Critical accounts of American poetry all too frequently privilege San Francisco, Berkeley, and Oakland, overlapping sites that evoke West Coast poetry's most memorable events and movements: the Berkeley Renaissance, the San Francisco Beat scene, and most recently, Language writing. Yet the outsider impetus behind William Everson's observation that the West Coast canon prizes creativity, and the East Coast canon judgment, applies equally to Los Angeles, although the fractal energy of the city's poetry scenes is less easily mapped out. While surveys of fiction probably work best by focusing on individual authors, the development of American poetry for much of the past half century is intimately linked to communities of writers and publishers. The viability of the network of workshops, public readings, magazines, and presses in 1970s and 1980s Los Angeles, for instance, depended on the availability of production facilities such as New Comp Graphics at Beyond Baroque, in the beachfront city of Venice, to help poets demarcate their communities in a self-reflective, organic manner. Fervently embracing the antinomian tendency in American poetry first enunciated by Roy Harvey Pearce, these intersecting communities and coteries produced poetry far exceeding in quantity and quality the writing produced about Los Angeles in the form of occasional poems by temporary residents or those living at a bemused distance. This survey will therefore focus on the scenes and communities that have flourished and intermingled in Los Angeles since World War II.