About Extremes and Moderations
A Historical Archive of Los Angeles and Southern California Poetry
Extremes and Moderations is a digital publishing and archival project devoted to recovering, editing, and recirculating the poetry of Los Angeles and Southern California. Published through The Text/Tech Papers, the project brings together writers whose work is out of print, difficult to locate, scattered across newspapers and little magazines, or absent from conventional histories of American poetry.
The archive is intended both as a reading library and as an ongoing historical argument. It treats Los Angeles poetry not as a single movement or lineage, but as a field of overlapping scenes, institutions, migrations, political formations, aesthetic experiments, and local publishing cultures.
Staley’s Views: Los Angeles, 1914–1915. Central Park, looking north.
ABOUT THE PROJECT
Extremes and Moderations reconstructs a literary history that has often been fragmented by geography, canon formation, archival neglect, and the disappearance of small presses and periodicals. The project begins with nineteenth-century and turn-of-the-century writing and moves through progressive-era literary culture, early and immigrant modernisms, interwar Los Angeles, mid-century little magazines, Cold War politics, California Quarterly and Coastlines, and the Venice West scene.
The archive includes writers who are well known, writers remembered primarily within California, and writers whose work has nearly disappeared. Newspaper poets, club poets, mystics, immigrants, translators, political writers, formalists, modernists, editors, bohemians, and experimentalists are treated as parts of the same changing literary ecology rather than as isolated curiosities.
WHAT THE ARCHIVE INCLUDES
Text/Tech editions may include complete or selected poetry, reconstructed collections, critical reading editions, biographies, introductions, bibliographies, source notes, and links to relevant archival material.
Whenever possible, historical texts are made freely available as searchable PDFs. The project distinguishes between original scans and newly prepared reading or critical editions. A reset edition is not presented as a facsimile: it is an editorial reconstruction designed to make the work readable and searchable while remaining faithful to the available historical sources.
The archive will continue to expand as new texts, periodicals, bibliographic evidence, and archival materials are located.
CATALOGUE AND ASSOCIATIONS
Catalogue
The Catalogue provides the primary historical structure of the archive. Each volume is assigned one principal place within a sequence of literary formations, including Foundations, Turn of the Century, Progressive Los Angeles, Early Modernisms, Transpacific & Immigrant Modernisms, Interwar Los Angeles, Mid-Century Los Angeles, Little Magazines & Formalist Networks, the McCarthy Era, California Quarterly and Coastlines, and Venice West.
Associations
Associations provide a secondary cross-index. They connect writers across historical periods through magazines, newspapers, institutions, literary circles, political movements, aesthetic tendencies, ethnic and diasporic formations, intellectual currents, and local scenes.
A writer may therefore occupy one primary place in the Catalogue while participating in many different Associations.
EDITORIAL METHOD
Text/Tech editions are prepared from available primary sources and checked against bibliographic and archival evidence whenever possible. Original spelling, punctuation, and typography are generally preserved unless correction is necessary for accuracy or readability. Where multiple versions of a work exist, editorial choices are documented when those differences materially affect the text.
Biographical and bibliographical information is treated as provisional scholarly work rather than fixed annotation. Entries may be revised when new evidence becomes available, and uncertain information is identified as such rather than silently resolved.
The project also preserves distinctions between historical documents and later editorial intervention. Original scans remain valuable as documentary objects even when new reading editions are prepared from them.
RIGHTS AND OPEN ACCESS
Extremes and Moderations is committed to open access while respecting copyright. Works determined to be in the public domain are identified as such when their status has been established. For works still under copyright, the project seeks permission from authors, estates, publishers, or other rights holders when required.
Rights research is maintained at the level of the individual volume and may change as copyright records, renewals, estate information, and publication histories are clarified.
If you are an author, heir, estate representative, publisher, or other rights holder with information concerning material published on this site, please contact The Text/Tech Papers.
CITATION AND IDENTIFIERS
Text/Tech editions are designed to be stable, citable scholarly objects. Each volume receives a persistent Text/Tech record identifier, with additional bibliographic identifiers added as they become available.
Metadata is maintained separately from the PDF itself so that cataloguing information, rights status, subjects, associations, and bibliographic identifiers can be revised without altering the underlying edition.
Revision dates are derived from the published PDF record, allowing updated files to be distinguished without imposing a manual version-numbering system.
ABOUT THE EDITOR
Brian Kim Stefans is a poet, critic, editor, and scholar working across contemporary poetry, digital literature, experimental writing, and the history of literary technologies. He edits The Text/Tech Papers and Extremes and Moderations.
The project grows out of long-standing interests in literary archives, neglected poetic traditions, small-press culture, electronic publication, and the ways digital tools can make difficult or inaccessible bodies of writing available to new readers.