Jewishness as Substance
In response to my comments last week one of my correspondents mentioned to me several places where I might go to find the LA poetry scene. Among the venues that she suggested are World Stage and Da Poetry Lounge. I have not had time to follow up on her suggestions.
Having now finished reading “Poetry Los Angeles: Reading the Essential Poems of the City,” by Laurence Goldstein, and the anthology, “California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present,” edited by Dana Gioia, Chryss Yost and Jack Hicks, I don’t feel that I have arrived at a really useful sense of the range and concerns of Los Angeles poetry. This is probably more my own failure than that of the author/editors.
Goldstein anchors his treatment of LA poetry in a series of themes: The Pacific Ocean, Hollywood, the merit of Charles Bukowski (plus or minus), Freeways, South Central and the Black experience, The experience of the Californios and Spanish speakers, life inside LA’s homes and buildings, and the outdoors and public spaces of LA. He presents various poems that illustrate those concerns and offers an analysis to accompany them.
What Goldstein fails to include in his chosen themes is immigration and religion. He is inattentive to the Jewish experience, and even more so, the Asian-American and Native experiences. His treatment of texts by Jewish authors is primarily in his analysis of Frederick Seidel’s “1968,” a kaleidoscopic poem that blends together cocaine fueled Hollywood excess with the Manson Family murders and the assassination of Robert Kennedy. He says, “Frederick Seidel is an unlikely candidate for the role of Jeremiah or Ezekiel, though he continues the tradition of Jewish moralistic writing about this most Jewish of communities.” This sentence and evaluation is confusing. Why would the extremely provocative and intentionally controversial Seidel not be viewed as a poet who would speak in the prophetic voice? What is Goldstein referring to when he mentions, “this most Jewish of communities?” Los Angeles as a city? Hollywood as a whole? The cocaine swilling poolside partygoers? The reference is probably just a bit vapid, but it is like sour milk if you sniff it up close.
In a discussion of Derek Walcott’s poem, “Summer Elegies II,” Goldstein refers to Stuart Perkoff. He quotes Bill Mohr about Perkoff (For Goldstein, the Venice scene is otherwise beneath consideration): “'Feasts of Death, Feasts of Love,' is a central text of Los Angeles Jewish poetry, in part because it is so resonant a statement of Jewish anguish following the revelation of the Holocaust.” A discussion of Lawrence Lipton’s “Bruno in Venice,” is dismissive, but only relevant to any Jewish concern in that it is a parody of the slimy Jew-Hating poem by T.S. Eliot, “Burbank with a Baedaker: Bleistein with a Cigar.” Goldstein invokes Allan Ginsberg with some frequency, but only really digs into one poem, “A Supermarket in California,” which is not set in Los Angeles and forefronts Ginsberg’s homosexuality.
Goldstein’s most intense interest in a poet, for whom Jewishness has some substance, is with Karl Shapiro:
“I would identify as the earliest poem about Southern California worth close examination, the primal text of the entire tradition I study in this volume, Karl Shapiro’s ‘Hollywood,’ …, published in 1942. As I note later, Shapiro borrows some of his imagery from Nathaniel West’s seminal novel of the Hollywood locale, ‘The Day of the Locust.’ … Shapiro’s poem is a pastiche of misreadings of the city. … Yes, Hollywood might merge as a ‘possible proud Florence,’ Shapiro asserts in the closure of his touristy piece, but only if you think of Dante’s fallen city as filled with the same ‘parasites,’ ‘quacks,’ and ‘morons’ Shapiro discerns in his brief walking tour of Hollywood Boulevard.”
Thus, Goldstein who professes little interest in anything Jewish elsewhere in the book, finds a Jewish vision (two, actually) as the beginning of serious poetry’s effort to describe LA and Southern California as a whole. This, despite his sense that the work itself is, “touristy.” But TS Eliot, Baedaker in hand, wrote a poem one might call touristy.
Hollywood
Farthest from any war, unique in time
Like Athens of Baghdad,this city lies
Between dry purple mountains and the sea.
The air is clear and famous, every day
Bright as a postcard, bringing bungalows
And sights. The broad nights advertise
For love and music and astronomy.
Heart of a continent, the hearts converge
On open boulevards where palms are nursed
With flare-pots like a grove, on villa roads
Where castles cultivates like a style
Breed fabulous metaphors in foreign stone,
And on enormous movie lots
Where history repeats its vivid blunders.
Alice and Cinderella are most real.
Here may the tourist, quite sincere at last,
Rest from his dream of travels All s new,
No ruins claim his view, and permanence,
Despised like customs, fails at every turn.
Here the eccentric thrives.
Laughter and love are leading industries.
Luck is another. Here the bodyguard,
The parasite, the scholar are well paid,
The quack erects his alabaster office,
The moron and the genus are enshrined,
And the mystic makes his fortune quietly;
Here all superlatives come true
And beauty is marketed like a basic food.
O can we understand it? Is it ours,
A crude whim of a beginning people,
A private orgy in a secluded spot?
Or alien like the word ‘harem,’ or true
Like hideous Pittsburgh or depraved Atlanta?
Is adolescence just as vile
As this its architecture and its talk?
Or are they parvenus, like boys and girls?
Or ours and happy, cleverest of all?
Yes. Yes. Though glamorous to the ignorant
This is the simplest city, a new school.
What is more nearly ours? If soul can mean
The civilization of the brain,
This is a soul, a possible proud Florence.
“California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present,” presents many of the most important poets who have been active in California up to the turn of the last millennium, but at this point, the youngest poet present, Jenny Factor, is now 55. Time ages us all. Each selection is prefaced by a biographical note about the author. These notes often exceed the poems in length which makes the collection like a museum with small paintings and big explanatory texts beside them. The editors seem to believe that biography explains poetry. This is true to an extent, but often a single biographical detail can help a reader focus while a list of awards and publications does not.
The sweep of these biographies reveals a surprisingly deep bench of poets out of Fresno, gathered around Philip Levine. Formal poetry in the west seems to radiate out of Stanford and the classroom of Yvor Winters. The Claremont Colleges appear to have produced more significant 20th Century poets than the Bay Area. The criteria for inclusion in this collection is that the author has to have spent most of their life in California. Perhaps this accounts for this curious result. The editors admit that this is just one anthology and there are many others that one might put together. Without further comment, I will agree. Certainly, this anthology leans more heavily on academic poets. The Iowa Writers Workshop comes up like the chorus of a song throughout. Outsider poets like Bob Kaufman make an occasional appearance, but are about as common as the flaws that Islamic weavers include in their rugs to demonstrate their modesty before Allah. Just one if you can find it.
All caveats aside, Dana Gioia, the lead editor is wonderful poet himself. Here is one of two poems of his own that he included in the collection:
California Hills in August
I can imagine someone who foundations
these fields unbearable, who climbed
the hillside in heat, cursing the dust,
cracking the brittle weeds underfoot,
wishing a few more trees for shade.
An easterner especially, who would scorn
the meagerness of summer, the dry
twisted shapes of black elm,
scrub oak, and chaparral, a landscapes
August has already drained of green.
One who would hurry over the clinging
thistle, foxtail, golden poppy,
knowing everything was just a weed,
unable to conceive that these trees
and parse brown bushes were alive.
And hate bright stillness of the noon
without wind, without motion
the only other living thing
a hawk, hungry for prey, suspended
in the blinding, sunlit blue.
And yet, gentle it seems to someone
raised in a landscape short of rain -
the skyline of a hill broken by no more
tree than one can count, the grass
the empty sky, the wish for water.
