Nonprofit Poetry: Lewis MacAdams and the Art of Environmental Bureaucracy

Poet Lewis MacAdams is widely regarded as a founder of the movement to restore the Los Angeles River, a 51-mile concrete drainage channel that once served as the region’s primary water source. His nonprofit organization Friends of the Los Angeles River (FoLAR) began as a one-off performance art piece in 1985. Scholars in urban planning and geography have addressed FoLAR as a case study for grassroots environmentalism, but little attention has been paid to the interplay between poetry and politics in MacAdams’s work. Given that MacAdams described FoLAR as a “forty-year artwork to bring the Los Angeles River back to life,” it is worth entertaining the quixotic premise that a nonprofit could double as a conceptual artwork or performance poem. If we consider his literary efforts in conversation with his activism, the premise seems less far-fetched. In this essay, I trace MacAdams’s path from the New York School to the poets’ enclave of Bolinas, California, in the 1970s to the concrete banks of the Los Angeles River. I argue that he devised political-poetic strategies to intervene in planning bureaucracies and that FoLAR should be understood as a durational utopian experiment, pursuing transformative possibilities from within dispiriting everyday conditions.