How to Experience L.A. Like a Poet

I was walking in Venice with poet Tom Laichas when he showed me a hard-to-describe object protruding from the strip between sidewalk and street. It was about the size of a fire hydrant, made of cement and decorated with faded hippie hieroglyphs.

“If you unearth it, you get to some pre-Easter Island god,” Laichas imagined.

He was demonstrating one of the key ways to experience Los Angeles like a poet, which is to pay attention to things that look out of place. “You know there must be a story about how they got there,” Laichas explained, “but the story has been lost.”