BAY AREA POETS REVIEW 

VISIONS & AFFILIATIONS
A CALIFORNIA LITERARY TIME LINE:
POETS & POETRY: 1940-2005

by Jack Foley

"The twentieth century in all its confused
and troubled eloquence."

From the foreword by Ivan Argüelles

    Jack Foley’s Time Line is both a chronicle, as in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, and also something much more, something that resembles the Camera Eye of John Dos Passos’ USA. Taking us year by year from 1940 to 2005, Foley chronicles not just the develop-ment of poetry during those years, but much more significantly, the relevance of that poetry within the larger cultural framework.

From Poetry at the Edge of the Continent

     In 1940, when this time line begins, California’s image had changed. The state had moved out of its early provincialism and had begun to take its place in the nation as a whole. In The Parade’s Gone By, film historian Kevin Brownlow tells us that in 1920 “film people were called ‘movies’ by Hollywood residents, who were unaware that the term referred to the product, not to the personnel.” By 1940, no one confused the “movies” with the actors and technical people anymore.
    In 1915, the Panama-Pacific Exposition—a celebration of the completion of the Panama Canal and a commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the discovery of the Pacific Ocean—had kept the state of California and the city of San Francisco in the public eye; twenty-four years later, San Francisco had its very own World’s Fair.    
    By 1940, the Golden Gate Bridge had been operating for three years and the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge for four. The Bay Bridge had cost $78 million and was described as the longest bridge ever attempted. Twenty-three men had died during its construction.
In Dashiell Hammett’s novel, The Maltese Falcon (1930), Sam Spade’s secretary Effie takes the ferry to Oakland. In the classic 1941 film version, Effie drives across the Bay Bridge. Like all detective stories, Hammett’s tale is relentlessly and deliberately urban, and both book and movie are, among other things, a hymn to the fascination and sophistication of the city of San Francisco. Raymond Chandler’s equally brilliant paeans to the fascination and sophistication of Los Angeles, The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely appeared, respectively, in 1939 and 1940. (During the 1940s, Chandler was in Hollywood writing for films.) A very successful film version of The Big Sleep was released in 1946. Three films were based on Farewell, My Lovely: "Murder, My Sweet" (1945), "The Falcon Takes Over" (1946), and a third using the original title in 1976. “Film noir”—like the books on which it was based—is deeply rooted in a glamorized, paranoic image of “the city.”
    In 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt took the unprecedented step of running for a third term. Jane Darwell won an Academy Award as best supporting actress for her performance in "The Grapes of Wrath," a film based on Californian John Steinbeck’s novel, set in California. Steinbeck’s book won the 1940 Pulitzer Prize, as did Californian William Saroyan’s play, 'The Time of Your Life.' Saroyan’s play won, in addition to the Pulitzer Prize, the New York Drama Critics’ Circle award—an extraordinary combination. A new form of radio reception, FM or “frequency modulation,” was invented in 1939; radical, listener-supported Berkeley station KPFA took to the FM band ten years later. A 1940 survey indicated that nearly 30 million American homes had radios. Another indicated that American illiteracy had reached a new low of 4.2 per cent. In June, 1940 the Alien Registration Act (the Smith Act) required the registration and fingerprinting of aliens and made it illegal to belong to an organization advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government; it was the first law to sanction guilt by association. Before a teeming crowd of 92,000 people, Southern California defeated Tennessee 14 to 0 in the 1940 Rose Bowl at Pasadena, California.

    “I came to California in 1927,” Kenneth Rexroth told David Meltzer in a 1969 interview: "The day I got into town, San Francisco’s leading poet, California’s leading poet, killed himself. George Sterling. He pretty much represented the California scene in those days [Sterling died November, 1926—ed.]... San Francisco, when we came there to live, was very much of a backwater town...We just didn’t have any competition. It was like Picasso dropping back into the world of Trollope."

    Rexroth championed the importance of “personality” in poetry, insisting that his work was not what T.S. Eliot called an “extinction of personality” but embodied “the interior and exterior adventures of two poles of a personality.”  It was only in the poetry of Rexroth’s friend and sometime disciple, California native Robert Duncan, that Eliot’s idea of the mind as a multiplicity—a clash of contexts—became an issue of importance. Rexroth’s tireless and sophisticated efforts at establishing art in the Bay Area were an immense factor in an extraordinary Western cultural awakening. He was aided by the presence of some of the finest minds to grace twentieth-century culture—poets, musicians, novelists, printers, filmmakers, painters—all of whom contributed mightily to the flowering of the West.
    This book, incomplete as it is, gives some of the minute particulars of California’s cultural awakening—an awakening which placed California in some ways at the very center of twentieth-century American experience. In A Lou Harrison Reader, Peter Garland writes of “California’s and the West’s contribution to American culture” during the twentieth century. Garland suggests that California’s unique contribution is “a renewed sense of place”:

    This sense of place differs from much of America’s other regionalist perspectives in that it is internationalist in scope. In that way regionalism becomes a liberating and progressive, rather than limiting, factor. Only in California perhaps, with its already mixed Anglo, Asian, Hispanic and Indian population and heritage, could this viewpoint have developed naturally and without intellectual self-consciousness or “borrowing.”

    The “viewpoint” Garland describes—simultaneously “regionalist” and “internationalist”—has been home to an extraordinary number of kinds of writing. Californian Ishmael Reed coined a term for the sizzling cultural soup that constitutes California—as well as America as a whole: he called it “multiAmerica.” It is “multiAmerica” which is the subject of this book. It chronicles time: sunrises and sunsets, big events and little, in brawling, sprawling L.A. and at San Francisco’s Golden Gate. Beat father figure Lawrence Ferlinghetti—whose San Francisco bookstore, City Lights, was declared an historical landmark in 2001—writes,
 
Everything changes and nothing changes
Centuries end
                    and all goes on
                                          as if nothing ever ends...
But I still hear singing
—Lawrence Ferlinghetti, # 1, A Far Rockaway of the Heart (New Directions, 1997)

memory

the sun
turns back

     No literature of the past two hundred years is of the slightest importance unless it is “disaffiliated.” Only our modern industrial and commercial civilization has produced an elite which has consistently rejected all the reigning values of the society. There were no Baudelaires in Babylon. It is not that we have lost sight of them in time. The nearest thing in Rome was Catullus, and it is apparent, reading him, that there stood behind him no anonymous and forgotten body of bohemians. He was a consort of the rich, of generals and senators, Caesar and Mamurra, and the girl he writes about as though she was, in our terms, an art-struck tart from the Black Cat, was, in fact, a notorious multimillionairess, “the most depraved daughter of the Clodian line”…The special ideology of the only artists and writers since the French Revolution who deserve to be taken seriously is a destructive, revolutionary force. They would blow up “their” ship of State—destroy it utterly. This has nothing to do with political revolutionarism, which in our era has been the mortal enemy of all art whatever. When the Bolsheviks, for a brief period, managed to persuade the culture bearers, demoralized by the world economic crisis and rising tide of political terrorism, that the political revolutionary and the artist, the poet, the moral vates were allies, Western European culture came within an ace of being destroyed altogether…“Marxist aestheticians” have gone to [great] lengths to “prove” that the artist, the writer, the technical and professional intelligentsia, are not déclassé in modern society, but members of the petite bourgeoisie, and must “come over,” in the words of Engels’s old chestnut, “to the proletariat,” that is, become the prostitutes of their brand of State Capitalism. Nothing could be more false. Artist, poet, physicist, astronomer, dancer, musician, mathematician are captives stolen from an older time, a different kind of society, in which, ultimately, they were the creators of all primary values. They are exactly like the astronomers and philosophers the Mongols took off from Samarkand to Karakorum. They belong to the ancien régime—all anciens régimes as against the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. And so they could only vomit in the faces of the despots who offered them places in the ministries of all the talents, or at least they were nauseated in proportion to their integrity. The same principles apply today as did in the days of Lamartine. Caught in the gears of their own evil machinery, the bosses may scream for an Einstein, a Bohr, even an Oppenheimer; when Normalcy comes back, they kick them out and put tellers [Tellers?—ed.] in their place. The more fools the Einsteins for having allowed themselves to be used—as they always discover, alas, too late.
     —Kenneth Rexroth enunciating his own version of “art for art’s sake,” “San Francisco Letter,” The Evergreen Review (1957)

chinese waterfalls
behind veils of mist
in a landscape painting
are more real than this

not men, shadows
         —Ivan Argüelles

1940s
The “Renaissance”
Kenneth Rexroth
Yvor Winters

     Kenneth Rexroth “invents the culture of the West Coast.” His first book of poetry, In What Hour appears from Macmillan. Many of the poems have been published in magazines such as New Masses, The New Republic, and Partisan Review.
     Robert Hass writes that In What Hour “seems—with its open line, its almost Chinese plainness of syntax, its eye to the wilderness, anarchist politics, its cosmopolitanism, experimentalism, interest in Buddhism as a way of life and Christianity as a system of thought and calendar of the seasons, with its interest in pleasure, its urban and back-country meditations—to have invented the culture of the West Coast” [Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry (HarperCollins, 1985)]. 
     In The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-century (Cambridge University Press, 1991), Michael Davidson adds,

     Although [Rexroth] had not been a member of the Communist Party (he claims to have become disaffected from official Soviet policy sometime around the end of the Bolshevik Revolution, when he was still a teenager), he was active in groups like the Randolph Bourne Council (an anarchist group), the John Reed Club, the Libertarian Circle, and the Waterfront Workers Association in San Francisco and participated in various WPA projects. For writers who gathered at his Friday evening “at homes” during the late 1940s and early 1950s, Rexroth represented a continuation of a much older radical tradition that was part of San Francisco’s heritage. He served as an important model for poets like Gary Snyder, William Everson, and Robert Duncan, who were searching for a socially as well as intellectually committed poet.
       The dominant politics of the Rexroth group took the form of anarchopacifism. A number of writers who met under this banner found themselves in conscientious-objector camps during World War II, most significantly that at Waldport, Oregon, where William Everson was interned. One of the first important small presses, the Untide Press, was established at Waldport under Everson’s supervision and produced numerous early books by conscientious objectors during the war.

      In Literary San Francisco (City Lights Books and Harper and Row, 1980) Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Nancy Peters describe Rexroth’s home: “Certainly the most international literary soirée in San Francisco in the 1950s and early 1960s was that held almost weekly at Kenneth Rexroth’s large second-floor flat at 250 Scott Street above Jack’s Record Cellar on the edge of the mostly black Fillmore district”:

   The halls of the flat were lined to the ceiling with apple boxes containing one of the finest collections of literature (Western and oriental, classical and modern, in several languages), much of it review copies in many fields (poetry, geology, astronomy, art, sociology, philosophy, political history, and radical thought in general)—the vintage harvest of many years of literary criticism for KPFA/FM, the Nation, Saturday Review, and the New York Times, among others.
     Writers from many countries plus migrant East Coast and Northwest poets found their way to Rexroth’s where they encountered many of the resident San Francisco radical community, the heart of which was made up of World War II conscientious objectors and poets active in the Berkeley Renaissance of the late 1940s. . . .
    Michael McClure: “[Rexroth] told us that we were part of the West Coast and we had more in common with Japan, China, Korea, than we did with Paris and London. New Yorkers related to the capitals of Europe; we could relate otherwise and be natural with Asian religious and philosophical ideas and ways of seeing and making art. As a person of the Pacific Rim, I could experience history in a different way. . . .”
                           
     The young Robert Duncan (born 1919) agrees with most of “Daddy Rexroth’s” (Duncan’s phrase) formulations. In the introduction to The Years as Catches: First Poems (1939-1946) (Oyez, 1966), Duncan writes:
                      
     "I saw my own personal life belonging to a larger human life that was foreign to the society into which I had been born, to the American way, to the capitalist ethic with its identification of work with earning a wage and of the work with a saleable commodity, and with its ruthless exploitation of human energies for profit. The years of the Roosevelt administration had seen the great increase of state power—an America that would overthrow Hitler’s State, taking its place and standing with the Soviet Union as an overwhelming contestant for world domination—and now, in these years as I began to write, from 1937 on, the Roosevelt panacea for the ills of the profit system, the Permanent War Economy, began to emerge as a reality that would take over. My deepest social feelings then were irregular…for I saw the State and the War as diseases, eternal enemies of man’s universal humanity and of the individual volition."

     The young William Everson (born 1912) felt equally “foreign to the society” into which he had been born. In his autobiography, Prodigious Thrust (Black Sparrow, 1966), he writes about his early relationship with poet/artist Mary Fabilli (born 1914),

     "We lived in a middle-class parish, the parishioners of which were conventional Americans, and there is nothing remarkable in that; but to such a one as I, estranged from contemporary life by a profound cleavage of values, and nursing a deep-rooted contempt for all the effects of modern civilization—to such a one, everything about a middle-class American church can move to nothing but repugnance.
     Later, after Baptism, I was to live in the poorest parish of Oakland, where the parishioners were largely of direct foreign extraction. In these people, for whom convention had not yet become a stultifying thing because it had been unable to crystallize in material possessions, I could truly delight. It would have been easier for me had I been able to make my orientation there…[M]y problem was not that of identifying with the dirty and disheveled, as it is said to be for the Protestant when confronted by that unmistakable Old World odor of the Church, but rather with the fashionable, the modish woman or the bustling business man; not to see Christ in the poor, for which I would have no trouble, but to see Him in the bourgeois, whom I despised."

   Yvor Winters (born 1900) self-publishes his Poems on his own handpress, Gyroscope Press, Los Altos, California.

   Poet/linguist/anthropologist Jaime de Angulo (born 1887) appears as a legendary bohemian hermit figure in Big Sur, California. Other artists in the area are composer Harry Partch and poet Robinson Jeffers; novelist Henry Miller will move to Big Sur in 1943. Jeffers, Partch and de Angulo are referred to as “The Three American Primitives.”

   Angered at receiving rejection slips from established magazines, William Everson adopts the pseudonym “William Herber”—Herber is his mother’s family name—and submits work containing a fashionable message about class struggle to Poetry magazine. Poetry publishes two poems in that vein, after which Everson admits the hoax in a letter which Poetry also publishes.

    Robert Duncan (then Robert Symmes) admires some of Everson’s published poems and begins to correspond with him. The two men will meet in 1941.

     Ward Ritchie Press in Los Angeles publishes a letter press edition of Alfred Young Fisher’s “quirky” epic poem, The Ghost in the Underblows.  The book is designed by Alvin Lustig; the poem is described as a “fragment.” The book’s prospectus features a cover design by Lustig not reproduced in the book as well as laudatory comments about Fisher and his poem from Una and Robinson Jeffers, William Everson, Jake Zeitlin, Jens Nyholm, Helen Eustis, Grace Hazard Conkling, Nikolaus Pennemann, Dow Parkes, Thurman Wilkins, and Gordon Newell. The subscription price for each of the two hundred and seventy-five copies alotted for sale is $6.00 (plus 18 cents sales tax).
     Alfred Young Fisher was the first husband of M.F.K. Fisher; they divorced in the late 1930s. He taught at both Occidental College in California and Smith College in Massachusetts. At Smith, one of his poetry students was Sylvia Plath, who inscribed a copy of the first American edition of her first full volume of poetry, Colossus, to him; the inscription affirms the importance of her former teacher to her understanding of poetry. These are some passages from The Ghost in the Underblows. Parts of this strange poem—note the British spelling of words like “realization”—seem almost comic, and it seems to be haunted by the imagery of war, though the bombing of Pearl Harbor did not occur until December, 1941. Fisher and his wife had lived in Dijon, where her love of cooking began to blossom.
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Order your copy now of Visions & Affiliations: A California Literary Time Line: Poets & Poetry 1940-2005 by Jack Foley. Order from Pantograph Press, 2569 Maxwell Ave., Oakland, 94601-5521, or go to http://www.jack-and-adelle-foley.com.



The BAY AREA POETS REVIEW is pleased to announce Jack Foley’s long-awaited time-line of California literary history from 1940-2005. We are grateful for the right to reprint an excerpt from this significant new work.  

 Order your copy now of Visions & Affiliations: A California Literary Time Line: Poets & Poetry 1940-2005 by Jack Foley. Order from Pantograph Press, 2569 Maxwell Ave., Oakland, 94601-5521, or go to http://www.jack-and-adelle-foley.com.