Backlit: Los Angeles and the West Coast poetry renaissance

In this dissertation, I argue that the emergence and development of communities of poets known as the San Francisco Renaissance is actually only a small portion of a much larger groundswell of significant poetic activity on the West Coast during the Cold War. In contextualizing the West Coast as a distinct area of imaginative exile, I analyze the multitudinous clusters of poets that emerged in both Los Angeles and San Francisco after World War II as an intermingled narrative of social upheaval. In studying how this variegated cultural insurgency affected the development of contemporary American poetry, I emphasize the relationship of community formation to institutional power as an enduring problem of social value, as well as examine how the marginal and occasionally outlaw status of some of these poets affects the canonical construction of contemporary literature.;In examining the role of the poets in Los Angeles in this portion of literary history, I use critics such as John Guillory and Cary Nelson to focus on the relationship of class, cultural capital, and social institutions in a city in which literary projects are always in immediate juxtaposition with the culture industries. Building on concepts proposed by Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau, I focus on two successive poetry communities that emerged in Venice, California, and argue that both Venice West and Beyond Baroque demonstrate the singular impact of the small press movement on the West Coast poetry renaissance. My dissertation not only establishes a new account of poetry on the West Coast during this period, but challenges assumptions about the process that replenishes the canon. I conclude that peripheral communities of artists define their relationship to cultural experiment and the avant-garde by a sustained commitment to exploring the project of self-legitimization within the crisis of the cultural wars at the end of the Cold War.