By Terry Wolverton
FROM: Cultural Weekly

The poetry community of Los Angeles is built and maintained and reimagined and rebuilt anew primarily by its practitioners. These poets devote time they might otherwise spend writing to founding and running magazines and small presses, opening or staffing bookstores, curating readings and offering workshops. Through their labor they feed the community so that it might grow, become more diverse and inclusive, so that talented voices do not go unheard, and so there will continue to be a place for us to practice and to touch readers.

This community service, this literary citizenship is almost always unpaid or so minimally compensated as to feel unpaid. It is often unrecognized and unsung. It can only be called a labor of love—love of creativity, love of language, love of poets and writers, of readers, and love of Los Angeles itself. Like the web of tree roots and fungi beneath the soil that provides a communications network for those trees—scientists call them mycorrhizal networks, unseen to those who live only on the surface of the earth—this devotion by poets does knit itself into an infrastructure for this city. Such love should not go unrequited.

Arising from exactly this fervor is the new collection, X LA Poets, edited by Linda Ravenswood and published by Hinchas Press. Linda is one of the poets who is building the poetry home she hopes to reside in, enlarging the rooms to accommodate more voices and tending a garden to grow for many seasons. Read Rest of Article Here