About Extremes and Moderations
A Historical Archive of Los Angeles and Southern California Poetry
Extremes and Moderations is a digital publishing and archival project devoted to recovering, editing, and recirculating the poetry of Los Angeles and Southern California. Published through The Text/Tech Papers, the project brings together writers whose work is out of print, difficult to locate, scattered across newspapers and little magazines, or absent from conventional histories of American poetry.
The archive is intended both as a reading library and as an ongoing historical argument. It treats Los Angeles poetry not as a single movement or lineage, but as a field of overlapping scenes, institutions, migrations, political formations, aesthetic experiments, and local publishing cultures.
ABOUT THE PROJECT
The Journals reconstructs the literary cultures that formed in and around Southern California periodicals: little magazines, poetry reviews, club journals, political publications, arts papers, and independent editorial ventures. Read together, these issues show writers, editors, artists, printers, institutions, and local scenes in active conversation.
The collection ranges from turn-of-the-century regional magazines through modernist and interwar publications, postwar reviews, community-based journals, and the experimental little-magazine networks of the later twentieth century. Complete issues appear beside carefully labeled anthologies when a journal’s literary writing is the relevant object of study.
How the Journal Archive Works
Each journal item has its own page with a concise introduction, contributor links, publication details, a full table of contents, citation guidance, and a freely available reading edition.
Reader’s editions reset historical material in a consistent 6 × 9 format for legibility and search. When an original scan is made public, it is identified separately; an anthology is never presented as a complete issue or facsimile.
The archive will continue to expand as additional issues, bibliographic evidence, contributor information, and archival materials are located.
JOURNALS, EDITIONS, AND CONTRIBUTORS
Journals
Journal pages gather the available run of each publication in chronological order, making changes in editorship, scale, contributors, and aesthetic direction visible across time.
Editions
Individual pages distinguish complete journal issues from journal-derived anthologies and indexes. The format of the source and the editorial scope of the Text/Tech edition are always stated.
Contributors
Contributor records connect writers, artists, editors, translators, and other participants across issues without requiring a separate biography for every name.
Editorial Practice, Rights, and Citation
Editorial Method
Metadata and contents are checked against the reader’s edition and, where available, the original scan. Reader’s editions preserve the complete textual contents of an issue unless the page explicitly identifies the item as an anthology or index.
Rights and Open Access
Copyright remains with the respective authors, artists, publishers, or successors. Rights notes on each item record the present basis for access; corrections, rights information, and removal requests may be sent to the editor.
Citation and Identifiers
Each item carries a stable Record ID and a suggested citation. Citations should identify the original journal, volume or issue information when known, date, and the Text/Tech Journals reader’s edition.
ABOUT THE EDITOR
Brian Kim Stefans is a poet, critic, editor, and scholar working across contemporary poetry, digital literature, experimental writing, and the history of literary technologies. He edits The Text/Tech Papers and Extremes and Moderations.
The project grows out of long-standing interests in literary archives, neglected poetic traditions, small-press culture, electronic publication, and the ways digital tools can make difficult or inaccessible bodies of writing available to new readers.