Let Us Now Praise the Gravy Poet

You can put your trust in gravy

the way it stretches out

the sausage

the way it stretches out

the dreams

--From “Gravy Tells a Lot,” by Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel

There was not, it turned out, much garden to the Tulare Gardens, just a few skinny trees, some Bermuda grass, and a hedge of oleanders that separated the low-slung apartment complex from a housing project next door. The beige buildings backed up to Highway 99, and from Wilma McDaniel’s unit a huge neon sign could be seen, calling motorists to a pancake house. That was about it for scenery.

Inside, the 76-year-old woman sat at a Formica dinette and read her poetry in a firm, flat twang imported from Oklahoma more than a half century ago. These were poems about her people, then and now, the Dust Bowl migrants who came to California in the 1930s, changing it, changing themselves--an uneasy transaction all around. These were poems about people not found in anyone else’s poetry, people with names like Buford and Elbie, Bobby Ray and Melvin. . . .

Melvin stared at the

table centerpiece

and reflected to his

Bull Durham father

Ain’t this something, Papa

five years in California

and we have went

from fresh fruit on our

table

to wax apples in a bowl

McDaniel started writing poems as a little girl back in Oklahoma. She would scratch them out with a stubby pencil on grain sacks or whatever else she could find. Her family, she recalled, accepted this as a sort of affliction: “Something like a child who is croupy; they will either get over it or die.” McDaniel never did shake poetry. She still spends an hour each day at the table, composing in a gangly longhand she worries would disappoint her schoolteachers.

The early poetry McDaniel stashed away in shoe boxes and old wicker baskets, lost to everyone but herself. In the last 20 years, however, she has begun to be published, typically in small, hard-to-find literary magazines and slender collections. Though critics have been kind, McDaniel said she treasures most the letters from simple readers who want to thank her for finding poetry in a people and past that--John Steinbeck excepted--most often have been subjects for slurs and ridicule. One such correspondent addressed his letter to the “Biscuit and Gravy Poet” of Tulare. It reached her, and the nickname stuck.

Some of McDaniel’s most striking poems deal not with the Dust Bowl days, but with contemporary California and the mixing of cultures that goes on even today. She finds poetry in the Tulare Gardens, yes, and also at the pancake house and nearby K mart:

Dirty Stetson

khaki clothes

cane beside him

on a K-mart bench

I heard the old man say

you know

us men don’t have to

look no certain way

like a woman does

or men expect her to look

you take Buck Owens

why he looks just right

if you put that face on

a woman

they’d run her out of town.

McDaniel read until the sun was almost down. It was her way of being interviewed. No matter what she was asked, she’d find a poem to answer. She explained she doesn’t like to talk about herself, figures at her age it would be silly. Anyway, it’s all there in her poems--the toll of hunger, the fear of children uprooted, the early deaths of too many brothers, the ghostly reunions with a father who “doesn’t come to me on Sundays in his good suit. . . .

But place me in a Saturday town

of khaki men with Southwest

faces and rich, slow tongues

And papa will blow around

the nearest corner

on a Prince Albert wind . . .

She also shied away from politics. “I’m not a temperamental type of person,” McDaniel said. “Anyone who has seen men working for 10 cents a day cannot be temperamental.” The state-line guards who turned back migrants, the taunts from European immigrants, themselves freshly arrived and fearful of the dusty newcomers, these have stayed with her. Yet, when asked about current attitudes, once again she let a poem talk for her:

They forgot so easily

the same road led

everyone to this place

“I think that statement still stands,” the poet said, “don’t you?”