"Fallen Western Star" Wars (Part IV)

Jack Foley

Richard Silberg's Response to Dana Gioia--Part One

On "Fallen Western Star":
Dana Gioia Stirs it Up in the Hungry Mind Review
RICHARD SILBERG

After twenty years in New York, most of them building a career as a businessman to support an impressive second career as a poet, translator, and critic, Dana Gioia returned with his family to California, his native state, to live in 1996. His opening salvo to the Bay Area literary community is "Fallen Western Star: San Francisco as a Literary Region" in the Winter 1999-2000 issue of Hungry Mind Review [just renamed Ruminator Review] in which he argues that the Bay Area has become a literary has-been because it lacks a "complete literary milieu," which he defines as a "diverse literary ecosystem of newspapers, magazines, publishers, and theaters," and, most especially, major literary journals in whose pages critics might perform the weighty work of evaluating and defining our writing for us and the rest of the nation. Without that ecosystem and those critics, he feels, our writers--and he grants us copious talent--can only wander in a feckless solitude, within the echo chambers of individual genius, and without any defining influence over our own works or the literary opinion of America.

Now, until I read his essay, I had been thinking of the Bay Area as a hot spot for poetry in the country, equaled only by New York. It played a key role in the poetic revolution of the mid-twentieth century and in the development of Language poetry in the seventies and eighties. It teems with poets, a startling number of whom have names that are both 'major' and 'national--two words that Gioia stresses--and it swarms with readings, residencies, workshops, festivals, and conferences. Furthermore, the Bay Area seems to be a magnet for poets from the rest of the nation. For instance, in the week that I write this, Robert Pinsky is coming back to his old stamping grounds to appear 'in conversation' with Thom Gunn; Yusef Komunyakaa read last month at UC Berkeley, where he had been Holloway Lecturer some five or eight years ago; Anne Carson, the spectacular Canadian writer, is here and doing months of readings; Sharon Olds and Galway Kinnell stream across country from NYU each summer to do their week-long poetry workshop at Squaw Valley. So what gives? Why the extreme parallax between Gioia's and my own points of view?

Gioia is a critic with clout, one that I respect. He has a compact, cogent prose style, formidable literary erudition, and an obvious love for poetry. At the same time, though, he has a penchant for provocative half-truths, and in driving those home he sometimes misses what's right before his eyes. He demonstrated both when he made his mark as a critic in Can Poetry Matter? (reviewed in these pages January, 1993, Number 238), whose title essay was published in The Atlantic Monthly. There he took a one-sidedly negative view of the poetry "subculture" that's resulted from the explosion of Creative Writing programs in American colleges and universities, while completely missing off-campus developments like slams, open readings, and festivals, flowerings off the Beat re-invention of the poetry reading that branched up into spoken word in the nineties and has changed the American image of poetry as we enter a new century.

"Fallen Western Star," I think, is making similar mistakes. For starters, there seems to be a systematic logical problem with his argument. On the one hand, he tells us that, "Significantly, there is not a single major literary quarterly currently published in California. Indeed, there has never been one that lasted beyond a few issues." But, on the other hand, he's celebrating the Bay Area's literary past, Jeffers and Everson, Ginsberg, Josephine Miles and Robert Duncan--his essay details our current community's fall from their influence and splendor--but, if critics and major journals are so crucial, how did that splendid past ever get splendid?

Gioia does some twisting and turning to answer that question. He opens in 1899 when "San Francisco was a major literary center--a city where influential trends emerged and young writers achieved national reputations…Jack London, Bret Harte, Edwin Markham, Lincoln Steffens, and Frank Norris." Why was that? "In the days before television and radio, national taste and opinion were not yet created exclusively in broadcast capitals like New York and Los Angeles… San Francisco, which was then the center of William Randolph Hearst's newspaper empire and home to dozens of other journals, helped set the agenda of American literature." Or, hopping to mid-century, "William Everson developed into one of America's greatest fine-press printers--not a surprising turn of events in a city that had recently become the nation's leading center for the book arts." I bet there are a lot of fine-press printers working in the Bay Area right now who'd be pretty unhappy to learn that they've disappeared into thin air.

Perhaps the real howler of these twists, though, is Gioia's rationalization for the Beat explosion in mid-fifties San Francisco: "Ferlinghetti virtually created the Beat movement with tiny City Lights' innovative Pocket Poets series." I've got the greatest respect for Lawrence Ferlinghetti, as publisher, as poet, as his city's recent laureate, but I'm guessing he'd probably agree that the truth is almost diametrically opposite. City Lights was an unfledged small press with no cadres of supporting critics. It was the power of the young Ginsberg and his poem Howl that virtually created City Lights, the power of the Beats, themselves, the young Kerouac--Ferlinghetti's own A Coney Island of the Mind, published by New Directions in 1958, was one of the bestselling poetry books of all time--McClure, Corso, Snyder, Whalen, and the rest, the confluence of their accessible, prophetic, demotic poetry with a social movement, the embryo of the counterculture within the button-down, 'gray flannel' fifties, all spiced by pornography trials, that attracted the national media and began to turn the consciousness of America inside out.

Which brings me to my central point. The half truth in Gioia's new essay is generated by the "Literary Region" of the title, its one block linkage of fiction and poetry. I don't think the Bay Area has ever been a major center for fiction, certainly when compared with the Southern tradition, New England, above all, New York. There have been many, many strong fiction writers here in recent decades, and Gioia names some of them, Tillie Olsen, Maxine Hong Kingston, Ron Hansen; and some that he doesn't name strike me, the late Gina Berriault, Molly Giles, Leonard Michaels, for a few. But the Bay Area's special strength, certainly since the forties, Rexroth, Duncan, two poets that Gioia never mentions, Jack Spicer and Robin Blaser, and whirling constellations of others, has been poetry.

I'm not at all sure, finally, why that's so. But there are significant differences between fiction and poetry, their publishing requirements, how they 'live' and radiate their respective verbal lives, that go a long way towards explaining why the Bay Area is, in fact, a poetry powerhouse without Gioia's "major literary quarterlies," "the vast majority of publishers, editors, agents, reviewers, arts administrators, foundation directors, prize committees...literary institutes," and so forth.

Fiction costs a lot more to publish. There's a lot more money to be made in fiction. And equally important, fiction is primarily a print medium. I want to come back to that in a moment when we talk about readings, but, economically, what it means is that the market for a novel or a book of short stories is not usually regional; rather, the readership for fiction is a print market, extending as far in every direction as the books can be advertised and distributed. The combination of these factors overlays narrative literature with questions of business and media strategy.

It would be overstating the case to say that poetry doesn't cost money to publish, to advertise. Certainly publishers of 'major' poets adopt 'national' strategies in their marketing, publish hardcover books in an initial printing, look to get their authors reviewed prominently, get them on radio or, God help us, TV, send them on cross-country reading tours. But even the most celebrated poets aren't hoping for a major motion picture--and the real life of poetry, poetry as it hunts and feeds and breeds across America, is much more local, moves much more in the media underbrush. The vast majority of poets publish their work in small, ephemeral magazines, in chapbooks, in inexpensive paperbacks. We're talking about student poets, young poets, community poets, rings and rings of progressive, avant-garde, rebel poets clustered hither and yon or, perhaps, more and more, communicating electronically.

But fiction and poetry don't differ just economically. A crucial difference, as I hinted just above, is the role of readings. The voice of fiction is pitched 'out'; for the most part, it's, precisely, narrative, dealing in characterization, exposition, action. Poetry, on the other hand, subsists in language, itself. Consequently, it's the most bodily, vocal, gestural of the verbal arts. There are fiction readings, certainly, but their audiences don't really 'learn' much from the reading that they wouldn't experience by reading the book at home. Fiction readings are more celebrity affairs aimed at signing and selling. But poetry lives in readings; its life is dual, even schizzy, divided between the page and the voice. We might go so far as saying that the 'true' poem exists somewhere 'behind' the page and the voice in a mystical triangulation between the two. So the poetry reading is an intensely spiritual affair; it 'completes' the poem; it unites poet and audience, when it works, communing in the 'word'.

The importance of the poetry reading can't, I think, be overemphasized. It means that, while fiction writers get their major payoff only in publication, in print, poets can sustain themselves artistically, spiritually, in communities of poets and lovers of poetry through readings and inexpensive publications. It means that, while fiction is a national or geographically indefinite medium, solitary affair of writer in one place, reader anywhere else with an expensive book, poetry nourishes itself regionally, communally, much more face to face, voice to voice.

We're in position now to understand why the great American poetry revolution of the mid-twentieth century came out of 'nowhere'. It was genuinely national. It included not just the Beats, the most accessible, overtly spiritual, the most overtly rebellious of these poets, but the Black Mountain poets, the New York School poets, and maverick poets from San Francisco, Boston, Los Angeles and traveling steadily points elsewhere and between. These poets were brought to national attention through the publication of Donald M. Allen's The New American Poetry, most famous and explosive of poetry anthologies, a book that made the names of most of the poets in it, made Allen's name too, then an obscure young editor from the Bay Area, and that, doubtless, was helped towards publication by the growing fame of the Beats. In his Preface--the book was published in 1960--Allen wrote, "These new younger poets have written a large body of work, but most of what has been published so far has appeared only in a few little magazines, as broadsheets, pamphlets, and limited editions, or circulated in manuscript; a larger amount of it has reached its growing audience through poetry readings."

Let's translate this into Gioia's terms. We're talking about what were arguably the most influential group of poets since the Moderns, Pound, Eliot, Williams, Stevens, et. al. I count two Pulitzers among these forty-odd poets, Ashbery and Snyder; Ginsberg, probably the world's most famous poet, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Michael McClure, the then LeRoi Jones, Denise Levertov, as well as about half of the poets Gioia cites in his essay as defining poets of the Bay Area's glorious past, William Everson, Robert Duncan, Gary Snyder (once again), and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The New American Poetry was a literary earthquake. I remember Stan Rice--a poet who spent some fifteen of his formative years in the Bay Area at San Francisco State's Creative Writing Department before he moved with his wife Anne Rice to Louisiana and found Knopf as his publisher--telling me he thumbed his way through three editions, literally pored them to pieces. I remember me, myself, a long-haired undergraduate, being blown into a metaphysical daze by poems like Kaddish, Olson's "The Kingfishers," so many more.

And what was the role of the major literary journals in this revolution, Hudson Review, The Sewanee Review, New York Review of Books, whose titles "Fallen Western Star" sucks on like candy? Zip. Nada. These poets and poetries were all being written in direct or indirect reaction to the New Critics who then ruled the American academy and to the poets they sanctioned and interpreted. Nor, let me make clear, am I attacking New Critical ideas of what a poem can be. I'm not attacking the lionized poets of that time either; Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop are wonderful poets, Berryman, Jarrell--even John Crowe Ransom has real virtues--or the great Adrienne Rich, who now lives in Santa Cruz and was last in San Francisco in March as a nominee for the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association Award in poetry. I'm going, instead, for the plain truth that poetry has a wild, deep life and can seize our national consciousness without the aid of big money, high prestige literary organs.

The development of Language poetry through the seventies and mid-eighties proves the same point and one more I'd like to make here. Language poetry, like the Beats before them, centered in New York and in the Bay Area. Compared to the mid-century wave of outside poetries--I would call them 'progressive', as opposed to the Language movement which was a genuine, and difficult, avant-garde--this new wave was relatively narrowly based, not so seismic, cool and intellectual; but poetically of the first importance. Wherever one stood, or stands, on Language poetry, it changed the whole dialogue, and it continues to ripple in what's being written today, in the Bay Area and around the country.

It too rose to prominence without the aid of, indeed flat against, the establishment literary culture. Today many of these poets, Charles Bernstein, Barrett Watten, Bob Perelman, Ron Silliman, have professorships [all of them now live in the East or Midwest]; Lyn Hejinian has taught at New College of California and recently at the Iowa Writers Workshop. A steady stream of books on Language and related experimental poetries flows off academic presses. Way back when, though, the movement sustained itself through circles of readings, small press publications--and criticism. Language poetry is undoubtedly the most self-critical--in the sense of self promotion and self-definition through the critical writing and talks of its member poets--of any movement in literary history.

Richard Silberg's response continued next week

Jack Foley