On the other side of the argument, Richard Silberg, associate editor of Poetry Flash, was one of the first Bay Area writers to disagree with Gioia's criticism of the cultural landscape of San Francisco, which Gioia believes is on the decline. Silberg writes in Poetry Flash (May June 2000):

"Diversity is one key to the vibrancy 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…"

In either case, Gioia's "Fallen Western Star" is an example of narrative writing at its best. I enjoyed the way Gioia described the history of San Francisco's writers and musicians from post World War II jazz musicians to Robinson Jeffers. And although Silberg didn't particularly care for Gioia's selections, such as Markham's "The Man with the Hoe", Gioia's description of how that poem became internationally famous is fascinating:

"Newspapers were the Internet of the nineteenth century—a decentralized information system—and "The Man with the Hoe" was reprinted from paper to paper first across the United States and then abroad. Translated into more than forty languages, it was eventually republished in ten thousand newspapers and magazines. In the early twentieth century there was no more famous American poem than Markham's. The poet became an international celebrity, and the poem served as a literary call to arms for the labor movement—all of which began with the San Francisco Examiner." According to Gioia, in those days, 1899, San Francisco was, as Jack Foley put it, the "powerful western star" of American literature.

I happened to catch Michael Kinsley one morning, editor of Slate.com, on C-SPAN's Washington Journal, address the question on how an editor selects material for publication. To paraphrase Mr. Kinsley, he said that you don't want commentaries that leave nothing to the imagination. You want to publish work that is controversial—otherwise, people will think it's boring.

Gioia's opinions may anger a good number of writers and readers, but the last thing they could ever say about his work is that it leaves nothing to the imagination or that it is boring.

Interestingly enough, Gioia suggests that the Bay writers have gone soft in this respect—as if our culture were an extension of the mild weather, and the Starbuck scene of suburbanite social gatherings. The days of "literary feuds and rivalry," wrote Gioia, "the necessary friction of cultural life," has all but disappeared in northern California. I'm not sure if that's true, but in any event, I think Gioia raises an important question on whether or not San Francisco can compete, as a literary region, with New York City.