A Poet’s Paradise, for Better or for Verse

For all you wannabe actors out there who are tired of incurring the wrath of mom and dad-”Isn’t it time you stopped waiting tables and got on with a real career?”-take solace in this: You could be an aspiring poet.

Apparently, there are a good many bards among us.

I found myself wondering about the vitality of poetry here after reading Barbara Isenberg’s interview with rocker Dave Alvin, who has set much of his writing to music that pulses like a runaway freight train but who also has published pure verse-words sans guitars (“West of the West,” page 26).

“A lot of people think that where they come from, there’s no poetry, and that they have to go to New York or Harvard or Paris to be a poet,” says Alvin, who grew up in Downey. “But what I learned...is that whatever your world is, that’s where your poetry starts from.”

Turns out, California is a pretty good source of inspiration. “There’s a poetry scene in La Jolla and San Luis Obispo and Monterey,” says UC Berkeley professor Robert Hass, the former poet laureate of the U.S., whose melodic style has captured the “pale yellow mornings” of California’s early spring and so much else about this place. He adds that the university communities in San Diego and Irvine are also producing magnificent stuff, as is L.A., which offers its own aesthetic-”edgy and noir-ish.”

The Central Valley has a strong poetry tradition, with Gary Soto, Philip Levine and many more. And then there’s the Bay Area, where Hass was raised in the shadow of the Beats; it has always been a poetry hotbed.

Not everyone is so sanguine. Luis J. Rodriguez, a Los Angeles writer whose oeuvre includes four books of poetry, is frustrated that there aren’t more practical resources for those engaged in the craft-ways to find out about readings, for instance. In fact, he wishes there were more poets around, period (the crush of hip-hoppers notwithstanding). “What concerns me is that we’re not using words to convey emotion,” he says. “We’re just using words to convey information.”

Yet Hass is convinced that “there’s more going on than there appears to be” when it comes to poetry in California-a lot of it driven by a diverse population and a violent landscape that lend themselves to the deepest kinds of contemplation. He cites the theories of William Everson (my favorite poet), whose book “Archetype West” makes the case that California’s mountains and desert and ocean have helped define a distinct literary region.

“Being on the coast offers a certain freedom” for artists, Hass says, quoting from one of the oldest works he knows, a Native American poem that in many ways says it all:

See! I am dancing!

On the rim of the world I am dancing!