Mad dogs, Englishmen and four Los Angeles...

Mad dogs, Englishmen and four Los Angeles poets will be out in the noonday sun Monday to flex their literary muscles and test their lung capacity in the grassy knoll that makes up Cal State L.A.’s Free Speech Area.

A jazz band will warm up the crowd before the poets read from their work in the opening of the second annual Los Angeles Poetry Festival. Among the readers will be Cal State L.A. Associate Profs. Timothy Steele and Kate Braverman.

Steele, whose traditional style

has marked him as a “New Formalist,” recently published “Missing Measures,” a book about modern poets’ abandonment of the strictures for writing poetry. Braverman, a free verse poet, has just published her third book of fiction, “Squandering the Blue,” with a fourth, “Mysteries of the West,” due out in the spring.

Los Angeles poets Henry J. Morro and Amy Uyematsu will also read. Monday’s reading, scheduled to begin at 11:45 a.m., is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.