William J. Margolis — The Anteroom of Hell and The Eucalyptus Poems
A stevedore, printer, and fiercely independent little-magazine editor, William J. Margolis made poems that turn political terror, wounded intimacy, jazz, mysticism, and the stubborn life of California trees into an unruly art of survival.
Charles Foster — Collected Poems
Charles Foster left advertising after a visionary crisis and spent the final decade of his life making poems out of California roads, Tarot emblems, family feeling, political anger, peyote, jazz, sex, Catholic ritual, and the recurring figure of a world-bearing Lady. His four posthumous books have nearly vanished. This edition resets the two complete books preserved in the project archive, documents the two others, and restores the testimony of friends, editors, and family records.
Stuart Perkoff — Collected Poems
Stuart Perkoff made Venice West audible: its storefront rooms, beaches, prisons, drugs, arguments, lovers, Jewish memory, American violence, and moments of revelation. This edition resets the complete local texts of Alphabet, Kowboy Pomes, and Only Just Above the Ground, adds the recoverable nonduplicative poems from Love Is the Silence and The New American Poetry, preserves his stanza shapes and insets, and documents the much larger corpus that survives in books, archives, and recordings.
Bruce Boyd — Collected Poems
Bruce Boyd moved repeatedly between San Francisco, Berkeley, and Venice West, carrying the experiments of one poetry community into another. His poems turn Buddhist language, tidal landscapes, sexual candor, philosophical argument, comic montage, and intricate spatial patterning into an unusually restless body of work. This edition resets every verified poem and sequence in the project archive, documents Boyd’s surviving 1958 Poetry Center recording, and restores his life from vital records, publications, correspondence archives, and the recollections of fellow poets.
John Thomas — Selected Poems
John Thomas brought Baltimore argument, Venice West street life, Zen irreverence, sexual candor, historical collage, and a merciless suspicion of literary poses into poems that can turn from comedy to grief in a breath. This edition resets the complete 1976 collection Epopoeia and the Decay of Satire, the complete prose poem from Patagonia, and poems preserved in periodicals and in his late collaborations with Philomene Long. Its difficult spatial poems have been rebuilt for a six-by-nine-inch page without flattening their shifts, gaps, and countervoices.
Lawrence Lipton — Collected Poems
A Chicago modernist who became Venice West’s loudest impresario, Lawrence Lipton fused aviation, atomic dread, ritual, jazz, sex, and street life into poems built to be spoken aloud. This edition restores his two poetry books, a dramatically different early version of Rainbow at Midnight, and uncollected magazine poems.