Point Conception

The train swerved along the tracks through the desert, the sleeper cars lit up with dim yellow lights. Inside one of these cars, a man knelt next to his dreaming wife, curled in a berth. She had begun to talk in her sleep, and the man scribbled her words on a pad. The train whistle blew. The woman spoke haltingly in a low voice. She answered questions that the man asked; her voice changed register as different characters spoke through her. The pen moved rapidly over the paper, as bright lights began to elongate and slip by the windows. The train was nearing Los Angeles. The woman opened her eyes, slowly reentered the year, 1917. She gazed at the man kneeling before her, writing, her new husband, William Butler Yeats.

This trance-talk (thankfully) was not an early version of channeling inspired by proximity to Hollywood but was among the first “automatic writing” experiments Yeats conducted with his bride (the former Georgie Hyde-Lees), which resulted in his occult philosophical book, “A Vision.” The “visitation” took place on a train “somewhere in Southern California,” as Yeats put it, while he was on a lecture tour to raise money for a new roof for the tower of his Irish country house, Thoor Ballylee.

Perhaps some poetry in the air of Southern California drew the smoky intertwining voices out of her dreams. The landscape itself was undeniably lyrical: glorious desert spilling into sea, mountains and scattered rock fragments broken like sentences the earth had tried to utter.

Long before, the Chumash Indians had touched these stones and understood them as poetry, as myth. Earthquakes, they said, were caused by the two great snakes who held the world up, who shifted when their burden tired them. They told stories of the soul’s migration after death, a journey that began on the cliffs by the sea at Point Conception, where the soul bathed and painted itself prior to its long flight.

When we talk about Southern California poetry, we are talking about poetry as old as the indigenous peoples, as old as their metaphors, their idea of the soul. It is odd, then, that most of our contemporary poets’ sense of regional literary history only reaches as far back as the original “coffeehouse movement’ of the ‘60s and ‘70s or back to the famous Watts Writers Workshop of the same era. These are indeed landmarks, but beyond them, collective literary memory shrouds itself in mist.

Though we seem not to read the past in Los Angeles, I believe that the past reads us. Many of the same themes, the same obsessions that preoccupy our poets today are mirrored in this repository of verse. Why have we forgotten this history?

Certainly it needs to be said that there are verse-writers of the past (as in the present) who deserve to be forgotten. Yet even these dimmer voices can document the thinking and the passions of vanished literary times. Then there are others whose voices seem meant for the ages, their presences as powerful now as when they first put pen to paper. (Both Robert Frost and Gertrude Stein were born in California, though it vanished from their work.)

Literary life at the western edge of the continent has always been a curious combination of isolation and internationalism. The religious poetry of the mission era, flowing from mestizo and Spanish sources, and later the passions of Sor Juana and Ruben Dario underscored the power of the imagination as homeland. As waves of newcomers arrived from the Eastern states, then from the Far East and from Europe before and during World War II, literary identity both changed and retained form. The early settlers seemed to have no trouble seeing themselves as citizens of two poetry spheres: the established community of the literary world at large and the fresh new Arcadia of California.

Ina Coolbrith, (nee Josephine Donna Smith) came to Los Angeles from Illinois by covered wagon in 1851 at the age of 10. She grew up and married in Los Angeles and moved later in her life to San Francisco. She was the first poet laureate of California as well as the first female laureate of the United States. The recently deceased (and sadly neglected) poet Ann Stanford praised Coolbrith as one of the first poets to use the West, “its landscape, place names, people and history as subject and background in her poems.” (Los Angeles for Coolbrith was a “long low vale with tawny edge / of hills within the sunset glow.”)

But Coolbrith’s sense of poetry had no borders. When she relocated to San Francisco, she wrote an elegy for Byron, “With a Wreath of Laurel,” that caused a sensation worldwide and inspired re-interest in the poet’s neglected grave.

Her passion for topoi that were not “features of native birth” roused ire in the 1932 anthology, “California Poets” (244 Golden State poets!). Coolbrith (along with Bret Harte, Joaquin Miller and Edwin Markham) was taken to task by the editor Helen Hoyt for writing about things un-Californian. “California Poets,” like other regional anthologies since, struggled mightily to establish literary territory. California was not to be seen as some out-colony of New York. Hoyt claimed that the word “desert” belonged to California in a unique way. With further regional imperium (and the time’s blithe Eurocentrism), she appropriated the following diction and described it as having no “place in the environment of most American poets,” outside of California poets:

desert, forests, ranger, mountains,

fruit belt, earthquakes, apricots

steaming in copper caldrons, cable

cars, oil derricks, vine grape odors

hanging along the road, fruit tramps

and pretty cannery girls, Chinamen

and harvest wanderers . . . prunes

drying in sun-faded trays.

Yet most of these anthologized poets wrote in polite, post-Georgian phrasing (with awkward flashes betraying the influence of Pound and H.D. and of Imagism); there is little that is uniquely “Californian” beyond place names.

Because of Kenneth Rexroth, who traveled from Chicago to San Francisco in 1927, literary awareness of “things Californian” began to change. Rexroth described San Francisco, on his arrival, as a “backwater town” but claimed that this was precisely his reason for staying there. It was, he said, a long way from the literary marketplace, and he didn’t have to listen to fashionable types arguing about what “Horace Gregory thought of Oscar Williams.” In 1941, he published “In What Hour,” described by Robert Hass as the “first readable book of poems ever produced by a resident of the city.” What Hass meant was, given that there were fewer than 400 English speakers in all of California in 1841, it took “about a hundred years for colonization to produce the city that produced the book of poems.”

In the 1930s, Rexroth worked in the San Francisco and Los Angeles branches of the Federal Writers Project and during these years became an outspoken champion of radical poetry and painting. He was, in a way, the most California of writers with his anarchist politics and his, as Hass notes, “almost Chinese plainness of syntax.” Rexroth “invented” the culture of the West Coast, or at least the style of that culture. If Jack London and Robinson Jeffers were, as Hass suggests, the first California writers, then Rexroth and Steinbeck are a second generation.

Rexroth favored a poetics of immediate expression, and this idea of “immediate” began to permeate the poetry scene. Poetry groups in the 1930s had been meeting quietly in homes or bookstores. In “Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry and Politics in California,” late Berkeley-based poet Josephine Miles remembered that work by poets was read from mimeographed typed sheets to other poets in private, but readings were formal public affairs where professional actors recited poetry (classical mixed with new) aloud. Serious contemporary poems existed only for the page, and “it was assumed that a poet was not a good reader of his own work,” observed Miles.

During World War II, this changed. Public readings by poets were staged at universities and theaters. Poets read from Homer, Milton and other classic poets; the goal of the readings was to strengthen public resolve in the face of war. These readings became popular in San Francisco and Los Angeles; many took place at the Los Angeles Vedanta Society and the Wilshire Ebell Club and later at Stanley Rose’s bookstore and gallery. After the war, the readings quickly became more personally public (or publicly personal); poets began to read their own work, began to feel at home in public expression.

Yet the legacy of Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962), his bitter, unrelenting desire to see with the “eye of the falcon” remained part of the California poet’s identity. His philosophy of “inhumanism,” his hatred of human solipsism, his refusal of community and dedication to the pure solitude of the imagination, the transitory nature of human experience, left a lasting mark on the consciousness of the poet in Southern California, faced with the biblical expanse of desert, the enormous abstraction of the sea, the isolation of the freeways.

Jeffers was born and educated in Pennsylvania, and after spending time at the University of Zurich, moved west with his parents and attended Occidental college. He continued his studies at USC, began his haunted life, the journey toward his fierce and uncompromising poems:

There is no escape. We have gathered

vast populations

incapable of free survival, insulated

From the strong earth, each person in

himself helpless

on all dependent. The circle is closed

and the net

is being hauled in.

A legacy from an uncle enabled Jeffers to build (with his own hands) a stone house and tower in Carmel, where he lived his later years. He became known as a recluse, his “appearance” in poetry pure-sighted and merciless. He spoke (as earlier poets had) with an international voice; he spoke to the world, though he categorically refused the world. This international voice in poetry seemed to inspire other visitations of poetic sensibilities in Southern California. Before and after the war, poets just seemed to materialize.

Yvor Winters’ poem, “On a View of Pasadena From the Hills,” single-handedly takes the Southern California ideal and addresses it boldly:

Randall Jarrell settled at 6 with his family in Long Beach and loved Southern California with an undying love. Later in his life in the East, he would defend the region passionately: “How can people who live in New York make remarks about Southern California? They ought to be put in asylums, which would at least be a change from New York City.”

This is my father’s house, no homestead here

That I shall live in, but a shining sphere

Of glass and glassy moments, frail surprise,

My father’s phantasy of Paradise;

‘No homestead here’ that I shall live in.”

Bertolt Brecht, fleeing Nazi Germany, came to L.A. at the invitation of his friend, writer Leon Feuchtwanger, in the early 1940s. His many “flower” poems about Los Angeles praise the extraordinary local flora, but Brecht always felt out of place here. He even wrote a poem in 1942, “Shame,” about having an idea for a screenplay stolen:

When I was robbed in Los Angeles, the city

of merchandisable dreams, I noticed

How I kept that theft . . .

Secret, as though I feared my shame might become known

Let’s say, in the animal world.

Thomas McGrath, the tough-lyrical North Dakota poet dropped in for a stay: “From here ship all bodies east. / I am writing this from 99 Marsh Street, Los Angeles.”

The sense of rootlessness, of chance, of emigre vision served these poets well. Predictably, as we move into contemporary times, the stage is set for the “hometown” aesthetic of the coffeehouse, of Watts, of East L.A. As surely as poets began to think of L.A. as home, they began to lose the defensiveness of perceived isolation. We began to have a history, but also began to lose touch with the past. (It is perhaps only in the work of a poet like Larry Levis, whose recent death reminded his readers of his ties to Southern California, that the San Joaquin Valley comes alive again with a kind of timeless ironic magic.)

Still it is Ann Stanford, an extraordinary poet and a native, who states the ongoing dilemma of “home” most poignantly in the introduction to her indispensable anthology, “Women Poets of the West, 1850-1950.” In an echo of Robert Frost’s “The Gift Outright,” she writes: “The land will be ours only when the poets have entered and possessed it.”

Then it must be our task, as poets of Southern California, to discover--each of us--what exactly that verb “to possess” means.