GRAND PASSION: The Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond.<i> Edited by Suzanne Lummis and Charles H. Webb</i> .<i> Red Wind Books: 260 pp., $10.95 paperback</i>

The general notion of poetry from Los Angeles at the end of our century is a curious one indeed. Beyond the often cited post-punk finger-snappers of Chicago; the Village loft-gruff of New York; the regional, intellectual or sexual contexts of Denver, Boston, San Francisco or Seattle, the Los Angeles poetry world, unlike the dominant art industry of the city, has no easy stereotype. This is so in part because of the sprawling, polyglot nature of a megalopolis made up of geographically separate (though at times overlapping) communities, an environment that has given L.A. poetry its undervalued universality. More important, however, are the founding forces of the city: the “to be continued” spirit and the transitory nature of those who sought shelter for fantasy, rebirth and reflection.

The result is a simultaneously arch-realist and metaphysical blend of literature found in only one other theatrical and multicultural urban landscape: late imperial Vienna. Nevertheless, the lack of a static identity has made the reception of Los Angeles poets and poetry a difficult one for those who require a reductionist frame for their written art. This is, unfortunately, the current direction of literary criticism and of large and small presses operating in the unprofitable domain of poetry publication.

The attempt to create a compendium of regional poetry or of a particular poetic tradition is laudable, but too often it does not look better on paper, to twist a phrase. Certainly many anthologies have managed to offer a selection of some, even most, important voices of a given geo-ethno-social parameter, and beyond the obvious record they provide, they might actually be readable. They can also be counterproductive by setting limits to a local poetry era and thus can damage the overall growth of a particular region’s artistic landscape by playing favorites, enforcing elites and supporting the views of one or several well-known editors, venues or publications.

When assembled with the true intent of showcasing the best of a movement or even a small moment in the development of a segment of voices, such anthologies can serve to chronicle the ever-fluid developments of the art, to offer an instructive primer on the art in its space and time and to provide a stimulus for new poets. When done right--and this is always where goal and reality meet for the financially challenged small presses--such poetry anthologies can become the alternate history books. Given the unique characteristics of Los Angeles poetry, this is a tall order.

“Grand Passion: The Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond,” edited by Suzanne Lummis and Charles H. Webb, is done right. One can welcome the fact that it does not hide behind the tired cliche of avant-garde or counterculture quirkiness to excuse sloppiness, lack of design or readability, things that have become all too prevalent in poetry publication. From the very feel and look of the publication to the choice and combination of poetic works, it is one of the most satisfying and elegantly produced volumes I have seen in more than a decade, a precarious but highly successful balance of emotion, technique, politics and dreams.

“Grand Passion” shows a strong editorial hand but is certainly no hasty sampling of recent poets connected with the interests of the editors. Lummis, the founder of the acclaimed Los Angeles Poetry Festival, and Webb, also a member of the festival’s directorship, spent more than a year widely soliciting (something rarely done in this cliquish field) and reviewing submissions to select the 70-plus poems in this anthology. Both editors have spent many years working as poets and activists in the Los Angeles poetry community and have cut their editorial teeth with the original Los Angeles “Stand Up” collection. This edition is their freshest and largest assemblage to date, and it is their finest and most intriguing. The danger of a theme or a concept is that it usually tends to inhibit and narrow, but this anthology’s guideline, the “possibility of passion from many angles,” seems to encourage rather than deny the raising of voices that reach us from every area of the polyglot Los Angeles empire.

Neither a guarded, arid collection of big names and promising personalities nor a subversively obsessed compilation of clumsy sociopolitical protest and shock-aimed posing, “Grand Passion” strives for readability and re-readability. So varied are the styles and motifs in this collection, so representative of gender and culture views and, yes, so well chosen are the republished poems that the reader can return to rediscover and review. This book suggests why the anthology form can be both popular and cutting-edge: The voices override the names, and provocation is natural, not synthetic. There are poets here of national and international reputation, such as Timothy Steele, Holly Prado, David St. John, Kate Braverman, Carol Muske, Robert Mezey, Robert Peters, James Ragan and Charles Bukowski; poets who have long influenced and represented Los Angeles poetry, such as Wanda Coleman, Bill Mohr, Manazar Gamboa, Eloise Klein Healy, Ron Koertge, Terry Wolverton, Laurel Ann Bogen and Michelle T. Clinton; and ultimately, fine new artists whose original and fresh writings show little evidence of workshops or group editing: Liz Gonzales, Carrie Etter, Aileen Cho and Pam Ward, among others.

Because of the quality of the poems, the style of the editors and the overall feeling of genuineness, “Grand Passion” transcends the Los Angeles scene it succeeds in recording and might well serve as a potent introduction to general late-20th century American verse. Many of these poets, who associate themselves with the city, reach beyond any L.A. stereotypes. The usual criticism about L.A. voices that break away when they attain national attention is undone by the heady experience these poets return to the cultural brew of the city by their individual claims to the city. They have returned and have helped make Los Angeles and West Coast poetry, long ignored or dismissed by the overrated poetry establishment of the East Coast, salonfahig (a German term roughly translated as “salon presentable”).

Not that, as many would argue, it was ever necessary in the first place. What becomes apparent is that there has been too little inclusion of West Coast and Los Angeles poets in the overall representation and study of American verse. There are exquisite moments here that must not be (and now will not be) forgotten.

On a more localized level, the collection is excellent in offering varied images, impulses and reflections of the different worlds of Los Angeles. The locus of the city’s poetry is no longer Venice or Santa Monica or downtown or anywhere that once suggested boheme, as it was during the first “golden age” from the mid-1970s through the 1980s.

As I recall from my own experience in the art and place, there was ghettoization: The minimalists, pop-poets, open readers, new romantics, postmodernists, alternatives, performance artists, agitprop language poets tended to avoid each other’s venues and publications as if they did not exist. Perhaps we were delineated in style and politics but, as Lummis notes in the introduction, “in 1984 the poetry community was fairly uni-cultural, though the city was not. It was difficult then, for the city to give full expression to itself through poetry. Those who tried to create the multicultural happening were often shunned even by the progressive media and became a subject of suspicion by poets and editors who prided themselves on their well-defined and insular ideals.”

Helen Friedland’s redoubtable Poetry/LA, which was published throughout the 1980s, was perhaps the only journal that ever managed to represent the vastness of this poetry city. It is satisfying to see that the walls of style have, for the most part, fallen and that verse neighborhoods and regions have emerged to influence, react, regroup.

One unique aspect to West Coast, specifically Los Angeles: Poetry is the unavoidable presence of the area’s major creative industries, film and television. For Lummis, Hollywood has a curious effect on the art. As does not happen in New York’s poetry-theater symbiosis, poetry egos and arts can be dampened or even damaged by the overwhelming celebrity cult of Los Angeles. Sometimes this leads to an inescapable sense of inferiority, but perhaps it also leads to an authentic counterculture. Then again, many L.A poets are in some way connected with the entertainment industry, so there is a sense of dramatic expansiveness and experimentation, an understanding of the facade and the fantasy and a personal experience that comes with the writing and performing.

Webb encourages this hybrid in his intelligent essay on the Hollywood-hued poetry world included in the volume: “I don’t expect poetry will ever be as popular as horror novels, cover girls, or rock ‘n’ roll. I don’t believe in ‘dumbing down’ poetry. I do believe that contemporary poetry could be more accessible and more widely enjoyed than it is. . . .”

Throughout this book are poems that show how poetry, passion and polyglot can do what Webb suggests in enlightening, enraging, enticing ways. There is the magical realism of Eloise Klein Healy: “I’ll tell you why I’m afraid of the dark / It has its own Idea / It’s like a bullet / It doesn’t want to know what you know”; Rondo Mieczkowski’s postmodern bildungspoem “Death by Chicken”; Carrie Etter’s “Hand over Fist,” a minimalist vision of woman’s rage; Silvia Rosen’s abstract “Tongues”; Henry J. Morrow’s subtly intertextual poems on Marilyn Monroe and abuse; and Ron Koertge’s iconoclastic Hollywood letter on love and difference, “Dear Superman.”

Other exceptional pieces include Aileen Cho’s “Koreatown” and Liz Gonzalez’s “Catholic Death”; a long poem by Gil Cuadros, “Sight,” which creates a transcendent world from the banalities of life; Amy Gerstler’s pseudo-monologues, which threaten to become novel and / or cinema text; Wanda Coleman’s shattered but forgiving paean to a city of so many voices (it must never lose even one), “L.A. Love Cry”: “To love L.A. is to love more than a city / It’s to love a language”; the sheer beauty of David St. John’s crossbreeding of Viennese and L.A. magical realism: “And the azure pearls / of opium, asleep in your palm-- / as if, from the glazed balcony / of your cheeks, blue tears / had fallen.” And the lines that might speak of the passion of the poet everywhere and in everyone, from Bia Lowe’s “Air”: “I stretch my lungs to meet you, pull my hips up to reach you, I swing out over and walk with no net under, so much depends on your grasp.”

There is so much in “Grand Passion” that has never been under a single cover, and yet, there are many who have shared lines and thoughts across the city and the globe. Unusual in such a large grouping, there is not a single throwaway work in the entire collection. Some of the more well-known poets represented here have previously been poor shows in anthologies. Often the editor is criticized for such a poor selection, but this problem is much more the fault of the poet, especially when the poet has a choice. Whether such disappointing representation is caused by poets’ traditional suspicion of the anthology form, the hoarding of their better works or the slapdash quality of an “occasion” piece, it is not a concern in “Grand Passion.”

Lummis and Webb, well respected as they are, have found or inspired gems. Although each poet here is, of course, capable of metamorphoses in style and subject, some offer poems which truly manage to capture their essence. Perhaps this is something one might expect from major academic-historical literary collections, and most anthologies claim to be such, but it is actually a feat rarely accomplished by a contemporary collection from a small press.

And yet, “Grand Passion” never seems to know how good it really is. It gives you much, and you find you long for more. It is about poetry, not editorial self-importance. It is complex and contradicting, ambivalent and incomplete, a striking realization of the impermanent quality of the Los Angeles existence, its pregnant and provoking multiculturalism. The city as facade, the city as empire, the city continued as images and words, the city as art: “Once I mistakenly read ‘word’ for ‘world’ and noticed it works that way, too,” notes Lummis. And she offers a glimpse into the impulse and philosophy that make this collection so different from the rest. Here is a reborn trust in the rough beauty of the concurrent failure and glory of words. One can only hope that Lummis and Webb will give us their collections on a regular basis. This is simply the best of its kind.