Robinson Jeffers at USC

READERS of this blog know that we've got a special place in our collective hearts for Robinson Jeffers, the great California poet of the '30s and '40s who settles in the rugged, unpopulated coastline north of Big Sur. (He was voted Best California Poet right here on The Misread City.)

On Thursday, a festival devoted to Jeffers' life and work will take place at USC, one of his two alma maters (he shares Occidental College with our president, Ben Affleck and my wife.) As the university's release has it: "The panels and exhibition will explore Jeffers’ relationship to the natural world, Jeffers and the art of the book, and his story as a young poet in early 20th-century Los Angeles. Jeffers manuscripts and photographs, many of which are rarely seen by the public, will be on view."

One of very few people I know whose ardor for Jeffers outstrips mine is my old friend Dana Gioia, whose essay on the poet in Can Poetry Matter? made me think about Jeffers in a new way.

Dana and I discussed the poet and his legacy here.

Robinson Jeffers seems like the most distinctly California poet conceivable. It's really hard to imagine him coming from anywhere else, isn't it?

Jeffers was a poet who could only have developed as he did in California and probably only in the Modernist era.

His search for a distinctly modern voice took an entirely different course than any of his Eastern contemporaries. The still pristine landscape of California gave him a direct relationship with nature (and a skepticism about human civilization) that would not have been possible in New York or London.

What's the purpose of the Jeffers Festival at USC? What will it be like?

My aim is to bring Jeffers back to his alma mater. He is the most considerable writer ever to have attended USC, and the university has mostly forgotten him. I want to reclaim his legacy. I am pleased to report that everyone I have approached here has been eager to help. We have deliberated put together a conference that is not just literary chatter. Our speakers -- a great historian, a major sci-fi novelists/naturalist, a fine press printer, and a biographer -- will celebrate aspects of Jeffers' work not likely to be discussed in an English department.

What is your relationship to his work?

Jeffers has had an impact on my imagination. He showed how powerful and original poetry could be written out of my native landscape. His work also showed that a great Modernist could write in ways that were both innovative and accessible.  

Can you mention a poem, or a line, by Jeffers and tell us why it

resonates with you?

I love so much of Jeffers' poetry that it is hard to pick a single poem or single line. "To the Stone-Cutters" is only ten lines long, but it has a 

huge resonance.  It begins:

    

   Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated 

   Challengers of oblivion

   Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,

   The square-limbed Roman letters

   Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain.  The poets as well

   Builds his monument mockingly....

That seems to be true of time, life, and poetry. I love the way the free verse lines alternate long and short and quietly echo the long lines of Latin and Greek poetry without ever making an issue of their lineage. It's learned but light, clear but incisive.

Elizabeth Taylor in Big Sur

IT'S hardly a great movie, and it seems quite square and timid in its embrace of what we now know as "the '60s" -- art, bohemia, individualism. But I'll never forget Elizabeth Taylor's role in The Sandpiper and those great shots of the Big Sur Coast -- perhaps this blog's favorite West Coast locale.

Liz plays a free-spirited singled mother, with raffish friends, and nearly bursts out every scene.

Richard Burton (as the headmaster of an Episcopalian boarding school) is great too.

Here is a bit on the film.

Rest in Peace, Elizabeth Taylor.

California Poetry and Robinson Jeffers

WHEN I put together a blog poll on Best California Poet, I was certain Charles Bukowski was going to barge in, whiskey bottle in hand, and run away with it.

So I’m pleased to report that a far more significant poet ended up winning – and by a landslide. Take a bow, Robinson Jeffers!! He not only presided over the best turned-out vote in the history of The Misread City, he won by nearly as large a margin as Jimi Hendrix did in my Favorite Guitarist poll.

Of course, in most circles, the great poet of Carmel and Big Sur is still largely unknown – as is the runner up, Weldon Kees, who drew nearly double the votes Barfly garnered.

Jeffers – a classically flavored poet of wide-open spaces and the expanses of the Pacific -- and Kees – a jazz-loving hipster who (probably) threw himself off the Golden Gate Bridge in 1955 – could not be more different. But I’m quite honored to have both of them championed by readers of The Misread City.

“No major poet has been treated worse by posterity than Robinson Jeffers,” Dana Gioia wrote in his essay “Strong Counsel,” going on to describe his embrace by environmentalists and general readers and his neglect by literary scholars.

“More than any other American Modernist Jeffers wrote about ideas – not teasing epistemologies, learned allusions, or fictive paradoxes – but big, naked, howling ideas that no reader can miss.”

Dana and I disagree on a number of things, but Jeffers is one place where our tastes come together, and we both love Tor House, the poet’s domicile in Carmel.

U.S. Poet laureate and poetic minimalist Kay Ryan also drew a good number of votes, while Kenneth Rexroth and Lawrence Ferlinghetti did less well.

This poll, like all of them, drew protests for who was not included. As I sometimes say, running a poll with too many choices is like throwing a party in a house with too many rooms – you need some compression so people will come together. Still, I wish I’d put Gary Snyder in here instead of Ferlinghetti – Snyder’s career has continued to evolve and deepen, and he will probably be part of my next literary poll.

As for Buk, I have nothing against the guy, and like some of the work okay. No doubt he would be more fun to hang out with than Jeffers, who was often cranky and very austere in his tastes. But much of the cult of Bukowski, I think, turns on the American romanticism of alcoholism. All of the other poets on the list have earned their reputations from something more substantial. Here's to them.

Robinson Jeffers and Big Sur

"NO major American poet has been treated worse by posterity than Robinson Jeffers," poet/critic dana gioia wrote in 1987, lamenting the lack of scholarly attention, an up-to-date selected poems, or a full-dress biography of this california writer who was once read voraciously and still inspires environmentalists.

a few things have changed since then, but the great poet of california's central coast is still widely overlooked. HERE is my humble attempt to try to bring this austere and charismatic man some attention. this is basically a travel piece about big sur and carmel, but with jeffers's life, work and times -- mostly the 1930s -- providing the framework.

so we visited Tor House -- the stone house jeffers had built, and the tower he built, almost single-handedly, for his wife by rolling stones up from the pacific -- the point lobos state park he captured in verse, as well as the henry miller library, dedicated to a writer who knew and admired jeffers.

while watching at the pacific's waves slam into the towering rocks, it was hard not to be struck with jeffers' vision of the california coast as both the geographic end of western culture's grand experiment and a renewing source for it.