Dickey's move from the great sculptor to the poet himself covers the distance from Florence to Georgia, not that all poems need to cover that much distance. But as a field editor for the San Diego Poetry Annual, I am frequently disappointed to read through so many submissions that never look locally. Dickey writes,
...the original shape
Michelangelo believed was in every rock upon earth
is heavily stirring,
surprised to be an angel//
***
but no more surprised than I
to feel sadness fall off as I myself
were rising from stone
held by a thread in midair,
badly cut, local-looking, and totally uninspired,
not a masterwork
or even worth seeing at all
but the spirit of this place just the same,
felt here as joy.
What if place/setting determines form? I would rather read a hundred more free verse poems about New York/Chicago/Los Angeles than a sestina or sonnet about those places; of course, form most often expresses the narrator's point of view. In an environmental crisis, the disconnect between setting and POV reflects that crisis. I grieve at so many poems in which the setting is a mind isolated from this planet. Too much nowhere produces more nothing.
Please notice that I'm not saying that I don't want to read poems in form. Nor am I saying I don't want to read poems about someone's inner space. I just want to read poems formed or in-formed by the place that has formed and in-formed them. That intersection of self and place can often arouse in me a "spirit" of "joy" as a poem lifts a moment from time's flow and suspends it on the sky of the page.
There is some weight to Dickey's metaphor that poems are sculptures, light ones perhaps twisting regardless of line length, or just as bad, freighted with nowhere-ness so the thread of interest snaps well before I turn the page or get to the final line. In organic form (Dickey disliked the term "free verse"), content in-forms the shape of the poem.
The thread of interest runs both ways, of course. A poem could be about my hometown, but if it doesn't connect with the spirit of the place in the first stanza, I'll probably stop reading. So it isn't enough to set a poem in SoCal; setting needs to touch--dare I write it?--spirit.
A reasonable objection to this aesthetic would be that it ignores interior settings. I agree. By the laws of geography and astronomy, there will always be more good poems about places removed from SoCal than there will be about SoCal. All the more reason for me to find the rare poem set beneath my feet.
And just to assure you that I look beyond SoCal, here's an introduction to an anthology I co-edited for Writers' Ink in San Diego:
And just to assure you that I look beyond SoCal, here's an introduction to an anthology I co-edited for Writers' Ink in San Diego:
If titles count, A Year in Ink is about what the writers who tumbled into the extreme southwest corner of the U.S. decided to submit halfway through 2011. No more, no less. And that’s enough.
It’s not easy writing in San Diego. I don’t want to name names, but we are the town that proved “New York, New York” wrong: just because you can fake it there doesn’t mean you can fake it anywhere. As poet John Peterson noted, you can tell San Diego isn’t really a part of the rest of the U.S. because of the extra set of immigration check points at the county line on I-5, I-15 & I-8; it gives the impression no one wants to hear what we have to say. A calendar of “Southern California Poetry” managed to name 48 poets without one San Diegueño among them. A careful reading of certain “California” poetry anthologies shows that one of the best career moves a San Diego poet could make would be to relocate to San Francisco and die.
So what’s a San Diegueño writer to do? Write and publish. In a previous edition of A Year in Ink, former Union Tribune books editor Arthur Salm wrote, “I confess to being a contrarian [when] it comes to the literal idea of writers as a literal, physical community….But a figurative, literary community? Oh, yes, indeed.” One good confession deserves another: any community that doesn’t manifest some point-at-able aesthetics is not a community but a multitude waiting for a miracle. It’s not just the bound pages but what’s on them that matters. Oh me of little faith.
So what are the significant poetics of San Diego? In these pages, can a regional accent be heard? Do the form & content of these poems resonate with this time & place? Most of these poems have right margins like the coastline if you’re facing Tijuana. Sorry, neo-formalists. These lines break where image or music need to; it’s a border thing. It’s a form manifest. And it’s neo every day.
Reading submissions, I did discover a consistent characteristic: most have nothing to do with San Diego during or around 2011. Yet 2011 was an astonishing year in this old city. The ocean that largely defines it changed. A cold current came ashore farther north than it had in the past, bringing with it black jellyfish that drove swimmers from the water. A photograph of a large fin among surfers in Cardiff went viral and raised discussions about sharks frequenting our coast. A band of Kumeyaay Indians put the name of their casino on the old Sports Arena, just off the historic Kumeyaay Trail to Playas (now called “Rosecrans Street”). The Pala Band of Indians continued their battle to purchase back their ancestral homelands in Warner Springs, a volta in the poem of history.
Poetry, however, favors an intimate persona over a public one. The whispering of subtext can’t always be heard in the public voice of “we.”
In poetry saying something while making it sound interesting is risky business. In a poem like “jazz is e.e. cummings,” if the poet can run a line of euphonic imagery in one direction, pivot without losing flow and avoid running in the ruts of the literal, it will be fine. We like our music imbued with more than sound. Poems like “Silent Movie,” “How the World Sounds” and “Why I Married Him” all have that music & luminous imagery that draws me.
In a sense, “Why I Married Him” is a solid representative of San Diego poems: first, it has nothing to do with San Diego; second, it’s about leaving someplace (in this case, Milwaukee); and third, the poem ended up here. Most importantly for me it eschews the obvious and finds awe:
I lived without music then, cut off from the Rain Prelude and nocturnes of fog, but the bridge! It buzzed – no, not like a giant bumblebee, but only as a metal bridge can sing, from the maws of Bethlehem Steel.
“Familia Anclada” (anchor family) is another poem about leaving or at least needing to leave. It’s a poem that doesn’t offer an answer but raises the right questions.
She cannot cross the desert with her babies, The able kids are throwing gang signs in the alleys littered in crime scenes
In “What I Know,” Red-necked Phalaropes stop over at Mono Lake on their way here. The birders walk in “single file” on the path through the rare environment: “each soft step/we take in this tender landscape/says we wish to be nowhere else.”
So does each poem in this anthology. At least for 2011.
This anthology represents a community, a point of culmination from many directions. One morning in The Ink Spot, Kelli Wescott, Tammy Greenwood and I sat around that big table upstairs while the fierce sun lit the poems & prose. Kelli kept track as Tammy and I introduced pieces to each other, like planning a dinner party: “Seat this chapter beside this poem because they have a lot in common to converse about.”
So cook last year and cancel the calendar. This place of pages is rocking, and it looks as if we’re going to party for the rest of the night.Those were some poems from that year and place. No "London" by Blake. No 'Innisfree' by Yeats. No Langston speaking of the Euphrates or muddy Mississippi. My interest in setting might sound like a real estate agent's mantra--"location, location, location." Yes, the central location will ultimately be in the mind; nevertheless, the roots of endangered plants give a voice its distinct resonance if they connect.
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