Lawrence Lipton — Collected Poems

October 10, 1898, Łódź, Poland – July 9, 1975, Los Angeles, California

Lawrence Lipton moved through several American literary worlds without staying safely inside any of them: immigrant Chicago journalism, mid-century social fiction, the little-magazine networks of the 1950s, and finally the poetry-and-jazz culture of Venice West. His poems are public, argumentative, and theatrical. They turn the airplane cockpit, the atomic age, the factory, the nightclub, and the ritual stage into places where reason and myth can confront one another. Rainbow at Midnight (1955) gives that ambition its largest architecture; Bruno in Venice West and Other Poems (1976), selected by Lipton shortly before his death, carries it into the improvisatory rhythms and embattled bohemia for which he became best known. The surviving periodical record shows that this career was both longer and more fluid than the two books alone suggest.

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Catalogue

Venice West and the New American Poetry

Associations

Beat and New American Poetry Editors and Magazines Film and Hollywood Jewish Los Angeles Poetry Los Angeles Radio and Pacifica Venice West

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Bibliography

Lipton, Lawrence. Brother, the Laugh Is Bitter. Harper & Brothers, 1942.

———. In Secret Battle. D. Appleton-Century, 1944.

———. Rainbow at Midnight. Golden Quill Press, 1955.

———. The Holy Barbarians. Julian Messner, 1959.

———. Art Is One: The Case for the Reintegration of the Arts. Intrator, 1961.

———. The Erotic Revolution: An Affirmative View of the New Morality. Sherbourne Press, 1965.

———. Bruno in Venice West and Other Poems. Venice West Publishers, 1976.

———. “Solitaire.” Pearson’s Magazine, vol. 51, no. 1, Feb. 1925, p. 35.

———. “Marginal Notes.” Pearson’s Magazine, vol. 51, no. 1, Feb. 1925, p. 53.

———. “Rainbow at Midnight.” The California Quarterly, vol. 2, no. 3, 1953, pp. 16–42.

———. “A Plug Hat for the Archetypical Man.” Coastlines, vol. 1, spring 1955, pp. 18–20.

———. “The Poetry of Ewart Milne.” Poetry, vol. 86, no. 6, Sept. 1955, pp. 366–368.

———. “Disaffiliation and the Art of Poverty.” Chicago Review, vol. 10, no. 1, spring 1956, pp. 53–79.

———. “A Midnight Poem.” East-West, autumn 1956, p. 12.

———. “The Poetry of Kenneth Rexroth.” Poetry, vol. 90, no. 3, June 1957, pp. 168–180.

———. “A Voyeur’s View of the Wild Side: Nelson Algren and His Reviewers.” Chicago Review, vol. 10, no. 4, winter 1957, pp. 4–14.

———. “I Was a Poet for the F.B.I.” Liberation, vol. 2, Nov. 1957; reprinted in Coastlines, vol. 9, winter 1957–58, Frontier, vol. 9, no. 11, Sept. 1958, and Stolen Paper Review (1963).

———. Jazz Canto: An Anthology of Poetry and Jazz. World Pacific Records WP-1244, p. 1958. Sound recording; includes “Night Song for the Sleepless,” read by John Carradine with the Chico Hamilton Quintet.

———. “Improvisation on a Theme from ‘Bird’ Parker.” Prairie Schooner, vol. 37, no. 1, spring 1963, p. 87.

———. “Bruno in Venice West.” Coastlines, nos. 21–22, 1964. Later reprinted in Bastard Angel and in Bruno in Venice West and Other Poems.

———. “Radio Free America.” Recurring column in the Los Angeles Free Press, late 1960s–1975.

Works About the Author

Birns, Margaret Boe. “Lawrence Lipton.” EBSCO Research Starters, 2023.

Dotson, Bill. “The Lost Sounds of Venice West.” USC Libraries, 3 May 2019.

Doub, Bo. “Lawrence Lipton, William L. Pereira, and Floyd C. Covington: Three Recently Processed Archival Collections of Los Angeles History at USC.” USC Libraries, 6 Dec. 2018.

Goldstein, Laurence. Poetry Los Angeles: Reading the Essential Poems of the City. University of Michigan Press, 2014.

Knecht, Louis, and Bo Doub. “Lawrence Lipton Papers, 1883–2009, bulk 1950–1975.” Collection no. 0159, USC Libraries Special Collections.

Lipton, Nettie. “Lawrence Lipton.” The Beats: Literary Bohemians in Postwar America, edited by Ann Charters, Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 16, Gale Research, 1983, pp. 352–56.

Marks, Jeffrey. Who Was That Lady? Craig Rice: The Queen of the Screwball Mystery. Delphi Books, 2001.

Maynard, John Arthur. Venice West: The Beat Generation in Southern California. Rutgers University Press, 1991.

Meares, Hadley. “Lawrence Lipton and Venice, California’s Claim to Beat Fame.” PBS SoCal, 9 Oct. 2020.

Novak, Estelle Gershgoren, editor. Poets of the Non-Existent City: Los Angeles in the McCarthy Era. University of New Mexico Press, 2002.

———. Art and the City: Civic Imagination and Cultural Authority in Los Angeles. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009.

“Lawrence Lipton, Wrote of ‘Beats’.” The New York Times, 10 July 1975.

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.