"Fallen Western Star" Wars (Part VI)

Jack Foley

Jack Foley's Response to Richard Silberg--Part One

THE BLACK HOLE OF CRITICISM: RICHARD SILBERG ON DANA GIOIA'S "FALLEN WESTERN STAR"

Richard Silberg and I are friends who often disagree on esthetic matters. Usually we let it go at that—different strokes for different folks. We respect and admire each other's work, and that's usually enough. I think Richard Silberg is a brilliant poet and critic, and I enjoy reading his work whether I agree with it or not. In this case, however, I felt impelled to write back.

Dana Gioia has referred to himself as a "contrarian." His "Fallen Western Star" (Ruminator Review, formerly Hungry Mind Review, Winter 1999-2000) seems to me an enormously challenging article with historical implications of considerable interest. Thank the lord that somebody has finally said something about this problem. Gioia's piece is a breath of fresh air.

Like the earlier responses of Jonah Raskin ("Local Literary Scene Is Worth Celebrating," The Press Democrate, 12/15/99) and ZYZZYVA's Howard Junker, whose letter to Ruminator Review is both hilarious and substanceless ("I don't publish criticism, because I don't want to"), Richard Silberg's article misses both the point and the challenge of "Fallen Western Star": what he sees is a dark star, even—to make the metaphor a little more accurate—a black hole.

There's a personal element here as well. "Fallen Western Star" begins with a reference to my book, O Powerful Western Star and to the line in Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" which gave me my title. Dana's introduction to O Powerful Western Star—written despite the fact of our being in very different esthethic camps—is generous to me personally and begins to raise some of the issues which show up in "Fallen Western Star":

Although the Bay Area has played an important role in American letters since the days of Jack London, Frank Norris, and Ambrose Bierce, the region remains ignored or underrepresented in standard literary criticism and history. California poets in particular have suffered critical neglect. Poets as different as Robinson Jeffers, Yvor Winters, Kenneth Rexroth, William Everson, Josephine Miles, Edgar Bowers, and Weldon Kees all remain obscure or undervalued in the broader literary world. Only the Beats managed to capture and sustain national attention—mostly for socio-political reasons—and in the intervening half century California has slowly slipped in the national literary consciousness.

The relative obscurity of California writers originates at least partly in local cultural conditions. The Bay Area has often celebrated its own literary talent, but it has seldom done much to preserve, study, and meaningfully debate local achievements. The apparatus of literary fame hardly exists locally. There are no great quarterlies in California, and few literary journals of any sort that publish essays and reviews. This lack of public critical discourse and serious reviewing has made it difficult to develop local critical talent anywhere outside the university. If California has never lacked major writers in the modern era, it has consistently lacked significant critics seriously engaged with local writers.

Richard's opening sentence, "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," suggests that Dana has been out of touch with California. Later, Silberg writes, "I'd advise Dana Gioia to settle in, open up his eyes and ears, because he really doesn't get it." Doesn't he, though.

During his stay on the east coast, Dana made many trips to California, where he has family. Indeed, all his family lives in California. In addition, he is not exactly a newcomer: he has been here for nearly five years. (He arrived in January 1996.) Isn't that enough time to get a sense of what's going on? Certainly Boise State University's Western Writers Series (which includes monographs on people such as John Muir, Bret Harte, Zane Grey, Robinson Jeffers, Gary Snyder and Simon Ortiz) regards Dana as a Western writer: April Lindner, the author of the monograph on Dana, has much to say about him as a Westerner. For Raskin, Junker and Silberg, the fact that Dana doesn't agree with them means that he must be missing something. If he weren't missing something, he would agree with them! That is an indication of their tolerance for genuine disagreement: he's just an outsider, don't listen to him, he's been in New York for twenty years. As it happens, Dana phoned me to read passages from "Fallen Western Star" as he was writing it—and to ask my opinion about certain points. He phoned others as well, such as Kevin Berger, the senior editor of San Francisco Magazine and a lifelong Bay Area resident. Whatever Silberg thinks about Dana's qualifications to be writing about the West, I don't believe he would describe Berger or me as outsiders. He knows very well that I have been in the midst of the poetry scene for the past fifteen years or so. And I agree with Dana's essay.

Richard attempts to discredit Dana by asserting that "he has a penchant for provocative half-truths, and in driving those home he sometimes misses what's right before his eyes." Again the implication is that if Dana understood the whole truth he would agree with Richard. Richard then goes on to a long and not very compelling discussion of the difference between fiction and poetry. "Fiction and poetry don't differ just economically," he writes,

A crucial difference...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 its reading....

There is much to object to in this confused passage. Does Richard really mean to imply that narrative, characterization, exposition and action exist in a novel apart from its language? Has he never read narrative poems like The Iliad or Paradise Lost or Yeats' The Wandering of Oisin—or some of the works currently being produced by Neo-Formalists? What I find most obtuse in the passage, however, is Richard's bland assertion that "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." I suggest that Richard listen to Jack Kerouac reading from On the Road on a recently released Rykodisc CD or hunt up the marvelous recording of James Joyce reading from Finnegans Wake. One can learn a great deal from those renditions, and the last I heard, both On the Road and Finnegans Wake were novels. Talk about half-truths!

Another example of half-truth in Richard's article is the moment when he complains about Dana's choice of Thom Gunn's The Man with Night Sweats and Kay Ryan's Flamingo Watching as among the "Ten San Francisco Literary Classics." Gioia, writes Silberg, is "a New Formalist, himself, and these two poets, Gunn and Ryan, both do a lot of their work in closed forms." Well, Keats and Shelley did a lot of their work in closed forms, too. But, apart from that, Gunn's poetry is activated by a tension between closed and open form, which exist in an uneasy relationship in his work—as they do in Gioia's. A lot of what Gunn writes is free verse. As for Ryan, she does not write in closed forms at all: Richard is simply wrong about this. This is Ryan's "Half a Loaf." It is one of the poems in Flamingo Watching, and its technique is no different from that of other poems in the book or from Ryan's work generally:

The whole loaf's loft
is halved in profile,
like the standing side
of a bombed cathedral.

The cut face
of half a loaf
puckers a little.

The bread cells
are open and brittle
like touching coral.

It is nothing like the middle
of an uncut loaf,
nothing like a conceptual half
which stays moist.

I say do not adjust to half
unless you must.

There is some interesting and subtle rhyming in Ryan's poem. (My favorite is "moist" and "must.") Perhaps that's why Richard considered it to be a closed form. But it is not a closed form. It is free verse: it is not metrically consistent, and it is not trying to be. I would suggest that Richard consult Lewis Turco's The Book of Forms to find out what a closed form is. What is it he says about Dana? That "he sometimes misses what's right before his eyes"?

(Jack Foley's response continued next week)

Jack Foley