Josephine Ain — Aspects and Other Poems
Josephine Ain’s poems move by startling connection: water becomes a stubborn dream, a woman becomes an army, Don Quixote carries an island anchored to an antelope, and seven brief landscapes turn plants and animals into figures of attention. She began publishing as Josephine Cohen while still a Los Angeles student, later became a finalist for the Yale Younger Poets prize with the unpublished manuscript Momentary Mountain, and appeared in Poetry Los Angeles I and Coastlines. Her glass-and-steel home with painter Robert Chuey became one of the city’s most remembered poetry salons, a meeting place for writers, artists, spiritual teachers, and early psychedelic experimenters. This edition gathers every complete poem presently located: “Patience,” the five-part “Aspects,” the three poems printed together in Coastlines, “Seven Haiku,” and “When From the Night.” It follows the earliest complete witnesses, preserves lineation and stanza breaks, and records but does not reconstruct the lost Momentary Mountain manuscript or Ain’s unpublished book on LSD.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Bibliography
Cohen, Josephine. “Patience.” Los Angeles Times, 3 Mar. 1935, p. 10.
Ain, Josephine. Momentary Mountain. Unpublished manuscript submitted to the Yale Series of Younger Poets, 1952. Present location unknown.
Cohen, Josephine. “Aspects.” Poetry Los Angeles I. Villiers Publications, 1958, pp. 3–6.
———. “You There, Weeping,” “Magdalen,” and “Don Quixote.” Coastlines, vol. 14–15, spring 1960, pp. 64–65.
———. [Untitled Book on LSD]. Unpublished manuscript reportedly completed by 1961; unlocated.
———. “Seven Haiku.” Coastlines, vol. 18, 1962, p. 11.
———. “When From the Night.” Coastlines, vol. 21–22, 1964, p. 14.
Cohen, Josephine. Poems reported in Choice, The Kernel: A Literary Supplement, Perspective: A Quarterly of Literature, Arts Tower’s Smiling, Epos, Line, MS, and Transition. Titles and dates unverified.
———. “Aspects,” “Don Quixote,” “Magdalen,” “Seven Haiku,” and “You There, Weeping.” Poets of the Non-Existent City: Los Angeles in the McCarthy Era, edited by Estelle Gershgoren Novak. University of New Mexico Press, 2002, pp. 204–12.