Thomas McGrath — Figures from a Double World and Other Los Angeles Poems

Thomas McGrath arrived in Los Angeles as an internationally published radical poet and left a decade later after helping create one of the city’s most consequential, if long-obscured, literary communities. At Los Angeles State College he taught poets including Henri Coulette, Gene Frumkin, and Mel Weisburd; at his Marsh Street house he gathered the circle later called the Marsh Street Irregulars; and through California Quarterly, Coastlines, public readings, and the Sequoia School he helped give the city’s anti-McCarthy left an exacting poetic voice. His refusal to cooperate with HUAC in 1953 cost him his teaching position but sharpened the collision of lyric form and political history that defines his Los Angeles work. The complete Figures from a Double World (1955) moves from savage domestic and civic comedy through war memory into compressed songs of art, love, necessity, and revolt. The separately published poems extend that record, while the 1957 and 1958 installments of Letter to an Imaginary Friend show his long autobiographical masterpiece taking shape at 2714 Marsh Street.