Pages 21-24, from The Plain of Smokes: Poem Cycle

Known principally as a ceramicist, Ken Price emerged with a group of Los Angeles–based surfer-artists in the sixties that included, among others, Ed Ruscha, Robert Irwin, and Larry Bell. Price’s three-dimensional work consists predominantly of ceramic cups and polymorphous sculptures that emphasize clean lines, smooth surfaces, and colorful glazes. These aesthetic principles carry over into his two dimensional works as well, as his illustrations for Harvey Mudd’s book-length poem The Plain of Smokes demonstrate. The poem—written in four parts, from four different points of view, in four very different styles—is an ode to the Los Angeles that shaped both the artist and the poet. The Plain of Smokes was a true artist–poet collaboration—each motivating revisions in the other’s work. Price, for example, responded specifically to Mudd’s verse with Smiling Bather, and after seeing Price’s image Club Zebra, Mudd reworked the poem to include it.