BAY AREA POETS REVIEW 

Aleta & Ina:

Suisun City Writer Preparing a Book About the Nation's (and California's) First Poet Laureate: Ina Coolbrith

     Aleta George of Suisun City does not consider herself a poet, yet the life and personality of California’s first poet laureate, Ina Donna Coolbrith, has captured her imagination. The subject of George’s interest is relatively unknown even to most modern poets--that puts her into an even smaller minority of unknowns: if poets haven’t maintained her memory, who will?
     George is trying to change this. “Coolbrith has been condensed into footnotes over the years,” she says, adding, “I want to dust her off, bring her story to light by following her path as an artist. She should be celebrated as one of America’s most important pioneer poets.” George’s work-in-progress, Bittersweet Song, is a historical narrative describing Coolbrith's struggles and triumphs as an artist whose life span stretches from ante-Bellum America to the eve of the Great Depression.
     Known as “the pearl of her tribe,“ Coolbrith was a passionate Victorian woman who held court at frequent San Francisco salon gatherings between the mid-1860s and 1920. She helped secure the reputations of many of her fellow artists and writers, including Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Charles Warren Stoddard, Robert Louis Stevenson, John Muir and Ambrose Bierce. Her last years were spent negotiating two coastal cultures, as she traveled to New York for four winters to hole up in a hotel room and concentrate on her own writing, occasionally venturing out to bring the news of the West’s blossoming literary life to a myopic East Coast establishment. While there, she  chummed around with fellow Westerners Edwin Markham, Gertrude Atherton, Mary Austin, and with Carl Seyfforth, a handsome young concert pianist she called “her boy.”
      Coolbrith was a true daughter of the American West. She was the niece of Mormon pioneer Joseph Smith and she the dear friend of Joaquin Miller whose daughter, born to a Native-American woman, she helped raise. She was the first state poet laureate in the nation and represented California from 1915 until her death in 1928. There is a park on Russian Hill in San Francisco to commemorate her, and a poetry membership organization founded in 1919 in her honor. Yet, her poetry has been deemed old fashioned and her role in American letters consistently overlooked. For decades, her grave in Oakland’s Mountain View cemetery was neglected until the Ina Coolbrith Circle brought her an elegant tombstone in 1986.        

    Journalist and geographer Aleta George usually writes about the natural world for Bay Nature magazine and the San Francisco Chronicle. She also writes for Smithsonian and the Los Angeles Times. While researching an article about the Farallon Islands, she came across references to the vibrant literary salons of post-Gold Rush San Francisco. As she read about the men--and a few women--who wrote and published at this time, she kept encountering Coolbrith: “People were infatuated with Ina Coolbrith,” George says, “I’m not the first.” Coolbrith’s natural beauty and vivacity--with an “undercurrent of sadness” according to George--are evident in photographs taken of her at this time.
     George followed up, but found only one extant biography, a book written in 1974 by librarian Josephine DeWitt Rhodehamel well-researched book printed in purple ink that “was painful to read.” As she dug further, George learned that many of Coolbrith’s books and papers had been scattered to the winds; Coolbrith’s home--and all her papers, letters, and books--was burned to the ground in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. When Coolbrith died, her niece sold off most of what remained. Some papers are held in the Coolbrith Collection at the University of California’s Bancroft Library, Pasadena’s Huntington Library, as well as at Oakland’s Main Public Library and library at Mills College.
     Coolbrith published three books in her lifetime, contributed to all the leading periodicals in her day, and was the most beloved poet in the West for 50 years. As sole support for her mother and her sister’s children, Coolbrith worked hard as Oakland Public Library’s first librarian. Until she found a home in Oakland, she slept on a cot in the library. She hated to leave San Francisco for a town that was still mostly marshland and culturally backwards. Coolbrith “loved to see the Bay and the ocean” and loved the vibrant life of San Francisco. But, she was much the working woman, having responsibility for the children of her dead sister (she had none of her own), and working long days as Oakland’s first librarian where she placed books into the hands of such bright ambitious youths as Jack London and Isadora Duncan.
     She did not keep a personal diary but George believes “her poetry was her journal,” providing glimpses of Coolbrith’s inner life and emotional world. George believes that her relatively slim output can be explained by the difficulties of her life and the fact that “a lot of crap happened to her.” Her early life was dominated by forced migrations and the taint on Mormonism culminating in the assassination of Joseph Smith; Coolbrith’s father died when she was only six months old, and Coolbrith was married young and divorced soon in order to escape from an abusive husband. She eventually made her way to northern California.
     George says it is sometimes difficult to read her letters. Frustrated by the long working hours that kept her from writing, “she was a bit of a complainer.” “I want her to rise above her circumstances,” George says, acknowledging the great differences in opportunities that exist now that did not exist in Coolbrith‘s time. In addition to working 14-hour days, six days a week, Coolbrith--like most women of her day--were completely responsible for all household chores and the manufacture of many household supplies, such as soap and clothing. “I sometimes get disappointed in her during her library years,” says George, “but I also understand that she had to write most of her poems as she was doing the dishes.” George loves that Coolbrith had the courage to pack up her life at age 78 in order to write in New York. Financial support from the Bohemian Club allowed her to do so.
     Although she does not consider herself a qualified critic of poetry, George is dismayed that Coolbrith’s work has received short shrift from the academic establishments that groom writers. In general, literary critics have felt that her poetry hasn’t stood “the test of time.” George, however, has found meaning and beauty in it, particularly in the understanding about how a poet relates to her own worth and the impact she may be having on her field of endeavor. It is clear from Coolbrith‘s poetic meditations that she grappled with the question of “what‘s art for?” and, because a lot of her work reflects Western imagery and the California landscape, “She can come up with a phrase that is really brilliant, particularly with regards to her love of nature.”
     George, born in Novato and now living in Suisun, is familiar with that natural landscape and writes about it frequently, exploring the relationships between people and the land that has been a resource and an inspiration to them.

Poems by Ina Donna Coolbrith

Honey-Throats, upon the boughs,
Piping all day long--
Sun-flecks in the leaves that house
Quickened into song--

In your notes a gospel lies--
Teach it yet to me!!--
What the Maker in the skies
Meant His world to be.

In the Orchard
by Ina Coolbrith

Tent me within your cool, leaf-latticed house.
Pomegranate bough!
A carpet, sown with blossom-rubies, spread,
A queen might tread.
Toss your pink-petal banners to the breeze,
Bloom of the almond trees;
Tide to and fro
In seas of frangrances,
Peach blow and apple-snow--
Of every blossoming thing I am a part
Since love is at my heart.

They are talking very busily, the birds,
With such soft words
And sudden just-can’t-help-it-bursts of song,
The nesting leaves among!
Listen, that trill and tone!
Was ever such ecstatic rapture known?
Ah, sweethearts! Yet a moment pause, I pray--
I know what you say,
Since love is mine today.

You can find many more Ina Coolbrith poems at Poemhunter, www.poemhunter.com/

PAST LIVES
EDWiN MARKHAM

     Charles Edwin Anson Markham was born April 23, 1852, near the Willamette River in what was then the Oregon Territory. His rancher parents divorced a few years later, and Edwin was taken to Suisun, California, where his mother bought a ranch and set the family to raising cattle and sheep. Markham wrote later: "California has but two seasons, one of cloud and flowers, the other of dust and skies."
    Markham achieved an education in spite of his mother's initial resistance; although she had written and published verse herself, it's obvious that she needed her son around more as a ranch-hand than as a poet, writer, and teacher.
     It took running away to convince his mother to let him attend school.    Encouraged by several teachers— whom he later acknowledged in poems—Edwin was an avid reader of the popular classics of the day, including Alexander Pope's translation of the Illiad, Sir Walter Scott, Lord Byron, and the Bible. Byron inspired one early Markham poem, "A Dream of Chaos." He spent much time outdoors as well, riding in the western mountains, and working endless exhausting hours on the family ranch.
     After completing college, he took teacher's training certification in Santa Rosa and in San Jose where his mother joined him. In 1879, he was hired as a literature teacher in El Dorado County and was eventually appointed the education superintendent.

     By 1890, he had accepted a job as principal of Tompkins Observation School in Oakland, California, and moved back to the Bay Area where he was able to meet and mingle with many of the day's notable writers: Joaquin Miller, Ina Coolbrith, Ambrose Bierce, Jack London, and others. According to some sources of Markham trivia, "Presley," a  mystically-inclined character in Frank Norris's novel The Octopus, is modeled on Edwin Markham.
    Markham was a devout Universalist Church member who also studied mysticism from a spiritual instructor he met while living in the foothills.
     Aside from his innate spirituality,
the two greatest influences on his personality and writing were labor and nature.
    In 1898, at a New Year's Eve party, Markham read his poem, "The Man With the Hoe," inspired by Jean- François Millet's 1863 painting of the same name. (The painting now hangs in the Getty Museum in Southern California.) The publisher of the San Francisco Examiner, also attending the party, asked to publish the poem in a special edition of the paper; it swept across the country in newspapers and magazines, and was translated into forty languages, including Arabic and Japanese.
    Janice Albert, a journalist who wrote about making a pilgrimage to Markham's home in San Jose, described the impact of "The Man With a Hoe":
    Fellow-poet Joaquin Miller called it, "the whole Yosemite-the thunder, the might, the majesty." Collis P. Huntington put up $5,000 for the writer who could refute Markham in words of equal power. Our state librarian, Kevin Starr, reports that "Markham's ultra-conservative friend Ambrose Bierce never spoke to him again." Starr tells us that the poem was published in 50,000 newspapers around the world and was translated into forty languages. It "sprang instantly before the world's attention as the Socialist poem of the century."
     In 1901, Markham published Lincoln and Other Poems, which he later delivered at the inauguration of the Lincoln Memorial in Wash- ington, D.C. Also, in 1901, Markham and his third wife, Catherine Anna Murphy, moved East to Staten Island, New York.
    Markham's prose work, Children in Bondage (1914), helped change child labor laws. But during his last years, Markham returned (metaphorically) to California for his subject matter. One crowning moment must have been a party hosted by President Herbert Hoover in Carnegie Hall when the writer turned 80. Markham suffered a stroke in 1936 and died in 1940; he is buried in Los Angeles.
    Markham's personal library of over 15,000 books and personal papers, were bequeathed to the Horrmann Library, Wagner College, on Staten Island, where his son, Virgil Markham taught and chaired the English Department. Among Markham's papers are letters from literary and political figures of the early twentieth century, including Franklin  D. Roosevelt, Ambrose Bierce, Jack London, Carl Sandburg, and Amy Lowell.
    Although little read today,Edwin Markham still has influence. His poetry has been used in sermons and prayers; one poem was posted to a Boston.com website following the 9/11 tragedy: 

Defeat may serve as well as victory
To shake the soul and let the glory out.
When the great oak is straining in the wind,
The boughs drink in new beauty, and the trunk
Sends down a deeper root on the windward side.
Only the soul that knows the mighty grief
Can know the mighty rapture. Sorrows come
to stretch out spaces in the heart for joy.    
   
    There are schools in Vacaville and Placerville named for Markham, as well as schools in other states. In San Jose's Preservation Park, Markham's home is now the San Jose Center for Poetry & Literature, where his cane and a first edition of The Lark are on display.


San Francisco’s Beat: Bob Kaufman 1925-1986

On

On yardbird corners of embryonic hopes, drowned in a heroin tear.
On yardbird corners of parkerflights to sound filled pockets in space.
On neuro-corners of striped brains & desperate electro-surgeons.
On alcohol corners of pointless discussion & historical hangovers.
On television corners of cornflakes & rockwells impotent America.
On university corners of tailored intellect & greek letter openers.
On military corners of megathon deaths & universal anesthesia.
On religious corners of theological limericks and
On radio corners of century-long records & static events.
On advertising corners of filter-tipped ice-cream & instant instants
On teen-age corners of comic book seduction and corrupted guitars,
On political corners of wamted candidates & ritual lies.
On motion picture corners of lassie & other symbols.
On intellectual corners of conversational therapy & analyzed fear.
On newspaper corners of sexy headlines & scholarly comics.
On love divided corners of die now pay later mortuaries.
On philosophical corners of semantic desperadoes & idea-mongers.
On middle class corners of private school puberty & anatomical revolts
On ultra-real corners of love on abandoned roller-coasters
On lonely poet corners of low lying leaves & moist prophet eyes.

    For a man who claimed that he sought anonymity, San Francisco Beat poet Bob Kaufman has got to be bee-bopping in his grave. Just this past weekend in December, there was a remembrance event at the San Francisco Public Library. The copy of The Ancient Rain: Poems 1956-1978 that I found at the Berkeley Public Library had a long list of check-out dates on its front page. Crockett poet and lifelong bookseller, Anita May remembers going to North Beach in the late 1970s and seeing him in cafes. Most remember him there, in that locale, doing that thang, hanging out, preaching poems to sidestanders. He lived in San Francisco for much of his life. North Beach publisher New Directions put out much of his printed work.
    Raymond Foye, Kaufman’s editor, quotes the poet as claiming: “I want to be anonymous . . . my ambition is to be completely forgotten.” Google his name and you will get over 100,000 hits. Most are of admirers who write anecdotes of knowing him or young scholars critiquing the significance of his verse.
    There are some facts: he was a veteran of the Merchant Marine. During long journeys at sea, he indulged his appetite for reading and studying literature. Maybe the sea also gave him a need to still his nerves with tobacco and drink, the way it did for Eugene O’Neill. What’s clear is that the long stretches of time on board were better than a more formal education. Although he attended New School for Social Research in New York City in the 1940s (where he met Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs), Kaufman was an autodidact who read widely of world poetry, especially relishing Baudelaire and Lorca.
    Not unlike our new President, Kaufman was yet another of America’s mutts: born of a German Jewish father and a Catholic African-American mother on April 18, 1925 in New Orleans. He had twelve siblings, most older. His mother was a teacher.
    He was an addict and jailbird; he suffered poverty and electroshock treatments. That he was as well a devoted intellectual shows how insignificant so many labels are, particularly those ascribing to the underclass some quasi “reason” for why they end up that way. Reminds me of when I was a jail librarian and was blown away by many prisoners who asked for Plato, Krishnamurti, and books by poets.
    He was overtaken by silence when John F. Kennedy was shot. Kaufman reputedly maintained his vow to not speak until the Vietnam war ended in 1973, a period of over 10 years.
    When so many contemporary versifiers aspire to a misguided professionalism—the trappings of academia, a salaried tenured literary position—Kaufman can be for the majority of us Other poets an example of what a poet should be: a world citizen, engaged daily with words, sharing jubilantly our discoveries of language, unimpressed by the correctness police. It is such a damn relief to read about someone so unattached to his “legacy.”
    And so, what does it mean to celebrate the life of someone who obviously sought attention during his lifetime but claimed not to want it afterwards? Even among the iconoclastic Beats, Kaufman seems to stand out for his consistent “taking it to the curb.” Perhaps he took ego-obliteration to an extreme, but his love of the spontaneous eruption of verse (apparently many of what we have as published poems were written down by his wife and friends) brought us some incredible living poems:

These days and weeks
That cannot be found on any calendar,
These hours and minutes unknown to the clock,
When all those rusting ships of the past, long gone
To the bottom of life, guarding the sunken dreams
Cast up their sorrows to swell this grief with memory.

Terror is around us both my soul. Nothing else will come.
I cannot describe the horrors, and worse, I cannot flee.
A wall is all.
I am hacked by knives I do not see, stung by stinging bee,
I can only bleed in silence, my pains are numb with admiration.

Where do you keep them all, my soul? How long can you stand?
What question is this being asked, can humans ever know?
Mad teeth are in the forms of man and chew my love to bits,
And I can do nothing, my soul, but wait their clawing cut,
    Asking only that my flesh holds
    & my anguished mind’s reassurance in surprise,
    & my love survive these brutal enigmas,
    That I please you, my Soul . . . if only you alone.
             —from The Ancient Rain: Poems 1956-1978

    His work is frequently placed in the category of jazz improvisation. The Ancient Rain’s cover flap  likens his work to Surrealist automatic writing with Dadaistic elements. The poems are written in an eclectic manner: all upper case here, prosaic there, line breaks/no line breaks, punctuation and its absence; it is rhythmic, textured, political, poignant and punchy. But what are these tags but ways to avoid the real work and the real man who gave us reason to remember who we are and to be brave enough to open that vein.

—Jannie M. Dresser, with help from several web sources: Academy of American Poets, “About Bob Kaufman” by Kathryne V. Lindberg, “Bob Kaufman: Jazz Poet of the Streets” by C. Natale Peditto, “Bob Kaufman” by A.D. Winans, and wikipedia.