Poetry & Pollution: Mel Weisburd and Los Angeles
Melvin "Mel" Weisburd (1927-2015) was a poet, editor, scientist, and alum of our university who played a crucial role in literary and scientific cultures of Los Angeles in the middle of the twentieth century. A student of the radical poet Thomas McGrath during the tumult of the McCarthy period, Weisburd served as one of the earliest editors of Los Angeles State College's long-running student literary journal, Statement. That experience prepared him to co-found Coastlines, which became one of the more durable and influential regional literary magazines of the era.
Though he published his own poetry and essays – perhaps most notably his essay on "Lysergic Acid and the Creative Experience," which was one of the first literary accounts of LSD use – Weisburd was most impactful as an unsung hero behind the scenes of the local literary world. He helped host Coastlines fundraising parties that included jazz and live poetry readings, he mingled with emergent poetry celebrities of the day, and he feuded with the rival poets who made up Lawrence Lipton's Venice West Beat community on the other side of town. The numerous reel-to-reel audio recordings he made during the 1950s offer unusually intimate access to the poetry happenings that defined the L.A. scene.
Weisburd was unique in his ability to bridge the worlds of poetry and environmental science (his day job was as one of the first smog inspectors in Los Angeles, and he had a lasting impact on how people thought about air quality at the time). He was both a scientific researcher and a poet, a creator both of smog inspection manuals and of verse and prose – a specialist in both pollution and poetry. An unfinished project of his was a memoir of 1950s literary life entitled "The Smog Inspector," which sought to record the history he often found himself at the center of. Though that memoir was never published, the students in ENGL 3930 ("Introduction to Archival Research") are glad to be able to help tell some of Weisburd's story using primary sources and other materials from the Weisburd Collection housed at Cal State LA's Special Collections and Archives. In doing so, we hope to capture some of Weisburd's unique, individual experience, as well as the ways that his multi-faceted life connected him to Los Angeles and to our univeristy.