Garcetti’s turn at bat in L.A.’s culture game
Mayor Eric Garcetti is getting to wield a pretty big broom, with vacancies everywhere from the DWP chief to choosing a new head of cultural affairs and the three city animal commissioners he just replaced.
There is one post that was not going to be empty but has become so: the city’s poet laureate. Its first, Eloise Klein Healy, chosen under Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa just over a year ago, resigned in September after falling ill with encephalitis, which left her with aphasia — a stunning theft for a poet.
I wrote about her recovery, and I also spoke to the mayor about this opportunity.
Garcetti told me that he hopes to have a new laureate by the end of March, “following somewhat the process that Mayor Villaraigosa did [to select Healy], but I also want to bring the Los Angeles public library into the program, and the Library Foundation. I want the poet laureate to align with my priority of using city services to make our neighborhoods attractive,” like a plan to have a different artist design a library card for each branch library.
He’d also like to “incorporate social media to promote the search for the next poet laureate, [and] poetry in general” so the process is “not just behind closed doors by committee. “
Garcetti is launching a concurrent search to replace the city’s cultural affairs chief, Olga Garay-English, who was not re-upped by the mayor. The arts-minded mayor thinks that “probably no time since the early modernism of the ’40s to ’60s has so much creativity been percolating in this town all at once.”
Los Angeles has “done a lousy job of marketing our own city. We never tell our own story. We’re the king and queen of story-making in the world, but we don’t do a very good job of telling the L.A. story; I’m looking for a poet laureate who can do that.”
And presumably a head of cultural affairs with the same qualifications. The city that makes its international mark on the big screen and the small one needs to ratchet up its regard for the canvas and the stage too.
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