Peter Yates — Collected Poems

November 30, 1909, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada–February 25, 1976, Buffalo, New York

Peter Yates made poetry, music, architecture, family life, and the garden parts of one continuous art. In the rooftop studio of the R. M. Schindler house he shared with pianist Frances Mullen Yates, the couple presented the “Evenings on the Roof” concerts that transformed Los Angeles musical culture. His poems pursued a related intensity. A Smaller Poem Book uses Hopkins-inflected sonnets and concentrated lyrics to test how much sound and thought a small form can carry; The Garden Prospect opens that practice toward family devotion, illness, loss, friendship, music, landscape, and long reflection. Yates could be learned without losing intimacy and experimental without abandoning song. This Collected Poems follows the work from youthful compression to the spacious structures of the later writing, recovering the poetry of a major Los Angeles critic and impresario who treated listening itself as an imaginative discipline.

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Catalogue

California Quarterly, Coastlines, and Poetry Los Angeles

Associations

Architecture Jake Zeitlin Circle James Boyer May Circle Modernism Music and Poetry Poetry Los Angeles Poets as Collectors Powell–Ritchie Circle Radio and Pacifica

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Bibliography

Yates, Peter. A Smaller Poem Book. Anderson & Ritchie / Ward Ritchie Press, 1946.

———. The Garden Prospect: Selected Poems. Jargon Society, 1980.

———. An Amateur at the Keyboard. Pantheon Books, 1964.

———. Twentieth Century Music: Its Evolution from the End of the Harmonic Era into the Present Era of Sound. Pantheon Books, 1967.

Works About the Author

Iddon, Martin, editor. John Cage and Peter Yates: Correspondence on Music Criticism and Aesthetics. Cambridge University Press, 2019.

UC San Diego Library Special Collections and Archives. “Peter Yates Papers, 1927–1976.” Includes correspondence and drafts of poetry, plays, criticism, and books.

Monday Evening Concerts. “About.” Official institutional history.

———. “Chronology.” Official chronology of the series.

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.