Under the Sign of the Sun

“I know San Francisco like my own face,” said the greatest poet born in California. “It’s where I came from, the first place I really knew.” That this poet--Robert Frost--became famous as a poet of New England is a historical accident. After the death of Frost’s father, the family moved East. But Frost never forgot the landscape of his childhood. A sense of the vast, inhuman otherness of nature is the signature quality of his greatest poems about New England, and one could argue that it derived from his early experience of hiking in the Sierra and swimming in the Pacific. “Once in a California Sierra,” he wrote in the late poem “Auspex,” “I was swooped down upon when I was small / And measured, but not taken after all, / By a great eagle bird in all its terror.”

In “The Geography of Home,” Christopher Buckley and Gary Young have brought together a wide selection of contemporary poems about the California landscape--poems by established poets (Robert Hass, Philip Levine, Carol Muske, Adrienne Rich, Gary Snyder) and by an impressive range of newcomers. Place functions more as subject matter than as metaphor: The anthology focuses on poems that are literally about “the place--the mountains, rivers, deserts, ocean.” But by simply assuming the centrality of place to poetry, Buckley and Young dissuade us from asking what might be important--revealing, perplexing, contradictory--about poetry’s relationship to the California landscape. They evade the question of what poetry has to gain--or lose--by advertising its associations with any particular place.

Many poets have been tied to landscape; think not only of Frost but of Wordsworth or Virgil. But it is nonetheless difficult to explain how that association is registered in the texture of poetry--in metaphor, diction, design. Does a poem taking landscape as its subject tell us more than a poem incorporating the language of that place? The danger in putting too much emphasis on subject matter is that poems rehearsing what we already know (“mountains, rivers, deserts”) might wrongly seem to be more authentic, more genuine. Like any poem, a poem of place ultimately lives or dies on its language, not the subject matter on which it happens to hang its metaphorical hat. Frost made us see the little hills of New Hampshire more vividly than ever before because he made us see them differently--not merely as they were.

The best poets in “The Geography of Home” make us see California differently. No fog. No sidelong glances at suburban sprawl. No winsome catalogs of oleanders, redwoods and pepper trees.

radios barking disco

dogs mute in the face of poverty

old white ladies with shopping bags as wrinkled

as their necks, in tattered wigs, black high-fashion

eyelashes and green mascara

crisp starched sagebrush narcs crawling campuses

for children dealing illegal drugs . . .

These lines by Wanda Coleman, who was born in Watts, do not simply avoid commonplace invocations of the California landscape by turning our eye to an urban scene. Her use of the word “sagebrush” to describe the narcs makes us re-imagine that landscape’s traditional significance. Landscape exists in this poem not as subject matter to be recorded but as metaphor--a language of possibility rather than circumstance.

Dorianne Laux goes further, challenging the very metaphor of place. In “If This Is Paradise” she asks why, if the landscape is enough (“trees, beehives, / boulders”), we bother speaking about it at all:

Why not lift into each day like animals

that we are and go silently

about our true business: the hunt

for water, fat berries, the mushroom’s

pale meat, tumble through waist-high grasses

without reason, find shade and rest there,

our limbs spread beneath the meaningless sky,

find the scent of the lover

and mate wildly. If this is paradise

and all we have to do is be born and live

and die, why pick up the stick at all?

Why see the wheel in the rock?

Why bring back from the burning fields

a bowl full of fire and pretend that it’s magic?

The very fact that we’re driven to write poems about places suggests that the places are not enough. A landscape as such--unchanged by language--could never be paradise.

Yet many of the poets collected in “The Geography of Home” seem afraid of language; they posit a world in which landscape and language are simply identical. For instance, Buckley dreams of a place where he will “leave / most of the talking to the trees,” a place where he will say goodbye “to that arrogance which asks if there can be meaning / without first arranging the padded folding chairs of theory.” All he requires is “a few pines / speaking simply in the resinous language of the only world / there is, immediate and meaningful as your next breath.”

Such a world--even if it were available to us--would be hell, not paradise. A poetry of place must perform two contradictory tasks at once. On the one hand, the poem must make us feel the sheer otherness of the landscape. On the other hand, the poem must make us feel that the landscape stands for something other than itself. We need to know simultaneously that human meaning has been brought to bear upon the place and that the place resists the imposition of meaning. Buckley snorts at the arrogance of “theory,” but (as Laux suggests) it may be more arrogant to assume that we enjoy an unmediated relationship to landscape. The distance between language and landscape is cause for celebration, not lament. Without that distance, we could neither respect the landscape nor feel at home in it.

By privileging poems that are literally about “the place--the mountains, rivers, deserts,” the editors of “The Geography of Home” privilege lament over celebration. So while the anthology purports to show how “the history of people is to be found in a place,” it is unable to acknowledge that the most visible poetic movement to have emerged from California in the last several decades: the Bay Area Language poets who--whatever one thinks of their aggressively experimental writing--have taken the distance between words and things fruitfully for granted. Nor can “The Geography of Home” find room for San Francisco’s English-born Thom Gunn, whose poems about men with AIDS might constitute the most powerfully Californian poetry of our time.

Gunn’s unfussy use of traditional forms--more than his subject matter as such--embodies what it feels like to be part of a community of a particular place and time: These are poems, as Gunn puts it, of “social strength / Precisely exerted.” But if any anthology is haunted by what it leaves out, “The Geography of Home” is finally more troubled by what it includes: a good deal of rhythmically uninteresting poetry that (as one contributor puts it) merely uses “place names along with images of heat, flowers, trees.”

The exceptions consequently stand out like the San Gabriel mountains on a clear day. Brief excerpts from James McMichael’s exquisitely modulated book-length poem, “Four Good Things and Each in a Place Apart,” will send anyone running for more.

Occasionally, a car would turn from Madre onto Del Mar,

behind it and ahead along the streets

the separate conversations in the houses, trysts,

an evening with the radio. The sky was a pale wash.

It caught outside the windows all the late

small matters on the lawns, and lights inside were coming on

too soon.

McMichael uses place names and images of heat, but the poetry is never staked on subject alone. He is a master of the double task of landscape poetry, and while these lines focus resolutely on place, they are drenched with human feeling: the separate conversations, the early dusk. As McMichael explains, “there must be something / else somewhere, / some second thing at least, or why say / how the thing shows?” The thing--the landscape--paradoxically becomes itself more fully when it stands for something different from itself.

“The subject was never smoke,” says Charles Wright of landscape poetry, “there’s always been a fire.” That Wright’s poems stand out in “The Geography of Home” is no surprise: He is the poet of the second half of our century who most rivals Frost’s eminence as a poet of place. Laguna Beach is one of Wright’s landscapes; others include western North Carolina, where he received a spiritual education he has never been able to shake. “Clear night, thumb-top of a moon, a back-lit sky,” begins “Clear Night,” a poem set in Wright’s Laguna Beach backyard: “Moon-fingers lay down their same routine / On the side deck and the threshold, the white keys and the black keys. / Bird hush and bird song. A cassia flower falls.” Like so many of Wright’s poems, this one is obsessively focused; it doesn’t leave the backyard. But suddenly the poem erupts:

I want to be bruised by God

I want to be strung up in a strong light and singled out.

I want to be stretched, like music wrung from a dropped seed.

I want to be entered and picked clean.

This doesn’t feel much like the language of Laguna Beach. And in the final lines of “Clear Night,” Wright admits that the landscape doesn’t speak his language: “the stars start out on their cold slide through the dark. / And the gears notch and the engines wheel.” If Robert Frost carried the Sierra to New England, Charles Wright brought the spirit of the Blue Ridge--lush, throbbing with metaphor--to the California he called home.