No one L.A. voice

REGARDING Dana Gioia’s remark that L.A. has not produced a great poet (“NEA Nominee Puts Poetry Back on Page 1,” by Tim Rutten, Nov. 2), I would suggest that notion belongs to another time.

Whitman wrote well over a century ago, before the phenomenon of Ellis Island. If Ferlinghetti speaks for San Francisco, it is the city of 50 years back and not the Bay Area megalopolis extending to San Jose.

L.A. was born in the last half of the 20th century, and even that place is unrecognizable from our cosmopolitan sprawl of today. No single voice can embody the Hispanic, Asian, Russian, Israeli and Iranian experience along with the Hollywood dream machine, suburban and Westside consciousness.

L.A. starts in Santa Barbara and ends at the Mexican border. To articulate this expanse is to write with the breadth and breath of all humanity. That other so-called L.A. is a cartographer’s fiction.

Norm Levine

Santa Monica