"Fallen Western Star" Wars (Part V)

Jack Foley

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

I'm using an exception, then, virtually a poetic singularity, to prove this rule: poets, beginning when? Coleridge? Johnson? have frequently been the most penetrating and effective critics of their own and others' work. Think of Mr. Pound or Mr. Eliot. Think of Charles Olson. Black Sparrow Press has published volumes of Olson and Creeley's correspondence. Poets usually write criticism whereas fiction writers usually don't. In recent Bay Area history we could cite Robert Duncan, William Everson, Robert Pinsky, Kathleen Fraser, Robert Hass, Alan Williamson, Alicia Ostriker, who was first published out here and visits regularly, Thom Gunn, Jack Marshall, Carolyn Kizer, Jane Hirshfield, Tom Clark, Joshua Clover, Jack Foley, John Oliver Simon, Rusty Morrison, on and on--not even mentioning the Language poets, some of whom I've named above. Poets are a critical bunch. They love to meditate about language, to talk about each others' work. It's through this process--along with publications and readings--criticism both formal and informal, written and verbal, that poetry advances its bushy, populous life and that movements frequently build themselves even unto national attention.

Compare these living facts with Gioia: "Criticism and creativity also reinforce one another. The informed and demanding discussion fostered by quarterlies and other serious journals helps readers understand and evaluate new literary work." And: "Lacking a vital critical milieu, well-intentioned regional literati usually practice boosterism--the uncritical praise of all things local." I'm not against journals; the more attention paid to poetry the better--and let me take this opportunity to say that I think Gioia is rather dismissive of the journals that do exist out here--but those words smell a little arrogant, controlling; and they're the words of a man who's pretty out of touch with "San Francisco as a Literary Region."

I've been detailing my disagreements with Gioia to show why I think a strongly argued essay is, nonetheless, flat wrong, but there's one passage in his piece that makes me begin to hear weird music, in which he seems to have entered a veritable twilight zone. "Modern Western cities are built horizontally across huge stretches of land crossed by highways," a scale "not designed for the urban pedestrian," he tells us, naming LA, San Diego, San Jose. San Francisco, he goes on, "which was once a European-scale centralized city, has now developed into a vast and complex megalopolis linked by bridges and freeways across six counties." So--in contrast to "major Eastern literary centers" where "cultural life tends to be public and social"-- "Western literary life...tends to be private and individualistic. Writers live far apart, and there are few occasions that bring them together in significant numbers. A California writer is more likely to see local colleagues in a Manhattan publisher's office than near home." Where the hell are we here, riding the plains in Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove?! Did not Mr. Gioia meet Jack Foley and me when he read at Cody's some years back? And did the three of us not gather and schmooze at the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association reception on the occasion of his younger brother's winning an award for his book on jazz? Did he and I not schmooze again on at least two occasions when he came to Cody's to hear other poets read? There's no more social, more hooked-up large poetry scene in the country than the Bay Area's, and I've read often enough in New York to know that that's so; although I have not, alas, recently visited my Manhattan publisher's office. I'd invite Dana Gioia to open up the Flash Calendar section and look at the pages and pages of readings, open readings, slams, workshops, festivals, open houses, etc. He could come to Books by the Bay this summer, put on by the Independent Booksellers Association. He could come to Watershed next fall. He might actually meet some Western writers.

Returning to the topic at hand, though, I think Gioia has a somewhat unreal and cut-to-his-own-taste idea of what Bay Area writing is and should be. His opening tableau--the trendy, influential San Francisco of 1899--segues to the poet Edwin Markham's "The Man With the Hoe," first published in the San Francisco Examiner and reprinted in countless other papers and magazines, translated into more than forty languages. He mentions Markham and his poem also in Can Poetry Matter? And I understand his point there, that poetry once had the kind of central media pizzazz--which it's since lost--to seize the imagination of the literate public and become, as he says in this new essay, "a literary call to arms for the labor movement." Well and good. But in "Fallen Western Star" he's using it quite differently. He quotes the opening and the ending:

Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans
Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,
The emptiness of ages in his face,
And on his back the burden of the world.
How will the Future reckon with this man?
How answer his brute question in that hour
When whirlwinds of rebellion shake all shores?
How will it be with kingdoms and with kings--
With those who shaped him to the thing he is--
When this dumb terror shall rise to judge the world,
After the silence of the centuries?

And then he maintains, "Although no one ever cites it as such, Markham's 'The Man With the Hoe' was and remains the quintessential Bay Area poem."

Well, I'm sorry, folks, but there are two reasons why it's never cited that way, and the first is that it's second-rate. "Bowed by the weight of centuries"? "The emptiness of ages"? " the burden of the world"? Aren't those cliches? I'm not putting the poem down for what it was, for the sincerity of its feelings, or what it meant for a political cause. But Gioia's the man who's touting "criticism¦informed and demanding discussion." "The Man With the Hoe" is wonderfully suited for political sloganeering because it's well meant, exciting, simplistic, and somewhat sentimental. Which puts its worth as a poem on a par with Gone with the Wind as a novel.

Diversity is one key to the vibrance of the Bay Area. It's obstreperous, experimental, so many poets hitting on so many other poets, trading or butting ideas. With the partial exception of New York School, every kind of poetry is happening out here, mainline, academic, Language, postmodern, New Formalist, rap, slam. Gioia, however, seems to have a definite program for Bay Area poetry. He wants to build it on "The Man With a Hoe." "It dramatizes the lone individual against the system the style is both visionary and naturalistic The concerns are moral and political. Finally, the poem is conceived for oral delivery--it is accessible, dramatic and auditory." For Gioia, "mutatis mutandis," the best of what's followed out here--he names Jeffers, Rexroth, Yvor Winters, Ginsberg, Duncan, Everson, Snyder, Miles, Ferlinghetti, and Gunn--shares in these qualities, partakes in "an essential line of development" from our man Markham. " these poets share crucial assumptions that might best be called populist modernism Poetry was not conceived as a self-enclosed text for private meditation but as a direct address to an audience." "Who can blame," he asks, "an aesthete like Gertrude Stein from [sic] escaping this gritty, populist, and fervently political milieu for the l'art pour l'art freedom of Paris?"

This ocean, humiliating in its disguises
Tougher than anything.
No one listens to poetry. The ocean
Does not mean to be listened to. A drop
Or crash of water. It means
Nothing.
It
Is bread and butter
Pepper and salt. The death
That young men hope for. Aimlessly
It pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. No
One listens to poetry.

(first poem in Language, by Jack Spicer, 1964)

That's an often quoted poem by Jack Spicer, an esthete in Gioia's book, I'd guess--although I'd say he's closer to an 'anti-esthete esthete'--someone, at any rate, never mentioned in "Fallen Western Star." Spicer, of course, is a crucial poet out here, with Duncan and Blaser, a triumvir of the "Berkeley Renaissance." So here we have the second reason--as if we really needed any--for the noncitation of Markham's poem: this whole program of Gioia's is procrustean. He's not the first to talk about Bay Area poetry as 'populist modernist', to use his term as shorthand for the constellation of qualities he lists above. The idea is enlightening; in this case I'd say it's more than halfway true. But it's a long way from the whole story, and when it's claimed as such it becomes dogmatic, tedious. I'd be very surprised if Duncan or Ginsberg, were they with us, would accept Markham as their poetic grandad, but I'm quite sure the Language poets wouldn't, or scores of other innovative poets heating up the mix here.

So I'd advise Dana Gioia to settle in, open up his eyes and ears, because he really doesn't get it. In the sidebar to his essay, "Ten San Francisco Classics," he lists two living Bay Area poets, Thom Gunn and Kay Ryan. To be fair, the format is impossible. Ten out of past and present authors, not just poets but novelists and essayists. Still, what bothers me about his choices is that he's a New Formalist, himself, and these two poets, Gunn and Ryan, both do a lot of their work in closed forms. They're both, I think, wonderful poets, no problem there. Gunn was a star in England when he came here in 1954, and he's certainly become one of our essential writers, a world writer, really, rather than just Bay Area or California. And Ryan deserves what Gioia says about her Flamingo Watching, "A book of poems so ingeniously inventive that it reminds me of why I love poetry." My problems are two, though: first, the programmatic feeling in his choices, New Formalist choosing two formal poets; and second, there are so many other poets out here equally deserving, poets who are stars around the country. How about Robert Hass, our Laureate from the 'hood, generally recognized as one of the key poets of these last several decades in America? How about the radiant Brenda Hillman with her sweet blending of lyric and postmodernism? How about June Jordan or Diane di Prima? Barbara Guest? What about Michael McClure, or Michael Palmer? Al Young? Juan Felipe Herrera? How about brilliant poets less known than they should be like David Meltzer or Jack Hirschman? Let's not forget Jane Hirshfield, Kathleen Fraser, August Kleinzahler. What about Gary Soto, or Philip Whalen? Joanne Kyger? Leslie Scalapino? What about Tom Clark, Ishmael Reed, or but I think you get my drift.

Next week: Jack Foley's response to Richard Silberg

Jack Foley