Extremes and Moderations is a historical archive of poetry in Los Angeles and Southern California, recovering writers, books, magazines, and literary networks that have fallen out of print, remained scattered across archives, or disappeared from conventional accounts of American poetry.
The project moves from the region’s nineteenth-century literary beginnings through turn-of-the-century and progressive-era poetry, early and immigrant modernisms, interwar Los Angeles, mid-century little magazines, Cold War politics, California Quarterly and Coastlines, and Venice West. Newly prepared reading and critical editions are made freely available alongside biographical, bibliographical, archival, and contextual material.
The archive is organized through a primary historical Catalogue and a secondary system of Associations connecting writers across periods through publications, institutions, literary circles, political formations, aesthetic movements, and intellectual networks.
All editions are freely available as PDFs.
Nora May French blazed through California bohemia, writing fierce, haunting poems of freedom, desire, landscape, and death before her life ended at twenty-six. Published in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and national magazines, her work captures a restless new California—and the struggle of a gifted woman to build an independent artistic life within it.
A Forty-Niner, Los Angeles horticulturist, public official, and indefatigable newspaper poet, Albert Fenner Kercheval wrote California as he helped cultivate it. His work moves from mining-camp comedy and Civil War politics to botanical observation, family grief, civic argument, and the haunting Spanish romance of Dolores.
A Los Angeles poet who became a Parisian bohemian and one of America’s boldest translators, C. F. MacIntyre wrote jaguars, cafés, cathedrals, war, eros, and mortality into poems whose polished surfaces barely contain their appetite and mischief.
Before Los Angeles could forget her, Eva Carter Buckner wrote Black soldiers, suffragists, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Abraham Lincoln, and women’s ambition into poems meant to be sung, recited, and used. A seamstress, painter, club leader, and NAACP organizer, she turned verse into public action—and made citizenship answer for its promises.
Heir to two founding Los Angeles families and the son of poet Rosalie Seligman Jacoby, Grover Jacoby became an audacious theorist of rhythm, translator, editor, and experimenter. His poetry and prose pursue what he called fluctuant syllabic verse, linking family history, radical magazines, formal analysis, a shared Lydia Rader Billings Award, and a lifelong argument with free verse.
Julia Boynton Green crossed from Gilded Age New York verse into the gardens, missions, deserts, and shorelines of Southern California, publishing across nearly fifty years. Married to another writer and active in Redlands literary life, she turned regional beauty into poems alert to age, labor, illness, faith, and the cost of enchantment.
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.
Religious, mystical, metaphysical, occult, and comparative-spiritual traditions within Southern California poetry.
Composition, song, musical training, concert life, rhythm, and collaboration give these writers ways to treat the poem as scored sound as well as printed language.
