Tue 8 Dec 2009
Los Angeles Poetry I
(Villiers Publications Ltd., London: 1958)
Edited by James Boyer May, Thomas McGrath and Peter Yates.
This is the representative collection by what I loosely call the HUAC generation — both McGrath and Edwin Rolfe (who doesn’t appear here) were either fired or blacklisted due to their political views, and others in the collection were affected by McCarthy-era madness. An interesting study and anthology of this group of poets (though not including the avant-garde or non-political ones) is Poets of the Non-Existent City: Los Angeles in the McCarthy Era, by Estelle Gershgoren Novak.
Included in this collection is a weird, Joycean poem by the eccentric Philadelphia writer Gil Orlovitz (who frequented Hollywood as an a screenwriter; CA Conrad is a big fan, and you can read about him on Conrad’s blog), poems by surreal, experimental photographer Edmund Teske, a large slab of McGrath’s Letter to an Imaginary Friend devoted to the pleasures of sex, early work by the well-known poet and teacher Ann Stanford, and spare, compelling work by Josephine Ain, who doesn’t seem to have written much but whose name appears frequently in the literature on the period.
Other poets include: Melissa Blake, Guy Daniels, Gene Frumkin, Sid Gershgoren, Stanley Kiesel, Bert Meyers, William Pillin, Lawrence P. Spingam, Zack Walsh, Mel Weisburd, Peter Yates, Curtis Zahn — I don’t know much about these poets except that Bert Meyers has a collected poems titled In a Dybbuk’s Raincoat.
This anthology is a testament to the impact of the Thomas McGrath, who lived here for ten years, on the Los Angeles poetry world, since nothing of comparable scope was published for a few decades.
James Boyer May, Selected Poems 1950-1955
(Inferno Press: San Francisco, 1955)
I’m quite mystified by James Boyer May. He’s best known as the editor of Trace, a small press journal that reviewed and charted the progress of small press journals worldwide. A chapter of the book Mavericks: Nine Independent Publishers is devoted to him (along with the likes of James McLaughlin and John Martin), though I haven’t read it yet.
The idiom in these poems is unlike anything I’ve come across in American poetry, though it does have a strange resemblance to certain British poets such as those associated with “Cambridge” writing — a high tone that is open to vulgarities, a careful, tradition-wary metrical precision, a moral earnestness, a syntactic and lexicographical density, even a tendency toward Hopkins-esque word-clusters — though May was born and raised in Los Angeles. “Incredibly, ideals of bomb-feared noons — / here, violent blooms should scintillate, / men supplicate annihilative plans.” (from “Ossia”).
May, due to his connection with Villiers (see above), helped Ginsberg publish the first edition of Howl in the UK, which in turn led to the books being confiscated in mail on the way back.
John Thomas, Epopoeia and The Decay of Satire
(The Red Hill Press: Los Angeles & Fairfax, 1976)
Now here’s a difficult case: an undeniably excellent poet who died in prison, serving a sentence for having molested his daughter; a poet whose early work seems to show a visionary breadth and bounding imagination, but who barely published any new poems (or republished, times over, older poems) during the latter part of his life; and a poet Charles Bukowski called “the best unread poet in America” whose style synthesized elements of the most opaque of Olson’s Maximus poems or the collage aesthetic of the Tennis Court Oath (but who was also, at times, sexually frank, morally unambiguous in his amorality, and could tell a good story, like a West Venice West Georges Battaille).
Outside of this small group (most of which also appear in his first collection, called John Thomas), Thomas published a chapbook of poems called Nevertheless in 1990, and contributed to the excellent volume Abandoned Latitudes (with Paul Vangelisti and Robert Crosson) in 1983. A good, if not probing, obituary was published in the UK Independent; a much more detailed, and harrowing, account of his personality by his daughter, Gabrielle Idlet, appeared a little later in the LA Weekly.
Michelle T. Clinton, High Blood /Pressure
(West End Press: Los Angeles, 1986)
I don’t know much about Michelle T. Clinton — there’s almost nothing on the internet about her — except that she doesn’t live in Los Angeles anymore, and that she has a second volume of poetry, Good Sense & The Faithless, also from West End Press (1994). She’s also recorded a spoken word cassette called “Black Angeles” (1988) with Wanda Coleman, who writes that Clinton’s poems are “exorcisms — the rootings out of racism and sexism.”
I thought of her as a sort of female Etheridge Knight at first, as some of the poems reminded me of Knight’s “Hard Rock Returns To Prison From The Hospital For The Criminal Insane,” with its anecdotal focus on the most hidden parts of society, occasional use of Black English, and somewhat nihilistic underlying philosophy. But Clinton’s poetry is far more interesting — less “literary” (following through on that distrust of the “literary” that runs through much of Los Angeles poetry) though formally quite precise and refined. These poems, unsettling as they can be (and funny also) are packed with an amazing energy, frankness and skill, not to mention searing anger.
Bob Flanagan and David Trinidad, A Taste of Honey
(Cold Calm Press: Los Angeles, 1990)
Bob Flanagan is best known as a performance artist, cystic fibrosis sufferer, and subject of the documentary Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist (view his Super Cystic Fibrosis Song for a taste of that). David Trinidad is best known as David Trinidad, well-known New York poet. But in their younger years they were hanging out at Beyond Baroque with Dennis Cooper, Amy Gerstler and the teenaged Kim Rosenfield and publishing with Cooper’s press Little Caesar (follow the link for full issues).
This is a really enjoyable little volume — 12 poems of 36 lines each, and in iambic pentameter! It has some of the crazed feel of the Berrigan/Padgett collaborations but with a distinctly LA setting. The formal constraint gets you trying to read the poems as monologues (in the manner of, say, Browning), and brings them to a level that Flanagan, in his short, difficult life, was able to achieve in his solo poems (but more on that later).
The cover image, a combined portrait of the two authors, looks a little to me like David Carradine.
December 9th, 2009 at 3:28 pm
This is terrific, Brian. Thanks for reaching into the archive, digging these up, and bringing them online. I’ll drop a pointer to this from the PRB site.
December 23rd, 2009 at 1:00 pm
[…] sequel to an earlier group of Los Angeles PDFs. My apologies for the occasional crappiness of some of these scans, but I’m often using books […]
January 1st, 2010 at 10:46 am
Hi, Brian. I don’t know much about Clinton either, but I’ll just add that one heard her name around L.A. with some frequency in the ’80s, and I believe that some of her work can be heard on some Dial-a-Poem-esque compilation albums that linked the music and poetry scenes of the time, inc. several overseen by Harvey Kubernik, a longtime L.A. countercultural figure. The titles I can find reference to are English as a Second Language, Voices of the Angels, and Neighborhood Rhythm. (I don’t know which of these Clinton is on.) If I’m not just telling you something you already know, you might be interested in tracking these and related recordings down for this (very valuable) project – the prominence of the spoken-word side of things in L.A. during that period means that a fair bit of the extant documentation is audio.
February 10th, 2010 at 10:51 pm
“A good, if not probing, obituary was published in the UK Independent; a much more detailed, and harrowing, account of his personality by his daughter, Gabrielle Idlet, appeared a little later in the LA Weekly.”
Letter To Editor L.A. Weekly 8-2-02
I had the tragic privilege of being the attorney for John Thomas in his criminal prosecution. In my 20 years of exclusively criminal-defense practice, I have rarely had a client walk into my office and say: “I did this. I am sorry.” John Thomas not only acknowledged his wrongdoing of 30 years ago, but appreciated the gravity of his conduct.
Thomas was 71 years of age and had congestive heart failure. Because his health would not withstand the demands of trial, despite important constitutional, legal and factual defenses, John pleaded no contest to the charge of one count of oral copulation with a person under the age of 16, not “child molestation” as mischaracterized in Gabrielle Idlet’s article. Moreover, the misconduct occurred under the influence of hallucinogens with his former wife, Rose Idlet, in 1972. Thomas told the sentencing judge, Michael Pastor: “I do not forgive myself” and “I will abide faithfully by all conditions of the judgment you lay down, whatever they may be.”
I will never understand how the judge and prosecutor could sentence a 71-year-old man with congestive heart failure (and a statement from his doctor that he could not survive it) to 120 days in jail. John Thomas died on the 18th day. The criminal prosecution was subsequently dismissed, based upon his death during the pendency of the appeal. (This was omitted from your story.)
A luminary of the Beat generation, Thomas lived and wrote in Los Angeles for the past 40 years. He acknowledged to me and others that in his earlier days he was on drugs, his house was in great disarray, and he didn’t write for 18 years. He was, in his own words, “committing slow suicide.”
Also omitted in the published hate piece is that after 1983, with his marriage to poet Philomene Long, Thomas was, as he would say, “resurrected.” For the next 19 years he transformed his former life, feeling regret for his past, and began writing again (over 1,000 poems) and teaching. This was the John Thomas whom Fred Dewey, the director of Beyond Baroque, described as a “generous spirit,” for whom “poverty and love were equal teachers in a life of wisdom.”
Whatever truth exists in what Gabrielle Idlet has written is secondary to the distortions. She and her sister distributed hate mail and death threats to their father for years before the legal system was corrupted to allow the unconstitutional repeal of the statute of limitations. Their stated wish to see their father’s death was finally satisfied, and their thirst for revenge was a primary cause. May they be given the forgiveness that they refused to grant their father.
–Jeffrey J. Douglas
Santa Monica
June 8th, 2014 at 8:16 pm
Sorry to see how, even in death, John Thomas has put so much over on so many of you.
He was first, and foremost, a psychopath.
His behavior toward two of his daughters as mentioned here—and in writing of the late poet Wanda Coleman—somehow minimizes the truly horrendous effect his molestation has had on their lives, and turns HIM into the VICTIM. I was truly sorry to have been a party to some of these events. I later spoke with John about them and can say without a doubt, there wasn’t the slightest remorse in him.
He even told several friends of his (in anticipation of his 15-year-old daughter Susan’s visit) about his intention to have sex with Susan when she came to Los Angeles.
And, about the term “molestation”, I am using the correct term. He bargained his way to the lesser charge. A con man all the way.
Rose Idlet
(wife #3)