[A. E. Stallings]

Apparently, Gioia has ruffled quite a few feathers by claiming that "no great poet has ever come out of California." (I'm guessing he's exempting Frost--Gioia himself has pointed out Frost's Western birth). Interesting article on the hullaballoo: http://www.latimes.com/features/life...ory?coll=la%2D

[Chryss Yost]

I hope anyone familiar with Dana's writing will question whether that's what he actually said. The press in infamous for just such inaccuracies. There's a huge difference between saying that LA is "perhaps the only great city in the world that has never produced a great poet," (a plausible assertion--I tend to agree) and "no great poet has ever come out of California."

The article was meant to focus on an essay Dana wrote called " Fallen Western Star: The Decline of San Francisco as a Literary Region ," which is really questioning California's current literary culture, not historical merits.

Heck, even within the LA Times article, he talks about some of the important poets who've come out of California. He's written extensively on Jeffers, Keyes, and Kay Ryan, to name just three (although I think he'd argue Frost's place as a "California poet.") Frankly, Dana's spent way too much time and effort advocating California poets to have ever made such a sweeping and dismissive remark about their importance.

For the real scoop, read " Fallen Western Star: The Decline of San Francisco as a Literary Region ." Better yet, Jack Foley compiled all the responses to "Fallen Western Star" into a book, The "Fallen Western Star" Wars, which has some incredibly interesting responses from critics like David Mason and Richard Silberg.

On the plus side, the article mentions my name!!! In the LA Times!!! (Albeit in parentheses.) Woohoo!

C.



[This message has been edited by Chryss Yost (edited September 17, 2001).]

[R. S. Gwynn]

Dana has been misquoted again. He actually said, "No great poet has every come out in California."

[Richard Wakefield]

Alicia:
Thanks for directing us to a provocative article. Of course the qualifiers tend to get lost, but the hypothesis still raises the more general question of just how much our environment empowers or inhibits us, both as poets and as readers.
I was told long ago that my "bland" ethnicity and background precluded me from ever writing anything of great weight. It's true enough that lack of gravitas is but one of my failings, but my vanity makes me claim even my failings as my own rather than as the product of forces beyond my influence. After all, my various trials and losses certainly felt profound to me...
Richard

[R. S. Gwynn]

THE METEOR HAS LANDED

Richard Kohlman Hughey

Book Review

The "Fallen Western Star" Wars, Jack Foley, ed. Oakland CA: Scarlet Tanager
Books, 200 l; 87 pages; paperbound; $14.00

Dana Gioia is a youthful looking middle-aged poet who despite his cherubic
countenance stirs up controversy everywhere he goes. That should not come as
a surprise to anyone who knows Gioia's background. He finished high school
as the class valedictorian and editor of the school paper but was thrice
expelled for misbehaving. Gioia's essay "Can Poetry Matter?" for the
Atlantic Monthly a decade ago produced the most extraordinary response in the
magazine's history, which surprised me, as I didn't think poetry mattered to
that many people any more.

Gioia's thesis was that poetry once written for popular consumption has been
co-opted by the Academy, and that poets have sold their souls to university
administrations for junior professorships with limited potential for tenure
teaching creative writing, deemed vocational training by the tenured faculty
of the English department.

Gioia also pointed out that literary criticism had devolved into a back
scratching contest. In Ambrose Bierce's day a critic was hard to please
because nobody tried to please him, or "her" in the case of you know who.

We'll probably never seen another David Lezensky, the poor man who hung
himself when Ambrose Bierce accused him of plagiarizing Mrs. Plunkett's "Ode
to a Dead Cow." Perhaps that's just as well.

Bierce was extraordinarily prescient when he predicted with amazing precision
what literary criticism would become in the twentieth century. He saw the
critic "at work upon a book, and so read out of it / The qualities that he
had first read in to it."

For fifty years I've complained that literary criticism was simply an
exercise of the critic, usually a junior professor of sophomore English
literature, engrafting onto a work of art something the artist had no
intention of creating. Literary criticism today is like painting whiskers on
the Mona Lisa.

The genius of Gioia's piece was to articulate so beautifully the thoughts
that all of us - well, most of us - were thinking but couldn't find the words
to express. And to do it with elevated language -- unlike mine -- worthy of
a master prose writer.

Gioia laid out a formula for the resuscitation of the art form, but we're
still waiting for the faculty committee appointed to implement the proposals
to meet much less act on them.

Now that Gioia has relocated to a hilltop aerie in Sonoma County, in
California, he has loosed his fateful lightning with another thunderbolt that
has the luddites stirred to action once again. The status quo seems to be a
matter of national policy.

Gioia disingenuously maintains that he is only posing questions to
stimulate his readers' intellectual curiosity. Yet, every trial lawyer - I
used be one - can tell you that the best way to ask a question in court is
to include the answer within the interrogatory. That frequently leaves the
witness satisfied with his answer, while unknowingly having not only dug his
own grave but also pulled the sod into it.

This time Gioia questioned whether the San Francisco Bay Area is any longer a
literary region. "No" he said, "it's not." Then he proceeded for another
8997 words to explain why it's not.

The reaction to the essay reminded me of the time Anton Roman, publisher of
the venerable Overland Monthly, asked Bret Harte to edit an anthology of
California poetry. In characteristic fashion, Harte sampled the candidates
very selectively and chose only forty-one poems for inclusion in the
anthology. Only nineteen contributors were represented.

The reaction of the merchants and miners in the mining camps, who had
been sending their ditties to the San Francisco newspapers and seeing them
published without comment in the yellow journals, were furious at being
excluded from Harte's anthology. They descended on the city and gathered as
an unruly mob around Roman's mansion with pitchforks and torches demanding
his neck for stretching.

The lynch mob this time is led by Howard Junker, the editor of a literary
magazine with an unpronounceable name who to prove the positive set forth a
list of names of alleged San Francisco writers and poets who, except for
Michael Cardinal McClure and Kevin "not Kenneth" Starr, and one or two others
I, for one, never heard of.
The shot was a blank, in any event. Junker missed Gioia's point entirely.
It isn't that the artists aren't there; it's that they don't interact with
each other on a regular and ongoing basis, which is how a literary region
operates.

Other responses were more temperate and principled, and the scales seemed
weighted equally on both sides, although I had the nagging suspicion that
Gioia's attackers really didn't have a good idea of what the Bay Area was
like when it was a real literary region. And certainly there was no evidence
they were aware of the bohemian fantasyland that existed in the Bay Area
during George Strerling's time.

The historical perspective so essential to Gioia's thesis seemed lacking in
their assaults. I don't think the words Golden Era, Hutching's California
Magazine, The Argonaut, The Overland Monthly, The Lark, The Blue Mule, or the
Purple Cow meant anything to these folks; and if I mentioned people like
Prentice Mulford, John "Yellow Bird" Ridge, Eliot Gould Buffum, Bayard
Taylor, Alonzo "Old Block" Delano, George Horatio Derby, J. Ross Browne,
George Henry, Josiah Royce, Ina Coolbrith, Gertrude Atherton, Mary Austin,
Jimmy Hopper, Gelett Burgess, Harry Leon Wilson, Charles Warren Stoddard, and
a host of others I don't know if there'd be much name recognition on their
part.
But I shouldn't complain. After all, I was just as dumbfounded when Richard
Silberg read out the roster of the Berkeley regiment of the Avant Guard in
his in his excessively long reply to Gioia's thesis.

Please don't get me started on avant gardism.

The point is, you can't talk about San Francisco as a literary region today
without knowing what is was like yesterday.

Richard Silberg, associate editor of Poetry Flash, issued a papal bull
spelling out in excruciating detail his objections to Gioia's dialectic.
Silberg's rejoinder was in turn answered by Jack Foley and Silberg then
rejoined Foley's rejoinder, and the two critics somehow got lost in an
argument over the merits of Ed Markham's "The Man with a Hoe," not to be
confused with Chris Rock's "Young Man with a Ho."

I know Richard. I took his poetry workshop at Cal Berkeley in the early
eighties. I turned in a sheaf of poems I had assiduously written for the
workshop at the first meeting. I got them back a few weeks later. There
wasn't a mark on them except for a note scrawled at the top of the first
page: "I've never written in forms, so I can't help you with these. Sorry!"


I about fell off the chair. "What?" I cried, "how can a free verse poet not
interpret something as accessible as 'Casey at the Bat'?" There was no joy
in Berkeley that night, I can tell you.

I soon gave up writing poetry again as I had in the sixties. I got tired of
feeling like a well-fed Christian in an arena full of lions.

I should have known better, for on the first evening, Richard announced The
Paramount Principle of Modern Poetry: "Whatever works, works!" Right! And
any poet can be a pro playing tennis without a net.

I'll let readers of the book decide for themselves the merit or lack thereof,
as we old trial lawyers like to say, of Silberg's arguments. I only want to
point out that he seems to think a literary region lives on poetry alone.
I'll give him everything he says about poetry and still challenge him to
prove that the San Francisco Bay Area is a literary region. And I would tell
him that schmoozing at a poetry reading is not a particularly interactive
activity. I have in mind crashing in the same pad and sharing girlfriends.

Jack Foley has just edited and published a collection of the responses to
Gioia's Western Star piece brought out by Scarlet Tanager Books this year
called, perhaps a little grandly, The "Fallen Western Star" Wars. The book
puts the dispute into a clear perspective, making very interesting reading;
but the book would be worth the price of admission if it only included the
text of Gioia's essay, which is placed in the leadoff position. Those who do
not have ready access to such literary zeitungs as the Ruminator Review can
read Gioia's articulate piece in Jack's anthology.

The book also contains Gioia's short piece for the San Francisco Magazine
(January 2000) that spelled out for those who hadn't read the writing on the
stalls that the decline of San Francisco as a literary region was a matter of
over population and real estate values.
What we're talking about is traditional bohemianism. George Sterling defined
bohemianism as devotion to one of the seven arts - and poverty. Sterling
should have known that his definition was incomplete. Bohemianism needs two
other elements: the first is conviviality, from which the second follows,
namely, a sense of place. I know because I was there.

I was there in fifties when the beatniks were rousted out of North Beach by a
sudden influx of tits and ass. I was there in the sixties when the Zebra
killer and his associates invaded the Haight Asbury and slimed the
neighborhood relentlessly. When the bastards were through, they went across
the bay and slimed Telegraph Avenue.

I was also there in the eighties when what was left of the bohemian culture
was little more than gay coterie hold up in the Mission District amongst a
population of mostly hostile Hispanics.

I left the city in 1992 and the only thing I've heard since then is that real
estate values in the Mission have driven all the poor folk completely out of
the city, which, by Sterling's definition, means the writers and poets too.

Café Trieste still serves coffee to residents and visitors alike, and you can
still get a drink as Vesuvios or buy a book at City Lights. But you won't
find a Weldon Kees sitting at the bar in Vesuvios arguing with a Jack Kerouac
over who was the reigning jazz star, the local Turk Murphy or Jelly Roll
Morton from "back east." The El Matador is gone and so is Cal Tjader, and
you can't hear the Jefferson Airplane playing at Basin Street West or listen
to Pearl at the Matrix. And you won't find Don Carpenter and Richard
Braugtigan sitting at a table in a sidewalk café on Broadway making fun of
the local burghers.
Those who weren't even born then will never know what a real literary region
was like.

If you go looking for the I and Thou Coffeehouse on Haight Street, you'll
find a pizza parlor; and if you want to take in an Akira Kurosawa flic at the
old Wave Theater at the end of Irving Street, you'll find there a Chinese
Restaurant.

If you check out Café Picaro in the Mission District on 16th Street, you
might see some bohemian looking fellows at the tables but you won't see any
of them reaching for the books on the shelves.

This is what I mean about a sense of place. Every bohemian culture has to
have its Co-Existence Bagel Shop or its Original Coppa's Restaurant. And a
literary region is not a literary region without a bohemian culture. I don't
care how many of Madison Avenue's precious darlings live in the Bay Area,
Bohemia is dead.

[A. E. Stallings]

Well, I just think it's great that poetry is in the center of a controversy at all. And Dana does seem to have a knack for getting it in the news!

[Michael Juster]

The interesting thing here to me is how quickly people have passed over the threshold issue of how many "great" poets the US has produced AT ALL. I quickly sign up Frost and Wilbur, and acquiesce to Whitman, Dickinson and Stevens even though they are not to my taste. Longfellow and Robinson? Well, their peers thought so, but I'm not sure they quite make it. Ginsberg? Even I like parts of Kaddish and Howl, but mostly it is gaseous dreck that doesn't come close. I love the best of Dorothy Parker, but overall you can't make the case. Dana must have agonized over Jeffers, but I don't think he's close either. Keys? A small amount of interesting work and a myth to die for, but not great. Eliot and Auden? Brits in their hearts. Pound? A sad fraud that future generations will see more clearly as such. Millay? Inconsistent, and too often too musty and restricted in themes. Plath, Sexton, Berryman? Very interesting poets who caught the public imagination at the time, but hardly great (Plath is probably the best of that bunch). Lowell? Far thinner than he seemed at the time, although technically innovative and skilled when not substantially insane. Merrill? Tempting, but the great book designed to cement his legacy trivializes his talent, and ultimately the bloodless languor of the personality undermines the most extraordinarily skilled technical talent we have ever seen in this country. New Formalists? No one clearly stands out yet among the rest, and maybe none ever will. Roethke? His solipsism makes him hard to take, although he did write a handful of gorgeous poems (we should all be so lucky). Bishop? Dana would be tempted here as well, but I don't think her work reads as well as those who knew her do. Lifshin? If only poetry were hamburgers, then she could be our McDonald's.
In short, given the fairly recent population explosion in California, it does not seem to me to be too damning that they have on a sliver of one of the five or so great poets in our history. On the other hand, Dana may have a point if you ask the question, "Where is the best poetry being written today?", although I wouldn't presume to answer that one.

[Chryss Yost]

Jack Foley, editor of "The 'Fallen Western Star' Wars" (Scarlet Tanager Press, 2001), sent the following letter to the LA Times:
Letter to LA Times, 9/17/01
Editor: I am editor of "The 'Fallen Western Star' Wars," a book referred to in Ms. Charlotte Innes' article, "Fightin' Words" (9/12/01). I was surprised--not to say shocked--to read the article's headline: "Dana Gioia has ignited debate with his claim that 'no great poet has ever come out of California.'" Dana Gioia has indeed ignited debate--but it is not about this subject. Nothing that Gioia has ever written ever makes such an assertion: in fact, the assertion implicitly contradicts a number of things he actually has written. Gioia has been an eloquent defender of California poets such as Robinson Jeffers and Weldon Kees--among many others. When I phoned him to ask whether he'd ever said such a thing, he immediately answered, "No, of course not." The question Gioia is raising has nothing to do with whether there are good (and/or "great") poets in California. Of course there have been great poets in California: Robinson Jeffers is an excellent example, and Gioia would be the first person to say that. Despite the statement Ms. Innes erroneously attributes to him, Gioia's point is that poets in California are not talking to one another in meaningful ways. He is making a statement about the lack of community, not about the quality of the writing. I should know: the book I edited is specifically about the debate Gioia's essay, "Fallen Western Star," has stirred up. It saddens me to think that a real possibility for a popular presentation of Dana Gioia's innovative ideas about California writing has been lost--that he has been reduced to the perpetrator of a simplistic and, indeed, rather silly claim about "greatness." Ms. Innes' article is well-written and a pleasure to read--and I'm happy that she's giving both Gioia and my own book some publicity. But the article is marred by her basic misunderstanding of Gioia's position. Think about it: Would a dedicated California writer (one who has written extensively about many California writers and who positions himself as a defender of California writing) be likely to make an assertion like "no great poet has ever come out of California"? Wouldn't such an assertion be more likely to have come from someone trying to attack California writing? "California has never produced a great poet": we don't have to pay any attention to California poetry. Gioia has been active precisely in calling attention to California writers, many of whom have been unjustly forgotten (Weldon Kees) or overlooked (Kay Ryan). I don't mean to imply that Ms. Innes is trying to attack California writing, but her unfortunate misunderstanding of what Gioia said is wonderful fuel for such attacks. And, alas, fuel as well for attacks on Gioia.

[Carol Taylor]

Chryss, we received the same letter from Jack Foley. I was going to post it but see that you already have. Thanks.

Carol

[R. S. Gwynn]

Re. Dana's essay and Jack's letter, I would argue that Weldon Kees is not exactly what I'd call a California poet. True, he did live in SF and died there in 1955, but his residency was limited to the last few (five?) years of his life. He was a Nebraskan, and his most productive years as a writer were spent in New York. Oddly, his college roommate and pal, Spangler Arlington Brugh, did migrate to California after graduation and became a longtime resident, under his film name of Robert Taylor! Maybe there are some poems of Kees's that are "Californian," but I can't think of any offhand. You could make a better assertion that Louis Simpson is a California poet, based on his years at Berkeley in the late 60s. Certainly Simpson has written several poems ("How sad it is, the end of America") that directly evoke his years in the state.