicago. San Francisco had a renaissance thanks to the high-­ energy immigrants who appreciated the European character of the hills and harbors, and the willed community spirit of those who made this compact city their spiritual home. Writers like Robinson Jeffers, Kenneth Rexroth, and the Beats cultivated the landscapes of northern California, not always with good grace, and made them beacons for the rebellious generation that took seriously McGrath’s critique of conditions south of Big Sur. But the city blessed by its founders in 1781 with the toponym El Pueblo de Introduction...