Monday, November 21, 2011

James Koller's California Dream





I first ran into James Koller's work back in the late 1960's. His poems appeared in a series of small, unassuming little pamphlets--Two Hands: Poems 1959-1961 [James B. Smith, Publisher, Seattle, 1965; Some Cows, Poems of Civilization and Domestic Life [Coyote, San Francisco, 1966]; and The Dogs & Other Dark Woods [Four Seasons Foundation, San Francisco, 1966], and then in 1971 Black Sparrow Press, Los Angeles, published California Poems.

Some time in the early 1970's, probably in 1973, I wrote Koller a fan letter, something I've rarely done in my life. Koller, in the last-mentioned title, had evoked a rural feeling that struck a chord in my heart--it seemed like a book I might have written, had my life-path taken a turn or two closer to his. I'd grown up in Napa in the 1950's and early 1960's, at a time when the Napa Valley--along with the Sonoma Valley--was on the cusp of an explosion which would sweep away much of the charm and seclusion which had drawn the first wave of post-War Midwesterners and Southerners there.



It was still possible, in those decades, to imagine what life might have been like in rural California in the latter half of the 19th Century, and the first half of the 20th--to conjure up an unspoiled countryside of live-oaks and grain-gold hillsides, criss-crossed with stone fences, dotted with well heads, and connected by train-routes. Koller's poems seemed to describe the edges of this world, and though he had come here as a transplanted Midwesterner in the 1950's, his feeling for the California landscape, for a world of semi-rural existence in which scraping along and getting by and making-do had been subsumed into the ambient aesthetics of the then novel ecological-populist movements, and given voice in a poetry that clearly owed more to Ezra Pound and Carl Sandburg than to T.S. Eliot or Wallace Stevens, which seemed to share a common aspiration with the work of Gary Snyder, Charles Olson, Drummond Hadley, Lew Welch, Jack Kerouac, Ted Enslin, Doug Woolf and others of the generation of the New American Poetry. Koller participated in the Berkeley Poetry Conference in July 1965, and would probably have been included in the Allen anthology, if he hadn't been so young (he was born in 1936). In 1964 he started Coyote's Journal, an avant garde little poetry magazine which defined a nexus of voices and concerns that paralleled his interests, and the underground cultural trends of the time; ostensibly started in reaction to the suspension of publication of the Northwest Review by the University of Oregon in 1964, that initial pretext would seem in hindsight to have been largely a symbolic impetus.

What most distinguished it (the work) in my mind, then, and still does, was its sense of integral purpose, in which the life lived, the daily realities of work, love, and immediate sensory data were drawn up into the higher consciousness of meaning and purpose and given force in a most direct and simple style. I find it difficult now to speak of that time, the Sixties, without feeling some of the emotion which characterized it, for those of us young enough (or susceptible enough) to be swept up in the romance--intellectual, political, social--of that epoch.



Koller's earliest published works look a little bit like Michael McClure's (with the centered lines and capitalizations), and even sounded like it some:


I RIDE UP & DOWN
on a steaming horse
in a cold rain
before a ploughed but empty field
& the road reaches up
dark in rain
& my horse is gone
I walk in wet shoes
dropping seeds
from an old sack
children walk behind me
laughing
& I can not hear their words
I walk up & down
in a steaming field
the dark ground reaching
pulling at my beard
[1]

The dream-fantasy persona he uses has a semi-rural setting, consistent with the Sixties Hippie Culture of a return to the land, an awareness (or summoning) of ancestral identities (or deities), a faux-primitivistic evocation of animal spirits, the sense of community in shared interest and communal political consciousness.



By the time of Some Cows, he'd abandoned the centered lineation and was employing more direct narrational structures:


salt water swirls at the stone
sandstone, an alcove's gentle curves
ridges & hollows, a honey-combed holy place
where I led my daughter, almost a cave
at the water's edge, we sat on our heels
the tide in, caressed the stone
this is the owl's house, she said
[2]


Most of the poems in Some Cows stretch their legs a bit more than this, as the individual phrases and stanzas begin to break up into dialectical islands of assertion, and the authorial presence (voice) becomes interactive rather than soliloquial.


for Charles Hassler & Sally Joe Knowles
who were run down by motor vehicles
March 17th & March 18th 1964

A SMALL CHILD RUN DOWN & A BEAUTIFUL YOUNG WOMAN

O Sally Jo & Charles

dead animals all along the roads
the hawks hungry
tightening their circles

THE BEAUTIFUL & THE ANIMALS
are one with it

BUT THE KILLERS
with their gasoline engines
kill themselves their children their women
& even the earth
quakes can't keep up

the final score

WHAT A BENEVOLENT BOUQUET OF SAND WE GRIND BETWEEN OUR TEETH

why bother with breeding

WE ARE SAVING NOTHING FOR A BETTER DAY

I saw you coming
turning the corner

down to the road

& you were walking

GASOLINE ENGINES TURN TO RUST
turn & rust

SPRING IS A DEEP BURN

& where else there is
no other place

TRY AGAIN TO CROSS THAT ROAD

because we are one with it
we bother with breeding

& keep your eyes open no one
can do it for you

O Sally Jo & Charles
ARE YOU SLEEPING CAN YOU STAND OR BREATHE
HAVE THEY KILLED YOU

engines are rusty flowers
bombs for the beautiful
the hands of death have wheels
a bright pair of eyes that see
NO MORE THAN MAN CAN SEE NOTHING
eyes that see nothing

O KILLER MAN

my grandfather, who was also Irish
& had the nose for it, said he was part Cherokee

my mother, his daughter, is English

& don't you bring home any Indian girls


when the man died, they stretched his body in a tree
this out of Browning, Montana

against the law, the White Man said
we don't want to see anymore bodies in trees
you bury them, like everybody else

the Hawk has an Indian nose


Crow is black because he stole fire

he learned from everybody he ever stole from

Coyote is the color of his own dried blood
[3]


A lot of poets paid lip-service to the trends these poems address, but Koller was one of the few for whom they seemed genuine and immediate. I thought of him in those days--the late 1960's--as being a kind of minor Gary Snyder, not nearly so intellectualized and sophisticated, but rawer and perhaps more genuine--as if maybe Koller wrote the way, and lived the way, that Snyder might have, if he hadn't been a sort of perpetual graduate student in oriental studies. Snyder, of course went on to have a full career as an academic at UC Davis (now emeritus), while Koller seems to have steered clear of the academy.


Koller's appeal, to me, was to a significant degree, the impression he made of a man living on the edge of civilization. The tension between the wildness--its violence, sensuality, hypnotic instinctual forces--and the comfort, the encircling, reassuring formalities of civilized human habitation--is emphatically embraced and enacted in The Dogs & Other Dark Woods [1966]. The "dark wood" of nature, of the dark nature within humankind (our nature), to reproduce, to kill (to eat), to taste the vivid thick gruel of fleshly motivity, drives these poems to an edge of incoherence, barely contained--

THE OWLD & THE EAGLE (I am tired of sleep)

low over the corn with blood in his throat
the cock
& ran

in harness tail back
dragging the A

& the bitches so hot the place filled with smoke
or maybe it was dust
trying to get at him

I wil be ready for the snow
overland
A BEAR'S HEAD ON MY POLE
HIS SKIN ON MY BACK

in harness
dragging my ass

(I am tired of sleep)
the owl blind
the eagle up
A BEAR'S HEAD ON MY POLE
(I am tired of sleep)
AN EAGLE UP
[4]

Nearly all the poems in this Four Seasons collection are set within the dream-state consciousness of pre-historic subsistence and intensity. Sexuality, animal archetypes (both confronted and assumed--in the shaman tradition), place the speaker at a frontier of "domestic" regard for the primitive.


FOR FOUR HOURSE SHE HAS EATEN PLACENTA
six placenta in four hours the sacks
broken the water
drained the blind pups six times out
on their bellies their legs drag behind
like fish to the breasts & the tongue
drys their breath & finally
the bodies sleep seven
sleep mama & six pups who are
WHAT IT IS ALL ABOUT WHAT SHE
is here for we
are here for the breeding the breath
the young who chew blind
months the breasts
their mother our women
are for breeding & life
FOR THE LIVING THE GIVING OF IT
the narrow motion the passage
the fluid fuck the breath of it
for breeding & the blood that flows
through us the food
FOR DEATH IS EVERYWHERE IS CONSTANT & PRESENT &
looking after us not to be forgotten
we are not & death is not & life
moves us & death too
moves us & after us breeding we are
breeding & life is for the living & death
is for the living
not to be buried
DEATH WITH HIS JAWS OPEN THE MEAT
born on his tongue red the
father hunting the father anxious
to kill for love the movement the process
the fluids dropping from her the red &
after the birth red & she is all
teeth & growls & life & death
& love the food
the fluids between them
[5]
But where I really pick upon on Koller is his first full collection, California Poems [Black
Sparrow, 1972]. Koller has said often that he's a restless man, living in many places, traveling
around America, sizing up her land and settlements in her full breadth and extent. It may be
that his personal vision is as an imagined temporary settler in successive places, each offering
a specific resonance and inspiration.


That fall, on bicycle, at dusk, I heard the Canadian Geese--
honking low over the Samish, out the mouth
south, after the sun

& winter was early & hard

driving to Bothell, the seminary lawn
covered with coots

my daughter woke me with a flute

off San Rafael Creek, the bay--today--full of coots

I saw a girl in Burlington
with a wild goose
blazoned on the back of her jacket

she was going to the bowling alley

I was driving my truck home from the dump
[6]

Koller has said that he was much affected by Pound's work, and you can see how Pound's
stanzaic ordering of assertions has opened Koller's sensibility of the organization of experience
to dovetail separate apprehensions into a directed flow.

SNOW ON MT. ST. HELENA

the mountain behind me, I drove south & west
passed three angels in Valley Ford
five more & a girl at the cross roads to Tomales
& four gassed up at Point Reyes Station, roared away
chrome & hair catching the sunlight, to the north
to join the others

Billy & Toby were off, again
to Oregon, as per
I Ching, The Book of Changes

going thru changes

like music
harmoniously, minor discords
like she burned or threw away everything, always
burns her bridges
pulled the old light out of the ceiling
tore the wires loose, all connections

change gears

angels at every turn
all crossed roads

both sides, the streets lined with Harleys, choppers
of every description

he opened her coat
& holding it open
carefully & with expert eye
examined
what she had to offer
so to speak, as it were

a whole world

& nothing ever dies, it's all here
on every road, behind every tree
growing out of the ground, a beautiful
fire, flames

I'm grinning

exhaust, carbon

diamonds & threads
my mind is filled with diamonds & threads

we go off in all directions, thru intersections & crossed roads

a necklace to live in
[7]

There's a restlessness about all of Koller's work which may be its enabling force. The theme of
propulsion is crucial in much Beat Literature--Kerouac's road, Ginsberg's plane poems,
Snyder's seaman's journals--and there was an ecstatic visionary role which Koller felt he could
fill in those years--

we came out of that city
like we meant to stay out
north across the bridge
thru Sausalito, & in Mill jValley
drank, wine, ate Italian foods
Phoebe & McAdams turned back
we went on, the truck's bed
filled, the canopy
rattling & slapping
we stopped for all
wanting to go with us

from Tamalpais
we took the ridge road
sunset golden hills
red sky & blue
the Pacific, back of Bolinas

there were deer at the bottom
grazing the south edge
of that meadow
[8]

California Poems embraces the counter-culture sweep and promise of the late Sixties, and yet
moves out and beyond that to an unending pathway. Did some in our generation think we could
return to an hybrid agricultural subsistence that might allow us to live simply off poetry and
sex and a little easy gardening? The affluence of the post-War years probably encouraged some
to believe in a modified paradise (or a modified illusion thereof), right at the edge of
possibility (civilization). Or paradise squandered. It sounds naive today, when shortages and
selfishness and competition are beginning to impinge on The American Dream.

Koller eventually settled in Maine, but has spent a good deal of time in Europe (Italy and
France). The integration between the life and the work which Koller's earlier work implies,
may have given way to a higher degree of holistic inclusiveness, one in which the territorial
expansionism of our "western" consciousness is only the tail end of the migratory period of
human history, stretching all the way from our ancestors' first explorations of the New World,
from Scandanavia, Mongolia, or the Pacific Islanders, to the stubbornly frustrated aesthetic
colonials of the Bolinas township. Stopovers along the road.


_______________________

1. From Two Hands: Poems 1959-1961, James B. Smith, Publisher, Seattle, 1965.
2. From Some Cows: Poems of Civilization and Domestic Life, Coyote, San Francisco, 1966.
3. Ibid.
4. From The Dogs & Other Dark Woods, Four Seasons, San Francisco, 1966.
5. Ibid.
6. From California Poems, Black Sparrow Press, Los Angeles, 1971.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.

8 comments:

Bob Arnold / Longhouse said...

Curtis,

You put your shoulder to the wheel on this one, plus those delicious graphics of the hard won books. A thanksgiving to read.

all's well, Bob

Curtis Faville said...

Bob:

If we could write as well as those carpenters you talk about in your interview could build, we'd truly be craftsmen to honor. But we keep trying.

01010101 said...

The WASP who-wants-to be a medicine-man school.

Rob. Jeffers did that nearly 100 years ago-- better than the 60s college boys and zensters. Gets old fairly soon (and Pound opposed it, actually..de Rusticus)

Curtis Faville said...

01010101:

Really a pretty stupid comment.

Jeffers used classical Greek models, and used up his talent trying to construct archaic dramatic narratives. Does anyone read those anymore? ("No.")

The 60's "college boys" are now either dead or doddering. You're living in the past. "Zensters"--please . . . .

What exactly did Pound "oppose"? No clue.

01010101 said...

More like a stupid response. Pound opposed Rustics, nature mystics, zensters, ie, WASPs=who- wannabe shamans--ie, you and the bay area school.

And you haven't read much Jeffers obviously. At times he wrote on classical themes but usually on the Big sur coastline.

01010101 said...

aka the WASP bear j-o-in-the- woods-school. Like you and yr rustic palsies. Scotsmen, usually (tho...Anglos and a few germans guilty of it maybe. Not, say, a Rilke--who understands time, ancient euro streets, sad buildings and monuments, etc).

Curtis Faville said...

01010101:

Do you feel that Jeffers had any real relationship with the society of which he was a part? His "characters" are mostly cardboard two dimensional stand-ins for classical archetypes. At least Steinbeck--to take a parallel contemporary example--made some valiant attempt to re-imagine those archetypes in modern situations--Grapes and Eden are not complete successes, but better by far than Jeffers's stiff-backed rhetorical declamations. I like some of Jeffers's shorter lyrics, but the dramas leave me cold.

And, again, these cliché-ridden riffs ("bear in the woods" "nature mystics" "zensters" "rustics") don't clarify anything--they simply cloud the air with foul-smelling smoke.

01011010 said...

They clarify for those with the right ears...or at least souls.

Yes Steinbeck's writing--or F Scott F., Faulkner, et al-- has greater significance than Jeffers, or about any poet, even the klassix. Then, Im not a poet. Id rather read say Ray Chandler, Fitzgerald, ..or EA Poe tales than about any poet I can think of, but EP's Cantos has some zingers (Churchill in the swamp. Heh).