California Bard Rhymes Politics, Poetry

The political and poetical sides of Charles B. “Gus” Garrigus merge each year when he reads one of his poems to the California Assembly where he once served.

The Legislature officially named Garrigus poet laureate of California when he left the Assembly in 1966.

Garrigus, now 82, has held the title proudly ever since and returns to Sacramento once each session to read a poem.

“I feel like it gives me a chance to do something for the cause of poetry,” says Garrigus, who read his 1997 poem to the Assembly on Feb. 18. “There’s no more influential use of language than poetry, if you do it right.”

Garrigus was a poet long before he became a politician. As a boy, he won a newspaper contest with a poem about a pressed flower and can still recite it with inflection and passion.

“I’ve never entered a contest since,” Garrigus said during an interview at his home here.

But he never quit writing poetry during a long life that included a career teaching, serving six years in the Assembly, building a few homes and writing several novels.

Garrigus wrote his first political poem during his freshman year as a Democratic assemblyman in 1959 and read it the last night of the session.

“It was all about rivalry and stuff, personalities and stuff, incidents and attitudes and controversy,” Garrigus recalls. “The Legislature loved it. After that, I was expected to have [a poem] at the end of every session.”

The late-Gov. Edmund G. “Pat” Brown claimed he attended the Legislature’s last session each year just to hear the annual Garrigus poem.

Garrigus’s fondest memory is not writing and reciting poems for legislators, however. It’s a letter he received after the Los Angeles Times published a poem he wrote to honor astronaut Neil Armstrong’s moon walk in 1969.

“I got a letter from Neil Armstrong,” he says. “That was my biggest thrill as a poet laureate.”

Over the years, the words to 16 of his poems have been chiseled in stone or bronze and placed at various monuments around the state. Two novels he wrote -- “Brief Candle” and “Chas. & The Summer of ‘26’--fared less well, much to the author’s frustration.

“Everything is mass market. There should be a level of taste above that for classic literature,” he says of “Brief Candle.” “My book is literature.”

But Garrigus still can claim a rare stature when he recites his poetry to the Assembly. This year’s poem, titled “When You Think of California,” was a repeat of one Garrigus wrote 30 years ago. It ends like this:

When you think of California, think of Nature’s generous hand:

Mountains, deserts, beaches, redwoods, beautifying land;

Primeval parks of wilderness, Nature’s archives of the past,

Preserving for the future the beauty that should last.

“The average person doesn’t have any idea of the significance of the laureate tradition,” Garrigus says. “I love to think of Tennyson sitting there reading poetry while Queen Victoria sat a few feet away listening.”