Mel Weisburd — Collected Poems

28 November 1927, St. Paul, Minnesota – April 2015, Los Angeles, California

Mel Weisburd lived two careers that rarely occupied the same room: he was a poet and little-magazine editor formed by Thomas McGrath's Los Angeles circle, and a pioneering air-pollution inspector whose manuals helped establish modern environmental enforcement. Born in St. Paul to an immigrant Jewish family and raised amid separation, silence, and antisemitism, he arrived in Los Angeles as a teenager, served in the Army, and graduated from UCLA before joining the new Los Angeles County Air Pollution Control District. At Los Angeles State College he edited Statement, then co-founded Coastlines with Gene Frumkin in 1955. His poetry moves between the body and the instrument panel, private memory and public catastrophe, while his late books return movingly to his fifty-year marriage to the artist Gloria Applebaum Weisburd. This edition gathers the two complete books with the independently published poems located in The California Quarterly, Coastlines, Poetry Los Angeles, and Quill & Parchment.

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Catalogue

California Quarterly, Coastlines, and Poetry Los Angeles

Associations

California Quarterly Coastlines Editors and Magazines Jewish Los Angeles Modernism Nature, Science, and Environment Poetry Los Angeles Psychedelic Los Angeles Thomas McGrath Circle Wildfire, Smog, and Ecology

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Bibliography

Weisburd, Mel. A Life of Windows & Mirrors: Selected Poems 1948-2005. Conflux Press, 2005.

———. The Gloria Poems: A Short Memoir of a 50-Year Marriage. Conflux Press, 2009.

———. “My Father” and “The Elephant.” The California Quarterly, vol. 3, no. 3, 1954, pp. 19–20.

———. “Descendant Robot” and “The Game.” Coastlines, vol. 1, no. 1, spring 1955, pp. 26–27.

———. “The American.” Coastlines, vol. 1, no. 2, summer 1955, pp. 12–13.

———. “When I Go Down to That Sleep,” “The Integration of Failure,” and “Later Than There Is No Never No.” Poetry Los Angeles, edited by James Boyer May, Thomas McGrath, and Peter Yates. Villiers Publications, 1958.

———. “Lysergic Acid and the Creative Experience.” Coastlines, vol. 3, no. 2, spring-summer 1958. Reprinted in Best Articles and Stories.

———. “The Sixth and the Seventh Sense of Men” and “Leave Taking.” Coastlines, vol. 4, nos. 2–3, spring 1960, pp. 46–48.

———. “A Crow Black With Purpose.” Coastlines, vol. 5, no. 2, 1962, pp. 44–45.

———. “Report From Evanston.” Coastlines, vol. 6, nos. 1–2, 1964, p. 13.

———. “Between Chicago and St. Paul.” Poets of Today, edited by Walter Lowenfels. International Publishers, 1964.

———. “Image Hill / 1956.” Eating the Pure Light: Homage to Thomas McGrath, edited by John Bradley. Backwaters Press, 2009.

———. “Burial,” “Torrey Pines,” and “Kol Nidre.” Quill & Parchment, vol. 7, no. 9, Sept. 2007.

———. “The City That Outgrew Its Air.” Statement, vol. 6, 1953.

———. Air Pollution Control Field Operations Manual: A Guide for Inspection and Enforcement. U.S. Public Health Service, 1962.

———. “Analysis of Carcinogenic Air Pollutants.” JAMA, vol. 183, no. 9, 1963, pp. 811–812. DOI: 10.1001/jama.1963.03700090131041.

———. “Physician's Guide to Air Pollution.” JAMA, vol. 186, no. 6, 1963, pp. 605–609. DOI: 10.1001/jama.1963.63710060051022.

———. Field Operations and Enforcement Manual for Air Pollution Control. 3 vols. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 1972.

Works About the Author

Anderson, Susan. Interview of Mel Weisburd. Three sessions, 2013. UCLA Library Center for Oral History Research, 2014.

Ayala, Salvador, Amanda Kong, Gabriela Valenzuela, and Andrew Lyndon Knighton. “Holy City Adrift: Thomas McGrath’s Los Angeles.” North Dakota Quarterly, vol. 83, no. 4, fall 2016, pp. 7–19.

Cal State LA Special Collections and Archives. “Mel Weisburd Papers.” Includes manuscripts, journals, correspondence, and forty-two reel-to-reel recordings, some digitized through the California Audiovisual Preservation Project.

California State University, Los Angeles, Special Collections and Archives. Poetry & Pollution: Mel Weisburd and Los Angeles. Digital exhibition based on the Mel Weisburd Poetry Collection.

———. Weisburd (Mel) Papers, 1952-2002. Collection no. 2017.004. Online Archive of California.

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

Weisburd, Mel. Mel Weisburd Bio Insights and Testament. Kathabela Wilson, 4 Apr. 2014.

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.