Extremes & ModerationsA Historical Archive of Los Angeles and Southern California Poetry
Explore the poets, books, and literary communities of Los Angeles.
Collected Poems and Literary Reviews
An antiwar poet and early Los Angeles modernist.
Voices from Los Angeles’s literary past.
Collected poems, documents, and rare works from across the city’s literary history.
A Forty-Niner, Los Angeles horticulturist, public official, and indefatigable newspaper poet, Albert Fenner Kercheval wrote California as he helped cultivate it. His work moves from mining-camp comedy and Civil War politics to botanical observation, family grief, civic argument, and the haunting Spanish romance of Dolores.
A Los Angeles poet who became a Parisian bohemian and one of America’s boldest translators, C. F. MacIntyre wrote jaguars, cafés, cathedrals, war, eros, and mortality into poems whose polished surfaces barely contain their appetite and mischief.
Before Los Angeles could forget her, Eva Carter Buckner wrote Black soldiers, suffragists, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Abraham Lincoln, and women’s ambition into poems meant to be sung, recited, and used. A seamstress, painter, club leader, and NAACP organizer, she turned verse into public action—and made citizenship answer for its promises.
Heir to two founding Los Angeles families and the son of poet Rosalie Seligman Jacoby, Grover Jacoby became an audacious theorist of rhythm, translator, editor, and experimenter. His poetry and prose pursue what he called fluctuant syllabic verse, linking family history, radical magazines, formal analysis, a shared Lydia Rader Billings Award, and a lifelong argument with free verse.
A Chicago modernist who became Venice West’s loudest impresario, Lawrence Lipton fused aviation, atomic dread, ritual, jazz, sex, and street life into poems built to be spoken aloud. This edition restores his two poetry books, a dramatically different early version of Rainbow at Midnight, and uncollected magazine poems.
Nora May French blazed through California bohemia, writing fierce, haunting poems of freedom, desire, landscape, and death before her life ended at twenty-six. Published in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and national magazines, her work captures a restless new California—and the struggle of a gifted woman to build an independent artistic life within it.
Poetry connected to fine printing, bookselling, private presses, typography, visual culture, and the material arts of the book.
Meter, rhyme, stanza, syllabic design, translation, and sustained revision become ways for these poets to test how exact form can carry modern experience without nostalgia.
