Peter Yates: Collected Poems

Peter Yates was a poet, music critic, pianist, and one of the essential advocates for experimental music in Los Angeles. With his wife Frances Mullen, he founded the Evenings on the Roof concert series in 1939; it later became Monday Evening Concerts and provided a rare local forum for new music. Yates supported Harry Partch and served as an intermediary within the difficult Los Angeles worlds of Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky. His criticism brought the same independence to music that his poems brought to language: careful formal construction joined to an appetite for experiment. A Smaller Poem Book appeared from the Ward Ritchie Press in 1946. He continued writing poetry throughout his life, though he published it sparingly; Jonathan Williams's Jargon Society issued The Garden Prospect: Selected Poems posthumously in 1980. The revised draft repairs the broken title and bibliography in the earlier biography and places the poems beside the concert-making and criticism through which Yates changed the city's cultural possibilities.