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So, Philip Levine. One would expect poetry coming from Fresno to be a bit prosaic, and so it often is. It's frequently delightful prose, divided into lines like poems, but my mind always puts it into regular sentences and paragraphs as I read.
That flat place on the gridded valley floor, with its hazy distances and its monotonous rows of trees, the sky oddly washed out on most of those days when it has any clarity at all— it's an odd place for verse to grow, even irrigated by the largess of the California State University system. Like most of the San Joaquin Valley, Fresno is all vagueness and jumble, its few landmarks the work of mostly prosaic artifice, and unless it is one of those rare days when the bordering mountains are visible, it's very easy to get lost there.
To be perfectly fair, Levine is known to spend little over half the year in Fresno, and spends the remainder in Brooklyn. He spends summers in Brooklyn. I think that says something about Fresno's summer climate. Now and then in reading Levine one finds a line or two about a harbor. I'm sure they do not refer to Stockton or Sacramento. If a poet from Fresno did not occasionally escape to some place outside the valley, his work would probably end up as dessicated as Fresno's raisins. What's left when a grape is dried by the sun is sweet, but I always find myself missing the juice. Philip Levine is fortunate that there are highways leading out of the San Joaquin Valley.
( Wednesday Verse )
That flat place on the gridded valley floor, with its hazy distances and its monotonous rows of trees, the sky oddly washed out on most of those days when it has any clarity at all— it's an odd place for verse to grow, even irrigated by the largess of the California State University system. Like most of the San Joaquin Valley, Fresno is all vagueness and jumble, its few landmarks the work of mostly prosaic artifice, and unless it is one of those rare days when the bordering mountains are visible, it's very easy to get lost there.
To be perfectly fair, Levine is known to spend little over half the year in Fresno, and spends the remainder in Brooklyn. He spends summers in Brooklyn. I think that says something about Fresno's summer climate. Now and then in reading Levine one finds a line or two about a harbor. I'm sure they do not refer to Stockton or Sacramento. If a poet from Fresno did not occasionally escape to some place outside the valley, his work would probably end up as dessicated as Fresno's raisins. What's left when a grape is dried by the sun is sweet, but I always find myself missing the juice. Philip Levine is fortunate that there are highways leading out of the San Joaquin Valley.
( Wednesday Verse )
