John Thomas — Selected Poems

December 31, 1930, Baltimore, Maryland–March 29, 2002, Los Angeles, California

John Thomas made poetry at the unruly edge of Venice West, Zen practice, little magazines, jail, and the intense literary partnership he shared with Philomene Long. Friends remembered the force of his conversation and his refusal of easy praise; younger writers including Wanda Coleman, Paul Vangelisti, Neeli Cherkovski, and RD Armstrong treated him as a severe but essential reader. His poems can be blunt narratives, satirical portraits, devotional arguments, prose collages, broken maps, or fields of language scattered across the page. Epopoeia and the Decay of Satire, the book-length prose poem from Patagonia, and the late Venice and Zen work reveal a writer continually testing how much experience a form can withstand. The life also contains violence for which Thomas later wrote, “I do not forgive myself.” These selected poems present the range, brilliance, and damage honestly, without turning any of them into legend.

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Catalogue

Venice West and the New American Poetry

Associations

Beat and New American Poetry Law and Civil Liberties Venice West Visual, Concrete, and Book-Object Poetry

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Bibliography

Thomas, John. John Thomas. Red Hill Press, 1972. Edition of 405 copies.

———. Il vecchio Strawinsky prova con orchestra. Turin, 1975.

———. Epopoeia and the Decay of Satire. Red Hill Press, 1976. Introduction by Paul Vangelisti.

———. Six Poets. Vagabond Press, 1979.

———. The Ghosts of Venice West. Raven Productions/Hot Water Press, 1994.

———. Bukowski in the Bathtub. Multiple editions.

———. Feeding the Animal. Lummox Press, 2001. Introduction by Scott Wannberg.

———. The Selected Poems and Prose of John Thomas. Raven Productions, 2011. ISBN 9781450762663.

———. “Nine Stages in Education of a Butterfly” and “My Bird.” The Floating Bear, no. 5, Apr. 1961.

———. “Alba” and “Memo for Coffeehouse Psychologists.” The Floating Bear, no. 13, Sept. 1961.

———. “Francesca and the Wicked Giant.” ONE Magazine, vol. 10, no. 5, May 1962, pp. 12–16.

———. “Tonight” and “Tarquin.” Genesis West, vol. 1, no. 2, winter 1962–63, pp. 159–63.

———. “Some Books.” The Floating Bear, no. 29, Mar. 1964.

———. “The Empty Blues.” The Floating Bear, no. 35, Apr. 1968.

———. “The Water Wheel.” Unidentified periodical, 1970, pp. 25–27. Local clipping scan.

———. “The Dozens.” Unidentified periodical, July 1971, p. 44. Local clipping scan.

———. “Wide Eyed Dream.” Bombay Gin, vol. 4, summer–fall 1977, p. 82.

Thomas, John, and Paul Vangelisti. Cinq: Four Poems. Red Hill Press, 1974.

Thomas, John, Robert Crosson, and Paul Vangelisti. Abandoned Latitudes. Invisible City/Red Hill Press, 1983. Includes Thomas’s complete prose poem from Patagonia.

Thomas, John, and Philomene Long. The Book of Sleep. Momentum Press, 1991.

———. Our Life: The One Secret That Surprises Death. Raven Productions, 2002. Audio recording.

Long, Philomene, and John Thomas. Great Zen Masters & Other Holy Fools. Raven Press, 2004.

Works About the Author

Armstrong, RD. Recollection of publishing Feeding the Animal and of Thomas’s mentorship. Lummox Press web archive.

City of Los Angeles. “Venice West Cafe Monument and Historic-Cultural Context Records.”

Dewey, Fred. “Memorial and Interview Materials Concerning John Thomas, Philomene Long, and Venice West.”

Ezra Pound Society. “John Thomas Bibliography and Pound Correspondence References.”

Idlet, Gabrielle. “My Father, John Thomas.” Two-part family memoir.

“John Thomas Retrospective.” Free Venice Beachhead.

Long, Philomene. “Interviews and Recollections Concerning John Thomas, the Ellison, Their Marriage, and Their Collaboration.”

Long v. County of Los Angeles. United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, 2006.

Online Archive of California. “Los Angeles Poets Collection and Related Finding Aids.”

Swiss Literary Archives. Bibliographic record for Cinq: Four Poems.

Vangelisti, Paul. Introduction to Epopoeia and the Decay of Satire. Red Hill Press, 1976.

Wannberg, Scott. Introduction to Feeding the Animal. Lummox Press, 2001.

Woo, Elaine. “John Thomas, 71; Venice Beat Poet, Mentor.” San Francisco Chronicle.

Stefans, Brian. “Los Angeles Poetry from the McCarthy to the Punk Eras.” A History of California Literature, edited by Blake Allmendinger, Cambridge UP, 2015, pp. 260–80.