A legacy of epic proportions

“Poetry makes nothing happen,” as W.H. Auden famously wrote, but it does tell us a great deal about what happened. Indeed, that’s the whole point of “California Poetry,” an ambitious anthology that captures the experience of life in California as it has been perceived by 101 poets over the last century and a half.

“The primary criteria for inclusion in California Poetry have been literary excellence, historical importance, and representative range,” explains co-editor Dana Gioia in his introduction. “While attempting to be broad and inclusive in our taste, the editors have also been determined to include no poem that at least one of us did not genuinely admire.”

Gioia is the renowned California-born poet and critic who attended Stanford Business School and worked as an executive at General Foods for 15 years before abandoning the world of business for the world of letters. He serves as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, but his work in government has not diverted him from either poetry or criticism -- “California Poetry” is the second anthology co-edited by Gioia published within the last year.

It is Gioia’s credo -- expressed in his most influential work of criticism, the 2002 book titled “Can Poetry Matter?” -- that it can and does matter, but only if it achieves a standard of excellence. “Literary excellence may currently be an imperiled concept in some academic circles,” he writes, “but it remains an inescapable notion for any literary anthology that seeks to present poetry as an expressive art rather than a didactic medium.”

To the credit of Gioia and co-editors Chryss Yost and Jack Hicks, the anthology is a rich sampler, ranging from Bret Harte and Joaquin Miller through Robinson Jeffers and Hildegarde Flanner to Kenneth Rexroth and Charles Bukowski. Perhaps inevitably, it is heavily weighted toward living and working poets, who comprise more than half the contributors, a constellation that includes such disparate verse-makers as Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Wanda Coleman, Thom Gunn, Gary Snyder, Ishmael Reed, Jack Foley and Gary Soto.

Any collection spanning more than 150 years of history, of course, is bound to include some very strange bedfellows. Some of the poets are interested in great men and great events, and some are wholly absorbed by the intimate details of their own lives; some are enthralled by the beauty of nature, and some are appalled by its abuse. About the only thing they have in common is the accident of their birth or residence in California.

The first entry excerpts longer poems by John Rollin Ridge (1827-1867), known as Yellow Bird, a member of the Cherokee Nation whose most famous work, “The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta,” was the first novel written in California and the first published by a Native American. Yet his poetry, as the editors point out, “gives little sense of either his Cherokee heritage or his concern with racial injustice.” If there is a tinge of irony in the bombast of his praise-song titled “California,” it is buried too deep under the ornate rhetoric to be glimpsed:

And shall we view these miracles and more

Which mind and muscle never wrought before,

Without remembrance in these latter years,

Of those brave men, those hardy Pioneers ....

By contrast, the last entry is an excerpt from “Extramarital” by Jenny Factor, a San Marino woman who employs traditional poetic forms to express her experiences as a single mother coming out as a lesbian and exploring what the editors call “post-feminist sexuality”:

You kissed my mouth as if it were my sex

before you kissed me everywhere, before

that night in Rubyfruit’s, my glasses off,

the room elided, darkness stretched, a blur

zip-studded by red pinlights, hemmed and held

a cloth we had no future written on.

Each entry is accompanied by a biographical sketch of the poet, and most of these are penetrating and illuminating. About Gioia, who has two poems included here, we are told that “the sudden death in infancy of his first son compelled [him] to stop writing for nearly a year.” Then in “Planting a Sequoia,” Gioia recalls the Sicilian tradition of planting a tree to celebrate the birth of a first son and describes his own reenactment of the ritual in words that are spine-chilling:

But today we kneel in the cold planting you, our native giant,

Defying the practical custom of our fathers,

Wrapping in your roots a lock of hair, a piece of an infant’s birth cord,

All that remains above earth of a first-born son,

A few stray atoms brought back to the elements.

Many of the best poems reflect something essential about the place where they were written, then ascend to a higher plane. That’s what makes poetry matter, and it happens, almost literally, in “Artemis in Echo Park” by Eloise Klein Healy, a pioneering member of the faculty of the feminist art center known as The Woman’s Building and founding chairwoman of the master’s of fine arts writing program at Antioch University in Los Angeles:

The newer roads exist in air, drifting skyward,

lifting off the landscape like dreams of the future.

We’ve named these roads for where they end --

Harbor Freeway, Ventura Freeway, Hollywood Freeway --

but now they all end in the sky.

One substantial omission is readily acknowledged by the editors: The collection is limited to poetry written in English since California achieved statehood in 1849, thus excluding not only all Spanish poetry but also the writings of Native American, Japanese, Chinese and other poets whose native tongue is not English.

Gioia confronts the issue without apology: “The monolingual focus

One could quibble with the premise -- does American verse consist only of English-language poetry? -- but the editors deftly sidestep the argument over diversity. “This anthology is merely one attempt to sketch out the complex and diverse traditions that have created a distinct but varied regional poetry,” Gioia demurs. “There will be others.” He challenges anyone who finds fault with “California Poetry” to come up with their own anthology -- a rough-and-ready answer to would-be critics that is perfectly appropriate for a book about California, the place where self-invention is an art form.