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.