Extra Resources
Among the materials posted to the exhibit’s Facebook page were photographs of related artifacts and resources for further reading. The contents of some of those posts, including a couple of updates, are reproduced below.
Holy City Adrift in Print
Members of the McGrath Working Group collaborated on an article for a special McGrath-centenary-themed issue of North Dakota Quarterly, writing about McGrath’s time in Los Angeles and about the experience of developing the exhibit. That article may be found here:
https://ndquarterly.files.wordpress.com/2022/11/ndq-83_4_ocr.pdf
McGrath Reading Aloud
This Poetry Foundation podcast features about 10 minutes of Thomas McGrath reading his own poems, drawing on a recording made in 1960 at KFPK in Los Angeles. His monotonous style as a reader is intentional; he argued that the reader's voice should inflect the poem as little as possible, so that the language itself would be the focus. The effect -- here captured at the dusk of McGrath's emotionally tumultuous Los Angeles period -- is intense and haunting. McGrath's reading begins at about the 3:05 mark, after a helpful biographical overview.
The link below takes you to a 1957 recording of Thomas McGrath reading the first sections of his Letter to an Imaginary Friend, which were appearing in print at just about that same time. A trove of reel-to-reel audio recordings documenting this time period, made by McGrath student and collaborator Mel Weisburd, have recently been digitized and are now accessible as part of the Weisburd Collection housed in the department of Special Collections and Archives at Cal State LA.
https://archive.org/details/cls_000015
Naomi Replansky’s Ring Song (with an inscription to the McGraths)
Naomi Replansky's 1952 book +Ring Song+, was nominated for the National Book Award, and earned the following praise from Tom McGrath: "Among the books of the time it still seems to me in a class by itself. Perhaps that is why it seems to have puzzled some of the reviewers who, in a period of the well-managed academic poem...could recognize the high quality of the poems without being able to explain how they could possibly exist." Replansky made a gift of this inscribed copy for Tom and Alice McGrath in 1953.
For more on Naomi Replansky (including her New York Times obituary from 2023):
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/09/books/naomi-replansky-dead.html
Gene Frumkin: The Hawk and the Lizard
This beautiful first edition of Gene Frumkin's +The Hawk and the Lizard+, was published by Alan Swallow in 1963. It was Frumkin's first book collection -- dedicated to the author's wife and to Thomas McGrath -- and number 6 in the Poets in Swallow Paperbooks series. The last poem in the book, addressed to McGrath, is reproduced here.
At the time of this publication, Frumkin was best recognized for having edited (along with Mel Weisburd, who also was a student of McGrath's at LASC in the 50s) the influential southern California literary journal Coastlines.
On “Loyalty Checks” in Mid-century California.
This KCET article provides excellent additional context for Holy City Adrift: Thomas McGrath's Los Angeles.
"If We Remain Silent" La County's Cold War Loyalty Checks