Bill Mohr

Bill's new book is complicated, and very good, though it presents a most disturbing point of view--that the marginalization of culture in the post-war era created the energy in which that culture, however unpopular, flourished.

He can be trusted, having participated in a good portion of what's become the history as an activist, writer and publisher, and having a lively interest and the academic cred to provide witness to that time he wasn't there.

The lists and charts he's compiled of who published when and where--City Lights, Grove, Swallow, New Directions, Coastlines, Variegation, Poetry--and the east coast/west coast associations are infra-red.

Variegtion was a poetry magazine in LA founded in 1946 by Grover Jacoby Jr., a member of a poetry group that met regularly at the LA Public Library, who 'blurted out that he was going to start publishing a magazine featuring only free verse.' (p. 28)  Jean-Louis Kerouac submitted poems, as did Allen Ginsberg and Philip Whalen.

And then there's Don Gordon, perhaps "the most self-effacing political poet of the post-war era", who maintained "an obstinate belief in the intransigent affirmation with which he countered his assignment to marginality." (p. 49):

Someone has heard who did not seem to be listening./Someone will open the archives on a far-off day of rain,/Enacting the first law: the conservation of dreams."

Hold-Outs: The Los Angeles Poetry Renaissance, 1948-1992, by Bill Mohr (University of Iowa Press, 2011.)