Bringing poetic works to the people

Al Young stood at a microphone in the middle of the Cal Expo Center Stage, his white hair set aglow by a shaft of sunlight that slipped around the edge of a high overhead sunscreen. Hundreds of folding chairs were arrayed before him, but only about 80 people had settled into seats, drawn on a hot summer afternoon by the promise of poetry.

It was a smaller crowd than the one Young would read to later that day in a Berkeley Public Library meeting room. But an audience is an audience, and California’s newly crowned poet laureate had something to say.

“It is only very young and inexperienced cultures that don’t understand that art and culture are the most important byproducts of any society,” Young said in between poems, his deep voice resonating over the distant rumble of rides at the California State Fair. “You’re not remembered for your armies or your navies.... You’re remembered for your music and for your stories. For your literature. For your dance. For your film. For your painting. For your great art. That is what ennobles a society.”

If poets laureate deliver inauguration speeches, this was Young’s. Saturday was his first official appearance since his May appointment by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the Berkeley writer and jazz performer added a dash of art to the earthier elements of the state fair. And a touch of politics.

“We Californians like to think of ourselves as being in the vanguard, being one step ahead of the rest of the nation,” Young said, adding that California’s arts and education funding ranks near the bottom compared with other states. “It tells you a lot about where we put our values and what we think is important.... We need to put pressure on our legislators to put the money back into the arts, because that’s what enriches us.”

State fairs, with their rural roots, aren’t high on many people’s lists of places to hear poetry, more reliably found in dark urban jazz clubs than open-air pavilions. Yet for Young, an enthusiastic ambassador for an art form he’s loved since childhood, this was the perfect place for poetry, which he sees as a primal form of communication that has lost its connection with the masses. He blames the modernists.

“Eliot and Pound and that whole bunch made poetry seem difficult,” Young said during a lengthy interview spanning the train rides between Berkeley and Sacramento. “They generated the idea that if poetry weren’t obscure or learned, then it wasn’t really poetry.... For Americans in the 19th century, poetry was one of the main forms of entertainment. People memorized poems, they sat around and read it to each other. They bought poetry. Poetry was reviewed like novels are now.” With modernism, “poetry disappeared into the academy. We teach it as something that we’re not going to naturally understand.”

Fighting isolation

Young aims to bring poetry back to a place of common discourse, which he admits could be a tall order in a society that technology -- from the Internet to iPods -- has atomized. The more isolated individuals become, the less they can see themselves in others, he believes. He recalled one college class he taught recently in which the students -- modern children of privilege -- said they found nothing in common with the characters in Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart,” a metaphorical tale about colonialism and the loss of tradition under the pressure of modernization.

This, Young said, is his role as poet laureate: to use the distilled purity of poetry to breach walls of isolation.

“I think about things like that and try to work them into my teaching and into my poetry,” Young said. “I’m fascinated by the concept of there’s a bigger us, and there is no ‘other.’ ”

Ironically, Young hopes to use technology to help create a virtual community of poets. He wants to launch a website through the state library that would serve as a virtual coffeehouse for California poets.

“It would be of particular use to students and teachers,” Young said. “We’re hashing it out, but I think it could be a really good thing. There’s so much going on with poetry in California.”

Although Young is touted as California’s second poet laureate, the state began the practice in 1915 under a system that was more honorary than formal -- lifetime, unpaid appointments voted on by the state Legislature. In 2001, Assemblywoman Fran Pavley (D-Agoura Hills) pushed a bill to formalize the position, with the laureate selected by the governor and confirmed by the Senate (it has yet to act on Young’s appointment).

The two-year post pays $10,000, and laureates can serve only twice. Each laureate must make at least six public appearances and undertake a project “to bring the poetic arts to Californians and to California students who might otherwise have little opportunity to be exposed to poetry.”

“What interested me was the possibility of using a poet laureate to inspire children,” said Pavley, a former middle school teacher. “The original concept was to make visits to public schools.”

The program stumbled out of the gate, though, when the first poet laureate, Quincy Troupe of La Jolla, quit after four months when a Senate Rules Committee background check revealed in October 2002 that he hadn’t earned the bachelor’s degree he claimed on his resume.

Two and a half years later, Young got the call, an appointment that surprised him. The governor is a Republican; Young’s politics veer to the left, and he is a sharp critic of both the war in Iraq and what he sees as a Republican White House bent on Orwellian twists of language to subtly influence political opinion.

“When the vice president tells us, as he did recently, that American soldiers who die in Iraq are dying for ‘a just and noble cause,’ then you have a whole generation that thinks of ‘noble’ and ‘just’ in a strange way,” Young said.

“It doesn’t mean the same thing that it meant to me. And I’d like to know what the noble cause is. Or ‘preemptive strike,’ or ‘enemy combatants.’ These are words that at one time would have been included in news reports in quotes. Now they just come right from the press secretary’s office into public usage. And people start thinking in those terms. So it degrades your thinking processes.”

Poetry is the antidote, the dissipater of fog.

“Poetry is important in this respect because it freshens the language of the mind, the attitude of the mind toward language,” Young said.

Individual experience

While much of his work is infused with African American culture -- particularly his embrace of jazz -- Young believes poetry is born of individual experience and individual contact with the world. In the 1968 piece “A Dance for Militant Dilettantes,” he satirically offered advice to black poets that legitimacy would come only if they wrote out of anger. Then 15 years later he flipped the theme around in “Your Basic Black Poet,” assuming the voice of a listener wondering about a strange, dark-skinned poet on stage. “Where in the world / could he be coming from? ... Why are there oceans / in his poems, sunshine, glacial / journeys toward reunion? / What’s the matter with / his diction man he / sho don’t sound that black. / Any way you look at it / the dude is irrelevant, / & dangerous to the community.”

Young created an alter ego, the streetwise O.O. Gabugah, “to do a takeoff” about “false black militants.... It wasn’t too well received at first, because you weren’t supposed to make fun of the revolution.” In a wry twist, Young opened his 1992 “Heaven: Collected Poems, 1956-1990” with an introduction by Gabugah, writing about “my man Al Young” in the third person.

In some ways, Young joined with fellow African American poets such as Pulitzer Prize-winner Lucille Clifton and Jay Wright in asserting the commonality of human experience, a counter-voice to the edgier works of Black Arts Movement poets such as Amiri Baraka and Sonia Sanchez, said Charles H. Rowell, founder and editor of “Callaloo, A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters.” Young and the others, he said, helped a new generation of black poets connect with wider audiences on a personal rather than political level.

“He wrote about interior life during a period when many African American poets were writing the exterior life, on politics from the African American experience,” Rowell said.

Young, 66, was born near Biloxi, Miss., and moved to Detroit at age 10. After studying at the University of Michigan, he moved to Berkeley in 1961 because “this was where everything was happening.” He’s lived in the Bay Area ever since, writing and teaching at UC Berkeley, Stanford and other schools. He has also traveled extensively, giving readings from India to the Middle East while publishing eight books of poetry, 10 novels and essay collections and two screenplays.

He’s read in Sacramento before too. Many times. He said he enjoys the scene here because of what he sees as energetic and supportive audiences. The Saturday midday reading was no exception, he said, after he and two other poets -- Sacramento laureate Julia Connor and California Poets in the Schools winner Lindsey Smith -- received warm ovations from the few people in the mostly empty amphitheater.

Fifteen minutes later, as the poets signed copies of their poems at folding tables, a couple of dozen youngsters in purple flower-print clothes, purple feathers dangling from their hair, took the stage to perform traditional Tongan dances.

By then, the seats were full.