Greetings From L.A.

Most Angelenos are accustomed to the shorthand, wish-you-were-here postcards that render L.A. in the simplest terms: skyline and beach.

One Angeleno’s “perfection,” however, is another’s “cliche.” And that’s the greatest challenge to fixing a sense of Los Angeles on a glossy 3-by-5 rectangle. True Angelenos know that Los Angeles is neither easily accessed nor summarized, says poet Terry Wolverton, who’s just completed her most recent attempt to encourage writers to try.

“There’s been a lot of writing about the city, the myth of the city,” says Wolverton, who since arriving in Los Angeles in 1976 has been crafting her own series of compact portraits and meditations in poetry and prose. “If you come to L.A. and try to wrap your arms around the whole thing ... well, you can’t.”

Perhaps that’s because it is so diffuse. L.A. is a feeling. It’s a shade of light, a mix of spice and fruit carried on a hot wind. A forgotten road. An impossible hill. Above all, the traces it leaves are deeply personal. And Wolverton sensed that they could best be captured in a gallery of pictures drawn from memory and the senses--in words. Thus was born “Sense of Site,” a series of eight small literary works on postcards. Chosen in an open competition, with winners recently selected, poetic likenesses of L.A. will begin appearing on thousands of free postcards around the city in November.

Wolverton, who teaches poetry and runs the Silver Lake-based writers collective Writers at Work, has been pondering ways to make art in and of L.A. “I’d been looking at a way to break [the arts] out of this arts ghetto,” says Wolverton on a waning late-summer afternoon as she pauses between projects at her airy Writers at Work space.

As part of this effort, three years ago Wolverton began curating a group effort to expose Angelenos to poetry in as many far-flung nooks and crannies of the Southland as possible.

The first two projects--2000’s “Sonnets at Work” and last year’s “Prose Poems,” funded in part by the Cultural Affairs Department--helped to distribute free postcards in cafes, restaurants, clothing stores and malls across the basin. They also helped to spark curiosity and conversation. Imagine: Poems dotted among the sexy vodka ads or snide television promos stuffed in spinner racks just outside the loo!

But this year during the grant process, Wolverton found herself wondering: Instead of spreading just any poetry, why not poems about L.A.?

She put out a call to writers and, grants secured (this time from Cultural Affairs as well as the private Durfee Foundation), all she had to do was sit back and wait for the July deadline.

As poems drifted in, L.A. slowly emerged like a print shimmering up in a darkroom tray.

Page after page, frame after frame, personal panoramas--more than 100 in all--fanned out before her: Fish tacos. Hollywood ghosts. Stained glass. Dodger blue. Stucco adorning the city’s hem like decorative bric-a-brac. The Los Angeles that sang, prayed, shopped, hoped, loved and broadcast from those pages felt as wide and cacophonous as the city.

The challenge wasn’t to pick pieces that confirmed old stories or animated familiar vistas or rituals, but those that evoked the specific, “a unique vision,” in 15 lines of poetry or 143 words of prose. “Each of the pieces chosen is very particular about the site itself. Not a generic view,” Wolverton says. “There’s kind of an emotional investment in the site, while being very visual, very well-rendered pieces of writing.”

For some, like poet A.K. Toney, L.A. was evoked by ritual and rhythms of Leimert Park’s World Stage Performance Gallery, where “every witness is ascending more into feeling / the i was born from voice melodizing praise / to learn expression ancestors created ... “ For Ariel Robello, L.A. is a pause in the Odd Fellows Cemetery, where “each caw carries the soul of OG Veteranos / lost in battlefields home and abroad.” It is a stroll through a local farmers market. A humming downtown garment district. It is the 405, the 105, Santa Monica Boulevard, potholes, bougainvillea. Barnsdall Park palm trees that, writes Holly Prado, “shift into angels / patterned through a crowded sky.”

Wolverton found herself wavering and reconsidering as she narrowed down her list. Cost and printing format concerns forced her to whittle the winners to eight, whose names will be announced in November. Beyond artistry, she was looking for a range of voices and locations. “There are really extra-literary conditions. Like, there were way too many poems about Silver Lake,” she says with a laugh.

The winners will each receive $250, and Wolverton is crunching numbers and looking for other ways to secure some money for the runners-up as well.

A total of 80,000 cards--10,000 of each winning entry--will be printed and distributed in 291 M@x Racks throughout the region. Those are numbers seldom heard in the cottage industry of poetry, Wolverton says. “A good run of a book of poetry is 1,000; a poetry journal, 1,000. This is significant. In these racks, we’ll get to people who never go looking for poetry. Or those who delight in poetry but won’t go to a reading because it’s just not part of their world view or framework.”

Wolverton acknowledges that “there is not eight of anything that could fairly represent Los Angeles’ diversity of experience, of voice or location. Eight is ludicrous.” She is, however, moved by the minute details--L.A. textures and moods--that writers rendered within such a small space. The city isn’t just alive, but surprising.

Though the incarnation of the Cultural Affairs’ Regional Arts Grant that funded this postcard series will not be offered after this year, Wolverton isn’t worried. “You see wildflowers growing out of concrete all the time,” she says.

She has big hopes for the future and possibilities for this project. Inspired, she tosses out one idea, then another: “Maybe a bus tour to all of the spots where the writers could read at the site that they wrote about. Maybe we create a folio or map with each poem placed at its site. All this may not happen in this iteration, but there was such an enthusiastic response that I think that we could carry this further.”

It’s a journey without final destination, and Wolverton has big hopes about what awaits around the next blind corner. “I don’t know if it has been so much about learning about the city. But I think it’s confirmed that we really love our city. Our representation of city, our representative city. And I don’t know if people own up to that very much.”

A reading and free two-hour “Sense of Site” workshop led by Wolverton will be held Nov. 17 at Skylight Books in Los Feliz. For more information, call Writers at Work, (323) 661-5954.