The author of over 19 books of poetry, Vangelisti is a noted translator, journalist, teacher and editor of Amiri Baraka's selected Transbluesency
and the anthology LA Exile: A Guide to Los Angeles Writing, 1932–1988. (Since 1968, Vangelisti has lived in Los Angeles where he is now chair of the graduate writing program at Otis College of Art & Design.) This attentive and well-chosen selection (by poet Standard Schaefer; see Forecasts, July 23, for review of his Nova) reveals Vangelisti's impressive, and often innovative use of the book-length poem, collage, epistle and Oulipean alphabet poems, among others forms. Working in a comedic tradition that here include Dante and Jack Spicer, the poetry of many of these poems emerges from Vangelisti's keen, darkly humorous and sometimes noir-like investigations of corruption, loss and exile. In the persona-driven novel-in-verse Gold Mountain, which confronts issues of race, sex, place and the making of art, Vangelisti writes in the voice of a Chinese prostitute (circa 1891 California), "Once big nose dark face man wake up/ and my little feet go quick/ into his long boots. I say/ see my little box feet in you/ see me walk like you on Gold Mountain." The resulting identity entanglements will keep readers busy (and quite possibly angry) for months. Though arranged chronologically (and well-presented typographically), there is less a feeling of progress and more an on-going redirection of a straight lyric impulse in this array of experiments, both formal and otherwise. It's a redirection more readers (and writers) should experience. (Sept.)
