by Brian Dunlap

NOTE: Initially I didn’t post anything on Los Angeles Literature about Larry Colker’s passing last month from cancer because I never met him and I didn’t know him as a writer. However, seeing that Beyond Baroque is celebrating his life, the life of an L.A. poet and friend, on Saturday, and the fact that Los Angeles Literature is a news, history and information site covering the Los Angeles literary community, I feel obligated to post a brief article about him.

*****

Larry Colker was in love with poetry. “I am biased in favor of poetry that reads well aloud, to a broad audience,” he said in a Poets & Writers blog post from 2013 on “What Makes a Successful Poem.” He took that love into the Los Ángeles literary community as host of Redondo Poets for 15 years. In Redondo Beach is where he “heard eighteen thousand or so poems,” read aloud by features and poetry lovers of all kinds: teens, adults, aspiring poets and writers, community members looking for a warm, welcoming community to express themselves in. But most of all he used poetry as a mode to learn and explore who we are as humans. “I realize that one’s poetry is a reflection of one’s identity, and by identity, I mean our personal mythology about what makes us who we are.” His “greatest pleasure,” Colker said, of “host[ing] of a regular reading series is witnessing a poet coming into his or her own unique voice over time.”

Larry Colker was born in Huntington, WV, attended Deerfield Academy and universities in Chicago, Kansas City, and Urbana-Champaign, IL, with concentrations in Humanities, Romance Languages and Literatures, Educational Research and Psychology, and Early Childhood Education. But the first poem he wrote, he said in a Poetry.LA interview from 2015, “was for my parents 20^th anniversary.” However, it was sometime “between 10 and 12,” Colker said, when “poems struck me as marvelous machines in contrast” to prose.

Larry Colker’s impact on the Los Ángeles literary community reached far beyond his community work running and hosting Redondo Poets. “Here’s to the memory of one who was among us so long, and gave so much. Here’s to the poems he left us with. And they’re not going anywhere,” Los Ángeles luminary and poet Susanne Lummis said in an August 24 Facebook post. “Oh how I admired that man. Lovely, sweet, funny, smart smart smart man. We had some really great conversations over the years about everything but poetry, I’m so lucky and grateful,” Jessica Ceballos y Campbell said in another Facebook post dated from the same day.

Yet, the Redondo Poets Facebook page remembered Colker as, “the best poetry venue partner one could ever have. Kind, supportive, wise. A lighthouse to more than a generation of poets and performers that stepped up to this mic. I hope everyone is as lucky as I was to have a person such as Larry in their life.”