| The "Fallen Western Star" Wars Edited by Jack Foley | ||
"I teach my students to publish in New York." —A teacher at New College of California
Richard Silberg and I are friends who often disagree on aesthetic 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 is defending something, but one can ask whether he is defending anything more than the status quo.
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 The cut face The bread cells It is nothing like the middle I say do not adjust to half
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"?
Like Raskin and Junker before him, Richard 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 May, 2000
JACK FOLEY'S most recent books are the companion critical volumes O Powerful Western Star (recipient of the Artists Embassy Literary/Cultural Award 1998-2000) and Foley's Books: California Rebels, Beats, and Radicals. Among his poetry books are Exiles, Adrift, and Gershwin. Foley's radio show, "Cover to Cover," is heard every Wednesday on Berkeley station KPFA; his column, "Foley's Books," appears weekly in the online magazine The Alsop Review (www.alsopreview.com). He is a Contributing Editor of Poetry Flash. For the past thirty-seven years he has lived in Oakland, California. The above essay is from The "Fallen Western Star Wars" edited by Jack Foley. The Black Hole of Criticism is Foley's response to Richard Silberg's criticism of Gioia's essay, "Fallen Western Star". Richard Silberg is Associate Editor of Poetry Flash. His books of poetry include Translucent Gears, The Fields, Totem Pole, and Doublness, which was published in the California Poetry Series. When Dana Gioia, the author of "Can Poetry Matter?," published his equally provocative essay, "Fallen Western Star: The Decline of San Francisco as a Literary Region," he knew that certain quarters would be up in arms. Prominent California literati were quick to defend the San Francisco Scene and wrote articles attacking Gioia. Others attacked the attackers. The entire exhilarating, sometimes hilarious exchange appears in this book. Click HERE to read Dana Gioia's provocative essay, "Fallen Western Star". Click HERE to read Jacqueline Marcus' introduction to Gioia's "Fallen Western Star," republished in Foley's The "Fallen Western Star" Wars. Click HERE to read Jack Foley's response to Charlotte Innes' ridiculous assertion, in her L.A. Times' interview with Gioia (9/12/01), that according to Gioia, "no good poets have come out of California." Gioia would have to be an idiot to make such a claim, which he didn't. |
