"Fallen Western Star" Wars (Part VII)

Jack Foley

Jack Foley's Response to Richard Silberg

Like Raskin and Junker before him, Richard Silberg indulges in cheerleading for his team: "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?"

How about it, guys. Let's hear it for all of them. Gioia's essay asserts that there are many, many fine writers in the Bay Area. He is extremely explicit about this. His point, however, is that they don't talk to one another, that there is no means by which they can discuss issues of vital importance to their work. Does Richard believe that Barbara Guest phones up June Jordan to talk about her latest poem? Poetry Flash is virtually the only outlet for local criticism. "Western literary life...tends to be private and individualistic," writes Gioia. "Writers live far apart, and there are few occasions that bring them together in significant numbers." How does Richard handle this? The Bay Area, he says,

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.

The fact of writers "streaming across country" from New York to teach us how to write is hardly an example of the vitality of local culture. Nor are visiting professors or people on book tours who stop at the Bay Area among other places. More of Silberg's cheerleading. But you will notice that, here and elsewhere in the article, Richard doesn't name any of the intellectual issues that arise out of all this activity. If there is all this exchange going on--"readings, residencies, workshops, festivals, and conferences"--what are the people attending them talking about?What are the issues that define us as Westerners? Richard is silent on that because, evidently, he doesn't know. Surely out of all this mish-mash something must be coming, right? But is it?

Richard's ignorance of a genuine Western tradition is particularly striking in his remarks about Edwin Markham and about Gioia's discussion of Markham's poem, "The Man with the Hoe." "Well, I'm sorry, folks," Richard writes,

but there are two reasons why [Markham's poem is never cited as the quintessential Bay Area poem], 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 clichés? 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....

But Gioia is not the only person to find Markham, and particularly that poem, to be quintessentially Western. First published in 1976, William Everson's Archetype West: The Pacific Coast as a Literary Region is a brilliant examination of the coinciding of literature and region. "Markham," writes Everson, "is no longer highly regarded. He was, however, the first poet of the West to produce a poem that has entered world literature. Seventy years after its composition ‘The Man with the Hoe' is still read and believed around the world." Everson even cites a connection--though not a direct, literary one--between "The Man with the Hoe" and Ginsberg's "Howl." Everson is writing of the forties:

This accent on the spoken rather than the printed word, this devolution from the fixed standard of the page and its emphasis on dispassionate analysis which the eye implements, meant of course a rise in the participation mystique which [the Western] archetype favors, and which would later become one of the principal features of the Beat Generation. There were poetry readings earlier, of course, but attendance was usually confined to persons who knew beforehand the poet's representative works. Now the poetry reading was transformed from recital into encounter. This elimination of lecture hall distance between speaker and audience, this dependence on the primacy of voice, was crucial to the development of things in San Francisco. As we noted earlier it was Markham's direct reading that moved the editor of the San Francisco Examiner to instigate the breakthrough publication of "The Man with the Hoe." So it would be with Howl, which was "published" when it was first read in the old Six Gallery in the San Francisco Marina in the fall of 1955, and which gained a powerful reputation on platform well before it was issued in print.

Surely a poem to which Everson devotes so much of his book deserves better than Richard's curt dismissal of it as "wonderfully suited for political sloganeering." In his remarks about Markham, Dana Gioia attempts to recreate something of the consciousness with which the poem--which galvanized people world-wide--was received at the time of its initial appearance. He shows ways in which the poem might still interest contemporary readers. Richard treats "The Man with the Hoe" as if it were written last Friday; his dismissal of it is fairly well-written and somewhat amusing--as is the article generally--but it is also woefully ignorant and wildly unfair.

There are many other things to quarrel with in Richard's article, but I want to conclude with a wonderful passage of Dana's about his experience of being a Western writer. Much of the passage appears in "Fallen Western Star," so Richard has read a good deal of it. He may even have read it when it first appeared in Heyday Books' The Geography of Home. What I am quoting here is the form in which I first encountered it. Despite its length, I immediately included it in O Powerful Western Star. It seemed to me like something that needed to be said but had not been said. It seemed as well to arise out of a powerful understanding of what it means to live in the West. "I am Latin (Italian, Mexican, and American Indian)," writes Gioia,

without a drop of British blood in my veins, but English is my tongue. It belongs to me as much as to any member of the House of Lords. The classics of English--Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, and Keats--are my classics. The myths and images of its literature are native to my imagination. And yet this rich literary past often stands at one remove from the experiential reality of the West. Our seasons, climate, landscape, natural life, and history are alien to the world-views of both England and New England. Spanish--not French--colors our regional accent. The world looks and feels different in California from the way it does in Massachusetts or Manchester--not only the natural landscape but also the urban one. There is no use listening for a nightingale among the scrub oaks and chaparral. Our challenge is not only to find the right words to describe our experience but also to discover the right images, myths, and characters. We must describe a reality that has never been fully captured in English. Yet the earlier traditions of English help clarify what it is we might say. California poetry is our conversation between the past and present out of which we articulate ourselves.

I find that statement to be not only true but of an unmatched lyricism and eloquence. We ought to be trying to respond to the questions Dana Gioia's eloquent and enlightening essay gives rise to. Instead, we make fools of ourselves by pretending what he is telling us doesn't exist--and, like Richard Silberg, we see little but darkness.

Jack Foley