LSD and Creative Experience

Documentation of Mel Weisburd's relationship with LSD offers us a poetic window to the psychedelic experience of the 1950s and the 1960s. He was among the generation of southern California creatives who avidly participated in experiments with the drug, long before it became synonymous with the 60s counterculture. The collection of poems displayed here illustrates how the hallucinogen affected his own creativity as a writer. Bearing the marks of light editing and revision, these written and typed manuscripts convey the degree to which LSD molded the framework of his mind. Many materials in Weisburd's papers indicate his attempts to write on theme; most successful was his widely read 1958 essay on the topic for Coastlines.