William Andrew Spalding — Collected Poems

William Andrew Spalding wrote Los Angeles as it changed from frontier town to metropolis. A newspaperman, historian, civic observer, and longtime figure at the Los Angeles Times, he brought the habits of the editorial room into poems that could be humorous, patriotic, reflective, boosterish, skeptical, or sharply local. My Vagabonds gathers fugitive verses alive with topical incident and public speech; Snatches of Song looks back across war, work, friendship, faith, California landscape, and the city’s growth. Spalding’s typography sometimes carries part of the performance, especially where dialogue, refrain, or visual arrangement complicates an apparently straightforward poem. Collected Poems restores both books together with recovered periodical pieces, presenting a writer whose civic confidence, historical memory, and comic self-awareness preserve the voice of early Los Angeles from inside its newspaper culture.