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Number
285
May June 2000
On "Fallen
Western
Star":
Dana Gioia
Stirs it Up in the Hungry Mind Review
RICHARD SILBERG
Copyright
© 2000 Poetry Flash
RUMINATOR REVIEW
formerly Hungry Mind Review, 1648 Grand
Avenue, St. Paul, MN 55105; (651) 699-2610; back
copies are available for $4,subscriptions are $14
for one year/four issues.
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.
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 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
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.
Richard Silberg is
Associate Editor of Poetry Flash.
Doubleness, his new poetry book, is
available from the California Poetry Series/The
Roundhouse Press. He teaches "Writing and
Appreciating Contemporary Poetry" at UC Berkeley
Extension.
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