Fightin’ Words

Poet and critic Dana Gioia was once challenged to a fistfight by another poet after a reading in New York.

“He was accusing me of omitting him from an article for personal reasons,” Gioia says. “He got more and more offensive, and he started to physically threaten me. Finally I said, ‘If you want a fight, come outside and I’ll fight you,’ but then other people pulled him away.”

It’s not the kind of behavior one would expect from poets. Nor is Gioia the tough-guy type. But as an essayist on literary trends, he is a lightning rod for controversy in the poetry world. Almost every time this Santa Rosa-based poet writes an article, he stirs up outrage in one group or another.

The most recent tornado came when Gioia, in a recent essay (soon to be anthologized in a book), described California as a mediocre literary backwater compared with the East Coast. When pressed, he says California has “wonderful” poets, ranging from Thom Gunn to Carolyn Kizer, but “no great poet has ever come out of California.” He singles out Los Angeles as “perhaps the only great city in the world that has never produced a great poet.” And he disputes the general contention that poetry is thriving in California. People can catalog the readings, slams, festivals and workshops all they want, he says. But much of the poetry is bad, and no one is brave enough to say so.

“Lacking a vital critical milieu, well-intentioned regional literati usually practice boosterism” that is “a slow poison to native excellence,” he wrote in the Hungry Mind Review, a long-established, literary magazine (recently renamed the Ruminator) based in St. Paul, Minn.

He may as well have declared war. For a year and a half, barbs have flown back and forth in various literary forums, on San Francisco radio shows, at conferences and workshops and in literary magazines. Most notable was a series of essay-length exchanges in Poetry Flash, the Berkeley-based, bimonthly periodical that generated “dozens of letters and even more phone calls,” according to assistant editor Richard Silberg, who wrote the most lengthy critique of Gioia.

The intensity of the debate prompted poet and radio commentator Jack Foley to collect Gioia’s essay and several responses, positive as well as negative, in a book to appear this month, “The ‘Fallen Western Star’ Wars: A Debate About Literary California” (Scarlet Tanager Books).

Gioia argues that, unlike the Northeast, “where the literary power of the U.S. rests,” with its center in Manhattan, California lacks literary quarterlies with high critical standards, a central meeting place where ideas might be exchanged, and major awards to foster local excellence and garner national attention.

The problem is partly geography--California’s wide open spaces and urban sprawl inevitably prevent the formation of one community--aggravated by the romantic myth of the Western writer as a loner “skeptical about the merits of the intrinsically social acts of criticism and institutional organization.” Instead, he says, the existing loosely knit California community functions as the fearful, eager-to-please younger brother in the U.S. literary family, dependent on the older East Coast establishment for publication and renown.

Though Gioia has many supporters, many of the responses to his essay have been angrily personal. Insults range from “arrogant and controlling” to “publicity-seeking naysayer,” from “whiner” to “hustler,” a common criticism stemming from his worldly success, friends say. Though he is the son of an L.A. cabdriver and the first in his family to go to college (Stanford and Harvard), Gioia, 50, spent his professional career in New York as an executive for General Foods. When he started to gain a reputation as a poet, he retired wealthy nine years ago and returned to his home state to focus on writing and promoting poetry.

“Dana dresses like a businessman, and it drives some people crazy. It’s absurd!” says poet and longtime friend David Mason, a professor of English at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, whose letter to Poetry Flash in defense of Gioia will appear in the new book. “I think a great deal of what’s wrong with the debate is that Dana’s making pretty rational arguments--he’s got this incredible ability to put everything in a broad social perspective--and people are reacting as if they’d been personally assaulted.”

Gioia-bashing is nothing new to the increasingly public poet. In 1991, he ignited a similar controversy with his Atlantic magazine essay “Can Poetry Matter?” in which he declared that poetry has become the province of academics and creative writing programs but of little interest to the general public. Now considered classic in some literary circles, and still passionately debated by poets, Gioia’s article generated more than 400 letters from readers, more than any other Atlantic article before or since. Author of three books of poetry, two essay collections, translations, the libretto for the opera “Nosferatu” and editor of numerous anthologies, Gioia seems unfazed by the current hullabaloo.

“I could demonstrate to the most skeptical person in the New Yorker fact-checking department that I am the most widely attacked poet of my generation. But, you know, it doesn’t bother me,” he says in the mild tone that characterizes even his tougher comments.

“For me, literature is a conversation. And the richer, the more energetic, the more diverse that conversation, I think the healthier a literary culture. What the poetry wars are about is a challenge to the status quo which needs reforming, and no institution wants to be reformed. At this point, I believe it’s a sign of the importance of what I’m trying to do--and I say trying --that, repeatedly, whatever I do and wherever I go, some idiot attacks me.”

According to Foley, whose book show “Cover to Cover” airs weekly on the Berkeley radio station KPFA, this debate is a bit like earlier battles over modernism and confessionalism that stimulated the growth of new literary movements. Gioia has clearly touched a nerve. Still, no one can say what the future of California poetry might be.

“We can’t really judge the present moment as if it were an archeological artifact,” says Los Angeles poet Timothy Steele, a professor of English at Cal State Los Angeles. This is an era of “fragmentation,” he says, with many groping toward “some kind of common ground.” But “we can’t with any certainty say we’re dwelling on an alp of excellence or an abyss of wretchedness. That’s a judgment that people a few generations down the road will make.”

Many take issue with Gioia’s comment about California’s lack of great poets. They list poet after poet of national repute--from former East Coasters Jane Hirshfield and Adrienne Rich to Polish immigrant Czelaw Milosz and California natives Kay Ryan, former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass and (everyone’s favorite) Gary Snyder. They note up and coming poets like David St. John, Carol Muske-Dukes, Charles Harper Webb, or Leslie Mansour and Kevin Durkin. Some say Gioia is an elitist and that as a New Formalist his real message is to dismiss most of the contemporary poetry scene. Gioia points out that he writes in a range of styles and that he is co-editing (with poet Chryss Yost) a California poetry anthology from the Gold Rush to the present that will include poets as different as Ryan and Hass.

“If I have an agenda, I don’t understand what it is except for excellence.” Of course, he adds, “excellence and candor is a scary agenda for some people.”

As for being in the shadow of the East, poets agree they must often look to the East to be published, but the East looks westward, too. David Lehman, series editor of the annual New York-based “Best American Poetry” anthologies, says his editors always select a number of California poets for each edition. And this year’s anthology is edited by Californian Hass.

Gioia’s claim that California’s lack of a viable poetry community is partly due to geographic isolation prompts many to roll their eyes. Howard Junker, editor of Zyzzyva, a San Francisco-based literary magazine, makes fun of Gioia for his “self-imposed exile” in Santa Rosa, “60 miles from the madding crowds of North Beach” with its cafes and readings.

Silberg, who admires Gioia’s work and considers him a friend, recalls the many occasions he has schmoozed with Gioia at literary events. In his critique, he mocks Gioia’s observation that a California writer is more likely to see local colleagues in a Manhattan publisher’s office than near home. “Where the hell are we here, riding the plains in Larry McMurtry’s ‘Lonesome Dove?”’

In Los Angeles, however, there’s partial truth to Gioia’s claims, says Suzanne Lummis, a 20-year resident of the city and co-organizer (with poet Charles Harper Webb) of the biennial Los Angeles Poetry Festival. “I wish there were some place in L.A. that you could just pop into on the spur of the moment, and figure there was a good chance that you would see two or three of your fellow poets, and you could all sit down over some oolong tea and talk passionately and crazily until 2:40 a.m. But there isn’t, and it’s darn sad” because “a conversation can lead to action, to real change.”

Countering Gioia’s claim that there’s a lot of bad poetry out there, some say the mishmash of activity, as Foley calls it, is a sign of creativity and interest in poetry that will stimulate further creativity.

“From what I can see, the poetry scene here is as healthy as it can be,” says poet Thomas Lux, visiting from Georgia, as he gestures toward the 100-strong crowd who have come to hear him and his future wife, Los Angeles poet Cecilia Woloch, at a recent reading at Barnes & Noble on Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade.

Gioia says they’re all missing his point.

“I’m not saying these things are bad.” After all, as the organizer of two national poetry conferences and founder of the Santa Rosa Book Fair, he is a highly involved member of the community himself. “What I’m saying is that in themselves, these events don’t produce a healthy or complete literary culture, though they may be an important part of it.” What’s lacking is a critical establishment that would maintain a high standard of literary criticism and bring national attention to California poets. “California writers don’t take themselves seriously enough,” Gioia says.

And that shows up in the lack of poetry prizes, he says. There are only the Kingsley Tufts Awards based in Claremont and the Lannan Awards, formerly in Los Angeles, now in Santa Fe. The remaining national awards are on the East Coast. So when prize time comes around, very few go to Californians. Over the past 10 years, of 370 major awards, including the Pulitzer, the Bollingen Prize and numerous awards offered by the Academy of American Poets, only 30 (or 8%) were won by California poets.

For serious literary criticism, the Los Angeles Times Book Review is “part of the solution,” Gioia says. Typically, it publishes nine to 12 long poetry reviews a year. According to Editor Steve Wasserman, there will be a new monthly poetry column starting this month called Poets’ Corner, written by Muske-Dukes, to rectify the general inadequacy of poetry coverage.

Otherwise, Gioia notes, there are only two nationally distributed California literary magazines that publish serious literary criticism, the Threepenny Review, a Berkeley-based, 21-year-old tabloid quarterly, and 4-year-old Poetry International in San Diego, which comes out in book form once a year. Other literary magazines publish poetry with no criticism.

Who cares? some say. “I don’t publish criticism because I don’t want to, because I want to concentrate on original work--the hell with writing about writing,” says Junker of Zyzzyva.

Hass questions whether California should mimic East Coast conventions. “When did literary criticism produce great artists? Were there great critics when Coleridge and Wordsworth were writing? In fact, the critics savaged them.” He says Gioia’s call for a West Coast literary establishment is “a kind of longing for a patriarchal, hierarchical poetry scene.”

It’s this kind of comment that makes Gioia throw up his hands. But he knows it’s his role to be misunderstood.

“I’m a Hegelian,” he says. “I believe in getting the dialectic going and that everything will take care of itself. I am humble before the historical inevitable.”