An epic for a golden Eden

Eleni SIKELIANOS, the great-granddaughter of renowned Greek lyric poet Angelos Sikelianos, has lived in Athens, Paris and New York; her home now is Boulder, Colo. But she was born in California, and she casts her memory back here for a remarkable poem of near-Homeric proportion and ambition. “The California Poem” is her audacious effort to conjure the Golden State and the lives of its people in a sweeping work of free verse.

“Let me tell you,” she begins, “of my cat-o-nines cosmovision.”

Lest readers be daunted by the prospect of a book-length poem, note that it is designed with generous amounts of white space, the occasional drawing or photograph or found object, footnotes and endnotes, and a sprinkling of iconic symbols that make the book seem like the arcane work of an alchemist. On some pages, a few spare words of verse are offered up, a flyspeck of a poem sealed in the amber of the larger work.

Some passages are more accessible than others. Now and then, for example, Sikelianos abandons versifying and offers a Q&A;, a numbered checklist, a series of dated journal entries, a list of fauna and flora, and short paragraphs of run-on sentences, as when she recalls her grandmother in one of the brief and vivid bursts of memoir that illuminate like flashes of lightning:

“She collects California rocks, for she is a rockhound, and she collects California rattlesnakes, / for she is a tailhound, and she will open a health-food store and sell frozen buffalo meat for this is / California and she will embezzle money from the local paper and live in a trailer plunked in the / middle of the sand with every salvageable imaginable thing from the shores / of the unshored Inyokern a goat named Angel guppies her ladies in diners geodes / cracked open at the door.”

The poem is elaborately ornamented with allusions to high culture and pop culture, Virgil and Evel Knievel, Dante and Jayne Mansfield, the Odyssey and Marlon Brando’s movie “One-Eyed Jacks.”

Sikelianos quotes both Descartes and Brando (“ ‘Get up you scum-suckin’ pig,’ growls Brando / and plays a wild card”). She strikes lyrical notes (“at its goldenest gold, brimfullest bright / of citron, sun, when the blazing pollen falls all, all California blooms”) and comical ones:

Ah ha ha!

California is opening

the refrigerator door -- what’s

in there? Avocado,

alfalfa sprouts, and we are laughing our heads off

in Goleta because we just

smoked a lot of pot & don’t

have any theories

but obloquies on

L.A., evil

Smog-choked city

to the South, like black witchcraft

practiced next door ...

At moments, she celebrates the Golden State in elegant words and phrases -- “California / was my glistening chapel / Westminster Cathedral, gothic / beach scenes to the west” -- but she also intends irony and satire: “The dental imprint of California / is gravelly, epileptic, spasm / of a sea-borne bungled broken Coastal Range of ridges & spurs with localized names.” Then she despairs at what humankind has done to the landscape: “parking lots littered of glittering dead dented cadillacs.”

Surely she is jesting when she conflates her musings on actor Karl Malden -- a figure who appears so frequently in these pages that he seems to haunt the poet and her poems -- with references to Greek myth and zoology: “the water slapping / against the rocks massages Mr. / Malden’s proboscis like a Nemertean worm gently retiring to sandy tunnels, struggling with / Hercules’ Nemean lion in the water’s inky womb, black places / in the mind.”

But Sikelianos sometimes sinks so far beneath the surface of her own poem that we lose sight of her. She catches our attention with a familiar and vivid memory of childhood -- “I remember a man in a leotard tossing a medicine ball & pulling boats / between his teeth, he made us / drink smoothies & carrot juice; his name / was Jack LaLane” -- then she abruptly starts speaking in tongues: “For these / are the researches of Eleni, of melatonin patches / between the Channel Islands in whose floating hands I / invisibilize my blackness illuminate / of the green geometry (transepting grass upon grasses).”

Later, as if to concede the point, Sikelianos places a little jewel of verse into the long and uneven tapestry of language woven throughout “The California Poem.”

Invent a language, ‘the tongue

of the mirror,’ into which

anything, everything can be

perfectly translated, but in which

nothing can be said.

“The California Poem” may aspire to encompass the whole of the Golden State, its unsettled history and uncertain destiny, but it is ultimately an intimate and highly introspective work. “I can call myself / a Californian because / I was there in the state of the Sisters / of Perpetual Indulgence,” Sikelianos writes. Such self-absorption, of course, is one perfectly accurate and authentic expression of the place she calls, appropriately enough, “my hedon eden.” *

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Characterizing California

It takes a certain amount of chutzpah -- or is it hubris? -- for any poet, much less one still in her 30s, to claim all California as her canvas and to fill it with characters of her own imagining.

Indeed, Eleni Sikelianos views “The California Poem” as an audacious act, a heroic, expansive poem of memory and “landscape with a female speaker/traveler at its core” whose first lines came to her in a dream.

Sikelianos teaches at Naropa University in Boulder, Colo. Her book “The Monster Lives of Boys and Girls” won a 2002 National Poetry Series award, and a memoir of her late father, “The Book of Jon,” has just been published by City Lights.

-- Jonathan Kirsch