Shall We Gather at the River?

On April 21 of this year, Los Angeles lost one of its greatest poets and conservationists when Lewis MacAdams died at age 75. His loss further deprived California of one of its greatest environmental prophets at a time when thousands of residents have been displaced by the latest infernos to plague the state. Having spent most of his life on the West Coast, MacAdams understood that California, like all earthly paradises, is permanently on the edge of natural disaster, which is why he dedicated the last 40 years of his life to preserving one of Los Angeles’s most maligned natural blessings: its river. Described as a “flood-control channel” on good days and as a “pathetic sewage-filled ditch” on bad ones, the Los Angeles River is one of the most closely managed watercourses in the world, a state of affairs that began as soon as the Spanish arrived in 1769, leading to the forced resettlement of the Tongva people, who had lived in the region for centuries. The river stopped being a fluvial phenomenon and became merely a tool, like every other natural resource in the Golden State.

Sapped by the Spanish, then by the Mexicans, the alluvial river’s flow was channeled into the impressive Zanja Madre, or Mother Ditch, an open-air trench that fed the area’s large-scale orchards and vineyards and that served the Pueblo of LA as its original aqueduct. The new American owners of California eventually decided that the Los Angeles River, which mercurially shifted course across the southland, would have to be straightjacketed under tons of cement. In 1938, the US Army Corps of Engineers turned what was left of the river into the concrete halfpipe Angelenos and outsiders love to disdain today. After all, hating the river fits LA’s myth perfectly: a waterless river for a culture-less, nature-less city.

It has always been easy to fear or ridicule the Los Angeles River: it is bone dry for three-quarters of any given year, when it doesn’t look like a river at all. Yet, it has also unleashed devastating floods capable of washing entire neighborhoods into the Pacific. To this day, many older houses in LA still sit atop their raised river-rock foundations, which kept wealthier families above the watery fray before the river was tamed. In fact, ever since the Franciscan missionary Juan Crespí christened the river El Río de Nuestra Señora La Reina de Los Ángeles de Porciúncula in 1769, it has become de rigueur to mock it, or at least express one’s dismay and disappointment at its miserable condition, unfit for human activity—and that’s when people are able to catch a glimpse of it at all.

“Where did it go?” MacAdams asks in his book-length poem, The River: Books One, Two & Three, the work for which he will likely be best remembered, “Literally, where did it go? / Now there’s just the / Technical Advisory Board / of Friends of the Los Angeles River / trying to figure out / how much of it / has been lost.” Running for 51 miles alongside freeways, rail-yards, and factories, through 17 different cities and crossed by about 100 bridges, the river has provided Hollywood with the perfect cinematic backdrop for noirish murders and dystopian wastelands, or even just fantastic car scenes, like John Travolta drag-racing down the river’s length in Grease (1978), or the chase segment in To Live and Die in L.A. (1985). In many ways, the trickle that courses through the Los Angeles River does make a mockery of the time when crawdads and trout filled its waters, given that the last steelhead was caught off a bridge in the northeast of the city more than 80 years ago.

Nevertheless, follow the river’s course as it streams down the Simi Hills in the San Fernando Valley, curls around Griffith Park like a comma, slices south through Chinatown, Downtown, and the Gateway Cities to spill into San Pedro Bay, and the river will reward you with a rare glimpse of how amorphous Los Angeles really is. From the plastic suburbs of the Valley, via Universal Studios and the Hollywood Hills, past Chavez ravine and the Cornfields (Los Angeles State Historic Park), crossing the county’s unbroken urban expanse to Long Beach, one could hope for no better tour guide to the American West’s largest city. The river re-frames LA and puts it in its proper perspective, buttressed between the mountains and the ocean, a human aspect ratio often lost on the city’s harried commuters and tourists. Of course, the river looks stunningly different now than when MacAdams first laid eyes on it 40 years ago. As he put it in his unpublished memoir, Poetry & Politics, “All rivers have their smell. The L.A. smell was diesel fuel, carburetor dust, fear, loss, emptiness, and the future.”

In 1985, MacAdams founded the nonprofit Friends of the Los Angeles River (FoLAR), a loose coalition of artists, architects, urban planners, and neighborhood activists. MacAdams had a talent for pulling the levers of power, which he put to good use as he wooed mayors, governors, and senators. He prompted LA’s city government to initiate the River Master Plan in 1991 and the River Revitalization Master Plan in 2007, thus resuscitating ecosystems along several stretches of the river, laying out bike paths, and opening more parks. By 2010, the EPA declared the Los Angeles River to be “traditional, navigable water” despite objections raised by the Army Corps of Engineers that the river was merely a flood control channel. That designation ensured the river’s protection under the Clean Water Act and helped it become the urban-waterway-on-life-support that it is today. Little of that would have been achieved without MacAdams. In 2016, Marsh Park by the Glendale Narrows was renamed the Lewis MacAdams Riverfront Park in his honor, and the city unveiled a seven-foot stele bearing the poet’s profile, in his ubiquitous porkpie hat, surrounded by his beloved river creatures and lines from The River. Hidden behind this memorial, however, lies one of the most important, and least explored, bodies of work by a California poet in recent times.

***

Lewis MacAdams Jr. was born on October 12, 1944, in San Angelo, Texas, to Lewis MacAdams Sr. and Marjorie Rosenthal, members of Dallas’s small Jewish community. As he later recalled in Poetry & Politics, it was a time when the Ku Klux Klan was a major force in the area, directing the city’s deeply segregationist tactics. While MacAdams was careful to stress that the topography of Dallas did not immediately shape his understanding of the politics of water, he nevertheless understood how the city’s river, the Trinity, which stretched from the north of Texas to Houston, “divided black Dallas from white Dallas.” It constituted a natural bulwark between the wealthy white city and the Black slums west of the river, communities that constantly flooded owing to the city’s refusal to build the levees that instead protected Dallas’s white neighborhoods. The blues musician T-Bone Walker, who got his start playing in Oak Cliff, summed up this permanent precariousness in his song “Trinity River Blues”: “That dirty Trinity River / Sure has done me wrong / It came in my window and doors / Now all my things are gone.” Spending time in the Trinity River Bottoms, a neighborhood of shotgun shacks built on low-lying land beside the water in the shadow of downtown, proved formative for the young poet. It was where MacAdams first fell in love with music, attending gigs accompanied by high school friends, including Boz Scaggs and Steve Miller. They watched musicians like Jimmy Reed, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and Lonnie Johnson play tiny dives in the Bottoms, with the reminder of racial divides never far off. The Bottoms was exactly the sort of cross-sectional melting pot that continued to capture MacAdams’s imagination for the remainder of his life: “the river is where the political meets the poetic, where the dreamers and the schemers picnic side by side.”

MacAdams Sr. insisted on the best and ran up debts the family learned about only decades later. This profligacy ensured that the young Lewis was sent to St. Mark’s School of Texas, one of the state’s finest preparatory schools, where he was captain of the basketball team and president of his class. Hints of his future direction emerged when a friend of the family turned him on to Jack Kerouac, and like many of his generation, the teenage MacAdams was quickly drawn to the idea of the hip outsider. While MacAdams never fully revisited those days in Dallas outside of his memoir’s early chapters, scattered scenes in his poems attest to those years: “Religious Texas elder voices / congeal into mist, rain / drifts across Deep Elum / hock shop stoops, down / East 96th Street to Madison,” he wrote in “Back to the Dump.” In his late volume Lyrics (Blue Press Books, 2009), he wrote

I once saw Mance Lipscomb peruse a
Central Texas juke joint the way I just
cased this barbeque operation: cool inside a
friendly desperation, picking
through the rhythms of a
strained conversation
about love in a time of murder.

MacAdams graduated in 1962 and then headed to Princeton. As John Koethe, a poet and one of MacAdams’s coevals at Princeton, remembered: “There weren’t any creative writing classes at Princeton at that time, but there was a countercultural poetry scene, and Lewis was its ringleader. […] He brought all these poets to campus, among them Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, who read to an audience of four, as well as younger poets like Peter Schjeldahl, Kenward Elmslie, and John Wieners.”

Describing himself as an “unhappy undergraduate,” MacAdams threw his considerable energies into developing his skills as a literary impresario. He organized arts weekends— including one of Bob Dylan’s first performances in the area—and turned heads with his flamboyant costumes, such as a cape and wide-brimmed hat. In his junior year, MacAdams met his first wife, the poet Phoebe MacAdams Ozuna, with whom he would remain close until his death, and who dropped out of Radcliffe to be with him. It wasn’t long before the couple drifted to New York, where, as MacAdams writes in Poetry & Politics, he spent some time “learning how to be a poet the hard way.” Connected to various members of the so-called second generation of New York School poets, such as Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett, MacAdams became involved in the poetry scene in the Lower East Side, particularly around St. Mark’s Poetry Project during Anne Waldman’s tenure as director. His first readings were warmly acclaimed, with figures such as Gerard Malanga and Lou Reed in attendance. Following brief spells in Europe and North Africa, including an encounter with Eldridge Cleaver in Algeria, MacAdams returned to New York and got a job writing advertising copy. “Vertigo in the Clocktower” is typical of the poems he produced during that time:

Larry Fagin and I walked downtown to the Clocktower
to see art works from the fabulous collection of the
     Vogels, Dorothy and Herbert,
the five foot four inch minimal art collectors who live in
     a tiny NYC apartment
crammed full of small art.
 
Larry wasn’t feeling too groovy, but revived
as we climbed the architecturally legendary clock tower
     through the
arte povera (faint series of whitish-grey lines
on floors and walls) up a narrow, spiralling staircase
to a roof 18 or 20 stories above the street
where we walk around inside a
flimsy waist-high wrought-iron fence and view
the towers and lofts of Lower Manhattan.
 
“There’s St. Marks,” Larry said, pointing, as we edged
around to the tower’s north side.
But I was unable visually to concentrate
due to the onrush of vertigo.
 
Larry laughed when I told him what was happening,
and playfully tried to shove me toward the precipice.
 
“I didn’t know you had vertigo,” he said, and grabbed my arm
to pull me around to the east side, but I
laughingly insisted that I go back inside.
 
Safely back in the warm, sunny art room on a couch
I tried to remember the last time I had such a spell of the
     height/fear
disorientation: When I’d gone up in sealed Big D
     skyscrapers, suit on bod and hat
in hand to look for summer jobs; or meeting my father or
     my father’s friends in
bank building top floor private clubs when the subject
     under every discussion was
what was I going to do with my life.

Deeply marked by Frank O’Hara’s penchant for short, prosy narratives of city life, “Vertigo in the Clocktower” nonetheless exhibits a budding political awareness. It shows MacAdams turning against his father’s materialism and the profit-driven, social-climbing milieu in which MacAdams was raised. “Red River,” another highlight from that era, is dedicated to O’Hara’s memory, having been inspired by the shock surrounding the great poet’s death in 1966: “Peter talks poetry, / explains his dispatch, the food is rotten. // Linda says at the funeral friends stood in clumps, / like people in galleries who know each other. // Fire engines go back down Broadway. […] I’m smoking, inelegant, / as was never allowed in his poems / which spoke of small graces we must master / to live in ecstasy in New York City.” Around this time, MacAdams published his debut collection, City Money (1966).

In 1967, MacAdams left New York City to begin graduate studies at SUNY Buffalo. Greatly benefiting from then-Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s interest in expanding the State University of New York system, SUNY Buffalo had become the American avant-garde’s mecca, a reputation cemented when the English department hired first Charles Olson and then Robert Creeley, leading to Buffalo being informally referred to as “Black Mountain II,” after the experimental arts college in North Carolina. While at Buffalo, MacAdams formed lifelong friendships with the poets Duncan McNaughton and John Wieners, and he interviewed Creeley for the Paris Review, which also published some of MacAdams’s poems. Championed by Tom Clark (the Paris Review’s poetry editor), MacAdams’s work was included in Paul Carroll’s influential anthology The Young American Poets (1968), alongside emerging talents Waldman, Charles Simic, Diane Wakoski, Mark Strand, and James Tate. Thanks to Clark’s lobbying, MacAdams also published his second collection, The Poetry Room (1970), with Harper & Row—the only book he ever published with a trade press.

The rebellion brewing inside MacAdams reflected current events in the United States: the assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy; heightened Cold War tensions; the rising anti-Vietnam War movement; police brutality in Chicago; a viciously suppressed Civil Rights movement; and the violence at the Altamont Free Concert. Despite being a child of privilege, MacAdams was inspired by Ed Sanders’s cry of “total war on mainstream culture.” He began frequenting the latter’s Peace Eye Bookstore, located near Tompkins Square Park in New York City, where Sanders produced his mimeographed zine Fuck You: A Magazine of the ARTS and performed with his rock band The Fugs. The Vietnam draft was underway and MacAdams showed up to his hearing in Buffalo in his underwear, later commenting: “I just decided I wasn’t going to go to Vietnam.” Not long afterward, he and Phoebe, alongside Tom Clark and Angelica Heinegg, drove out west in a station wagon.

San Francisco became MacAdams’s home for the next couple of years. After taking on a medley of dead-end jobs, and living in communal situations, he landed a gig as director of the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University, where the first act he booked was Jessica Hagedorn and the West Coast Gangster Choir, a multiracial ensemble of vocalists and musicians, in their first-ever public performance. As Duncan McNaughton told me: “It was at this time that Lewis also became increasingly attracted to what later became known as performance poetry, especially if there was a rock-n-roll aspect to it.” MacAdams undoubtedly drew from the city’s strong connection to the oral side of the craft, as embodied by the various waves of the San Francisco Renaissance, first led by Kenneth Rexroth and Madeline Gleason, then by Jack Spicer and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and, finally, by the Beats associated with the famous Six Gallery poetry reading in 1955, where Ginsberg first read “Howl.”

It wasn’t long, however, before MacAdams decided to join the avant-garde train once more and relocate to Bolinas, then, as now, a reclusive community at the far end of an isthmus facing Mount Tamalpais, 30 miles north of San Francisco. Named after the old Mexican land grant, Rancho Las Baulines, Bolinas was perfectly positioned to avoid the overdevelopment that has turned the Golden State into a tinderbox. Framed on three sides by water—the Pacific Ocean and the Bolinas Lagoon, a tidal estuary whose mudflats are home to herons, sea lions, and pelicans—and with its back against protected parks, the unincorporated community remains roughly as big as it was in the sixties, and is home to about a thousand people. The village was further protected by the persistence of local residents in tearing down signs along State Route 1 that pointed to its existence, thus concealing the town from day-trippers.

Bolinas had sprung out of a dairy farm in the late 1920s, when the owners parceled out land into residential lots. As with many coastal communities in Northern California, its residents made a living off of whaling, then logging, and by the time MacAdams arrived in the late sixties, the only form of local government was the recently established Public Utilities Board, which oversaw water and sewage. An untitled poem by MacAdams from around that time sets the scene:

Dear Peter, Here is your analysis:
There are six new fishing boats in the bay.
The government buys them for the fishermen
with interest-free 100,000 dollar loans.
They’re from up north
Where there’s no fish.

Bolinas was home to an extraordinary group of poets from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, including McNaughton, Joanne Kyger, Jim Carroll, Richard Brautigan, Philip Whalen, John Thorpe, Lewis Warsh, Aram Saroyan, Philip Lamantia, Bill Berkson, Joe Brainard, Donald Allen, and Larry Kearney, among many others, some of whom are featured in On the Mesa: An Anthology of Bolinas Writing (City Lights, 1971). While attracting literati from San Francisco and New York, Bolinas was also home to “a varied group of psychedelic refugees,” as Kevin Opstedal, a poet and MacAdams’s friend and loyal publisher, put it in his study, Dreaming as One: Poetry, Poets and Community in Bolinas, California (1967–1980). The largely rural activities of the majority of its long-term residents clearly left an imprint on MacAdams’s work. Niman Ranch, now a commercial purveyor of “humanely raised and sustainable [meat]” with an annual turnover of close to $65 million, began as Bill Niman’s simple family farm, on land the Minnesotan purchased in 1969. This was the setting for one of MacAdams’s best-known books, News from Niman Farm (1976), in which the author interspersed scenes of urban decay, including some striking passages on homelessness in the Bay Area, with snapshots of rural life, no doubt inspired by the time MacAdams spent living in one of Niman’s hog-barns, which he helped build. Here is Section XVI of the book-long poem:

Hey, I’d
love to sit here unfastening your safety belt forever,
but there’s cows to push into the next pasture.
 
Last night I was nodding out until you showed me
a book you’d been reading about Emilie du Chatelet.
She was Voltaire’s mistress,
but she was also this incredible mathematician in her own right.
She looked a little like you actually,
from the frontispiece; and somehow we got to talking about journals,
and journalists, and you told me
I was a journalist.
 
What do you mean a journalist?
 
The tip of my tongue was numb
and my nose was froze.
 
Well you wrote Tilth didn’t you?
 
Yeah, well, I guess you could call that
journal   ism,
in that it was written
with a particular future in mind,
 
a short future which has already passed,
and come true,
and that book helped make it come true.

Tilth, meaning “tillage,” was a book of interviews MacAdams conducted with local residents in Bolinas, investigating the organic farming methods being pioneered at the time. Accompanying the interviews were photographs by MacAdams’s wife, Phoebe. Arguably the greatest turn in MacAdams’s creative life came in the wake of one of the largest oil spills in California history, in January 1971, when two Standard Oil tankers collided under the Golden Gate Bridge, pouring hundreds of thousands of gallons of crude into the water. MacAdams vividly recalled the incident and the resultant cleanup efforts, which galvanized the newly arrived artists, in Poetry & Politics:

People started hearing about this oil spill and the same night I believe the oil spill began to coalesce on the Bolinas lagoon, so there was nowhere that living birds weren’t covered with oil. It was murderous; it killed thousands of creatures…[P]eople joined together to try and build a log boom, which consisted of a walkway that went from Stinson to Bolinas bridge…We put out the log boom, and then we got bales of hay…and we were throwing out the used-up bales and bringing in fresh ones. When the water came in, it would get hung up like fencing material…Oil would be tossed, bale by bale, onto the beach.

MacAdams was elected to the Public Utility Board in Bolinas and began to exhibit a strategic zeal for negotiating with institutions to achieve his environmental goals. Not long after the spill, MacAdams had his first confrontation with the Army Corps of Engineers, a lifelong adversary, which at that time was laying plans for a sewage pipe that would channel raw waste through Bolinas directly into the Pacific—plans that MacAdams and other local residents ultimately defeated.

Although MacAdams routinely referred to Bolinas as his “spiritual home,” he quit the village in 1979 and headed to Los Angeles. Some said he wanted to make it in Hollywood, while others speculated he wanted to be nearer to Phoebe and their children following the couple’s divorce earlier that year. Whatever the case, it was clear MacAdams was trying to put distance between him and some of the ghosts that hung over Bolinas. In a poem from that time, “Bring on the Hungry Ghosts,” nearly every line begins with the name of a dead friend or a recently departed pop figure, among them one of MacAdams’s closest friends, the painter Jack Boyce (who was Joanne Kyger’s second husband). “Jack was one of these wild guys,” MacAdams later reminisced,

guys that felt they could live outside of the culture and just start it over, even if it meant hauling wood down the coast in a fucking rowboat. Jack was one of those kind of guys. […] Jack was always a serious drinker. One night in 1972, high, or drunk, or both, he decided to walk across one of the roof beams. He lost his balance, fell, and died. He had broken his neck.

By all accounts, Boyce’s death hit the local community hard, coming a year after the poet Lew Welch walked out of Gary Snyder’s cabin in the Sierras and headed into the woods with a revolver, never to be seen again. MacAdams’s poem “Heart Photos” memorializes Boyce’s passing:

The ashes of Jack Boyce’s body
Will be consecrated to the mountain
Tamalpais at noon Monday
at Mountain Theater.
 
[…]
 
It’s not a consecration at all, says Philip, It’s an ordination
ceremony. Jack’s been made into a monk,
That’s all. Like Lew, his spirit guards the holy mountain from the ghosts
whose dreary inner sanctum throbs with back-hoe gore.
It’s the only ceremony the Buddhists know.

Incorporating himself as Metropolitan Pictures in LA, MacAdams explored his interest in filmmaking, which began to bud in the late ’70s and ultimately led to him  codirecting the documentary What Happened to Kerouac? (1986), an examination of the troubled novelist’s life that, as David Ulin noted, “deconstructed the myth without denying the writer’s impact or value.” MacAdams also began producing the Lannan Literary Videos series, one-hour programs dedicated to the work of a single poet, a job that saw MacAdams interview Snyder, Louise Glück, Lucille Clifton, Czeslaw Milosz, Octavio Paz, Sharon Olds, Amiri Baraka, Joy Harjo, Seamus Heaney, Thom Gunn, and Eavan Boland, among many others. Despite never quite fulfilling his cinematic aspirations—although he teamed up with his old friend Boz Scaggs, by then a famous musician, to write the unproduced screenplay The Last Days of Hank Williams—MacAdams’s foray allowed him to consider the impact that the power of visual representation and language could have in changing public attitudes, lessons that later led him to found and lead FoLAR.

***

Speaking by phone from his home in California’s rural Nevada County, Gary Snyder recalled for me his part in the founding of Friends of the Los Angeles River:

Lewis invited me to visit him, so I went down to LA and stayed at his house. A few of us went for a walk and Lewis took us up a hill, through some fences, past some rail yards, then he pointed out the river through a fence. “Why did you bring us here?” I asked him, and he said, “I want to respect the river, I want to encourage it, I want it to know we’re here and that I want to be its friend.” We tore open a small hole in the fence, and pushed some gifts of food through and offered them to the river. “Let’s all be friends of the Los Angeles river,” I said. “I’m going to do just that,” Lewis said. “I’m going to see what I can do to be a friend to the Los Angeles River.”

MacAdams later formalized the events of that evening by founding FoLAR in 1986, alongside the architects Fred Fisher and Pat Patterson, and Roger Wong, a gallerist. They gradually assembled a rag-team of assorted “tree-huggers,” as MacAdams joked in Poetry & Politics, “primarily because we had nothing left to hug.”

In one of his first public acts—FoLAR being more a performance art project than a straightforward NGO in its early years—MacAdams went down to the river dressed in what appeared to be a white plantation suit and constructed a totem pole out of trash and debris. It was his way of asking the river if he could speak on its behalf. Dressing in a white suit wasn’t merely a bit of theater on MacAdams’s part. It was meant to resurrect the image of William Mulholland (1855–1935), the engineer who reshaped LA’s relationship to water, and who destroyed the farming communities of the Owens Valley in the Eastern Sierra by redirecting the waters of the Valley’s river and lake to fill LA’s new reservoirs, helping the city wean itself off of the Los Angeles River as its primary water source. As he didn’t hear the river say no, MacAdams forged ahead with his plans.

Beginning with acts of civil disobedience, such as blocking bulldozers, the poet later engaged with the city’s media on a more confrontational level. The perfect situation presented itself in 1989, when Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Sylmar) suggested in a Los Angeles Times op-ed that part of the river be turned into a seasonal freeway to ease the city’s congestion, spurring a war of words that played out in subsequent articles, letters, and hearings. MacAdams wrote about the apex of that confrontation in Section 19 of his poem The River, titled “First Breakthrough into Public Consciousness (Anger)—Katz”:

I was editing videotape
when the Times called up and asked me
What did I think of
Assemblyman Katz’s idea
of putting a freeway
in the L.A. River?
I felt like my forehead was exploding.
I spit out my words in Anger: “Over our dead bodies.”
The reporter made me repeat it.
 
After he hung up,
I was mortified.
 
I tried to call him back.
I knew I’d been
carried away in a cloud of
fiery, self-righteous Anger!
 
I did this once before,
at a Bolinas School Board meeting when
I called somebody on the Board
a liar from the floor.
The guy looked at me in shock.
He was from Stinson Beach. “I don’t need this,”
I could see him thinking to himself.
 
The reporter wouldn’t take my call.
 
I waited in dread
for the next morning’s paper.
He used the quote
“Over our dead bodies.”
Guilty!
 
But for the Friends of the Los Angeles River
it was a breakthrough.

The River, a 70-page poem in 96 cantos of varying lengths, some no longer than a quatrain, is divided into three books. MacAdams published an initial edition, The River: Books One and Two, in 1998, and a final definitive edition, The River: Books One, Two & Three, a decade later. Both versions lack page numbers, reflecting the author’s wish that it be read as an unbroken series of meditations, a cue from his teenage idol Kerouac and the original scroll of On the Road. A faithful and accurate diary of MacAdams’s work with FoLAR, the highly readable and moving poems in Book One of The River describe his encounters with city officials and the Army Corps of Engineers. They closely document the early work of MacAdams and FoLAR in changing the city’s perspective on the river it nearly destroyed. In the process, MacAdams became essentially the first California writer to examine the river as a natural force in its entirety, “from San Pedro bay where / the Queen Mary is a toothpick / in the river’s mouth, / to the snow dusted tips / of the San Gabriels’ granitic peaks.”

Despite the overwhelming effort of MacAdams’s 40-year project, many of his epic’s poems shine with an utterly unvarnished, plain-talking hopefulness: “Yesterday, we stood under the eaves / of the house watching the / warm rain sweep across the Valley / talking about politics. / Would there be, could there be, / a better world? The rain came.” Books Two and Three, on the other hand, see the poet adopt a wider lens. He occasionally makes excursions further afield to Redwood country, or New Mexico, or even Pennsylvania Avenue, peppering his lines with quotes from William Blake, Henry David Thoreau, and Lorine Niedecker. Many poems in these later sections are also lyrical mediations on MacAdams’s private life, including his love affairs, marriages, and interactions with his children—Ocean, Will, Torii, and Natalia—alternating between bouts of wrath, love, indignation, humor, and sharply sketched scenes of ecological revelation, doubling as a chronicle of the highs and lows of political activism:

You are hated—you can feel it
in the TV eye—by idiots and assholes,
slump-shouldered time servers and County weasels;
and their hatred is a cool, stiff breeze.
You struggle with self-righteousness
and you lose. Like your enemies,
you have your hate to keep you warm;
so your wife buys you a little laughing
Buddha down in Chinatown
to pop on your computer.
You are bent over with the pressure
of simply being a moron. You are shrinking
from the weight of your own gravity.
You are becoming your old man
as the chain-saws in the background noise
start to fan out. First they will school you in your errors.
Then they will squash you like a bug.

Now out of print, The River belongs beside other great American epic poems of the 20th century, such as Paterson (1946) by William Carlos Williams, or The Maximus Poems (1953) by Charles Olson. Nevertheless, the books it is spiritually closest to are Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems (1925) by Robinson Jeffers, and Mountains and Rivers Without End (1996) by Gary Snyder, whom MacAdams modeled himself after, sharing Snyder’s quest to tap into the spiritual side of the natural realm. Like Jeffers and Snyder, MacAdams proposed a poetics deeply rooted in nature as a means to overcome humanity’s increasing deracination from our earthly origins. In reading The River, one is able to learn alongside MacAdams by doing.

***

Few poets seek memorials outside of their work, but anyone walking along the river today will spot a succession of blue “Los Angeles River” signs bearing the image of a standing heron, another initiative championed by MacAdams. The story behind their installation neatly illustrates the poet’s modus operandi and his poetic ethos. Persuading the LA politico Tom LaBonge of the need for signs, he took him to the city’s sign shop armed with a bottle of bourbon, which he turned over to the sign makers to induce them to print the signs on the spot. MacAdams and LaBonge then drove to the Glendale Narrows and put up the signs themselves. That was who MacAdams was and, as was made clear to me by the people I interviewed for this essay, he will be greatly missed.

In his later years, MacAdams worked as a freelance writer for publications including Rolling Stone, the Los Angeles Times, and LA Weekly, and he also produced the popular study Birth of the Cool: Beat, Bebop, and the American Avant Garde (Free Press, 2001). The river, nevertheless, remained his chief means of connecting with people, and he attended FoLAR events long after his debilitating stroke in 2015:

At the opening of a new riverfront park
I talk to a kindly homeless man who
wants to know the name of the duck
that looks like a chicken.
 
We all worship
the river in our own ways, some with stale tortillas
from the Salvation Army, others
with degrees in landscape architecture
from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.

Before leaving us, but never for good thanks to his poems, MacAdams imparted the following warning in the final chapter of Poetry & Politics: “People would ask me in the early days: how will you know when you’re done? This is a 40-year artwork, how will you know? And I always responded that when the steelhead trout returns to the L.A. River, our work will be done. It’s always been a handy thing to say, but it’s a genuine marker. If you don’t have a healthy ecology, you can’t have a healthy anything else.”