Grover Jacoby — Collected Poems and Translations

Grover Jacoby made Los Angeles a laboratory for poetic form. His early book The Human Patina moves among lyric compression, satire, urban observation, and experiments in rhythm; later he created two companion magazines with deliberately opposing principles. Variegation welcomed free verse, while Recurrence defended rhyme, making formal pluralism an editorial program rather than a compromise. Their pages joined established poets, unknown writers, translations, essays, and early work by Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. Jacoby’s own poems range from the comic “The Dirigible” to densely patterned and self-analytical verse; his translations test how rhythm can cross languages without being flattened into paraphrase. Collected Poems and Translations gathers the book, the magazine poems, and the translated work alongside his writing on prosody, restoring a poet-editor who treated every line as an argument about how poetry moves.