typical of a warm summer night in Ojai, the locals, greying in white linen pants and floppy hats, came out in force. the seats were sold out, leaving only standing room for anyone without a ticket. hard to say if the turn out would have been less impressive had the tickets cost anything. since we showed up only five minutes before the officially listed start time, we could not find two seats next to each other, despite reserving the aforementioned free tickets.
Bart’s Books touts itself as the largest outdoor bookstore in the world. not sure if that’s true, but it is an impressive space, my bookseller of choice—being in the “vortex” of Ojai, they have a large selection of occult, new age, conspiracy, and other titles tantalizing to anyone with a taste for woo. the sizeable courtyard was filled with attendees eager to see the reading to be given by Lee Herrick, who, if you weren’t aware (and, let’s be honest, why would you be), is the California state poet laureate.
we settled into one of the fiction alcoves (~Te-Tu, if memory serves), and on my left in an aisle seat sat a tall blonde man–my boss. he made a confused face, said “no I don’t think so” when asked if we talked about this event, and introduced his girlfriend and himself to my girlfriend. no further conversation. I suggested to my girlfriend that we move back to “look for somewhere to sit,” because standing uncomfortably only feet away from my boss on a Saturday night, at an event I suspected would be very much up his alley and very much not even in my neighborhood, did not sound like a great time.
where we ended up standing, in the back with easy getaway access, should we need to make a getaway, was a man, about thirty, bearded with dreadlocks done up in a bun. now I know what you’re thinking: dreadlocks? in Ojai? shouldn’t someone tell him about cultural appropriation? don’t worry, this man was black. he kept on the shelf next to him a composition notebook, with the classic mottled cover. throughout the reading he pulled it off the shelf to make notes of lines he particularly savored, an appreciation he expressed by either closing his eyes and smiling pensively, or snapping once, just once, before jotting something down. this is a man who I would have been interested in speaking with, if only because there really aren’t very many nonwhite people in Ojai, but more so because he was absolutely absorbed in the experience, so present with the poetry, in a way that I just didn’t feel at all–perhaps I am too jaded, perhaps I didn’t enter with an open enough mind, perhaps I’m just a hater. or maybe I have a stronger bullshit meter, and I’m right that the people who apparently so enjoyed the poetry that night seemed to be convincing themselves of the work’s power, that the paucity of actual poetry in their lives leaves them bereft, hungering for the tiniest morsel of Art, and so they trick themselves into believing they’re eating ambrosia and not Soylent.
the opening act was a local woman, whose name I don’t remember, who read unremarkable poems not helped by her lack of stage presence. she prefaced some of them by saying she wrote them back in the aughts (“post-9/11”), when she was practicing “mindful” and “nonviolent” parenting. seems strange to have to clarify that your parenting style is “nonviolent,” but that was the form her resistance to the Bush administration took. it wouldn’t be fair to snipe at this woman’s poems when I don’t really remember them, so I won’t. the sonnets she read at least showed an interest in rhythm, much more so than a lot of the so-called “poets” of my generation do.
in what seem to be signature trapezoidal glasses and blue sport coat, Lee Herrick demonstrated a much greater comfort with holding an audience, no doubt something that helped him through his California Congressional confirmation hearings. why any poet would want the imprimatur of one of the United States’ governing bodies is beyond me, but then again I do like Elizabeth Bishop, William Carlos Williams, and Louise Gluck, so who knows, maybe if I reached a similar stature as a writer I’d be honored to consult the Amerikkkan Empire on matters of poetry. Herrick of course only serves KKKalifornia, at the behest of the Getty’s Golden Boy Gavin Newsom. The Governor’s office’s press release said of Herrick’s work that it “explores the diversity and vitality of the California experience and the exhilarating success of the American experiment.” exhilarating success? Gavin have you been to Los Angeles or San Francisco recently? what conclusions do you think any of the thousands of “unhoused” people filling the encampments beneath freeway overpasses might draw when judging the results of the American experiment?
Herrick’s poetry precisely articulates the willful blindness of liberalism, full of cutesy multiculturalism and bullshit politics that get nowhere near addressing anything like the Reality of the World. one poem he read, “My California,” contains the lines “In Fresno, the bullets/tire of themselves and begin to pray five times a day.//In Fresno, we hope for less of the police state and more of a state of grace.” aside from gesturing at social issues, there’s no real interrogation of these conditions, seeing as this observation about Fresno comes immediately after the declaration, “Here, in my California//we fish out long noodles from the pho with such accuracy/you’d know we’d done this before.” like, who cares if we’ve eaten pho before? what does juxtaposing those things reveal? a different poet might play up the ironies, the disparity between the poverty of somewhere like Fresno and the “group of four at a window/table in Carpinteria” who “discuss the quality of wines in Napa Valley versus Lodi.” but here these details are just thrown against the page, in the hope that something will cohere. Herrick has professed a love for Walt Whitman, but he seems to think Leaves of Grass is merely the record of a blithe meander through America. at least in Ginsberg, another Whitman disciple, his freeranging rants exude a real sense of anger and despair; somehow I don’t think Herrick, being the adoptive Korean son of white Americans, had quite as radical an upbringing as Ginsberg did, what with his communist mother dragging him to Party meetings as a child. later Herrick read another poem, with an Anthony Bourdain quote as an epigraph (“Street food, I believe, is the salvation of the human race”), that just sort of runs through a bunch of different kinds of street food, which, as with his perfunctory references to various cultures and ethnic groups, merely reduces them all to fungible signifiers. it’s the literary equivalent of a corporate Pride parade float.
but a poet doesn’t have to have good politics to be good at poetry; in fact, too much politics tends to curdle poetry into propaganda. an acute ear, a concern for metaphor, a strong perspective that freshens the reader’s sense of being alive, these are all qualities that make up a great poet. and Herrick sometimes writes a decent phrase: in “Here, in my California, the streets remember the Chicano/poet whose songs still bank off Fresno’s beer soaked gutters” the trochaic lilt of the second line vivifies the image of dirty gutters, playing off the idea of sound “banking” against concrete. but “Here, in my California,” the poem’s refrain, is so plodding, like an uncertain elephant, that I wonder if Herrick even realizes it’s possible to marry rhythm to content. during the Q&A, he said that he “experiences the world through sound,” but I’m not convinced he has a very good grasp on how sound creates meaning—something a celebrated poet ought to understand.
elsewhere his metaphors and images seem clumsy and confused: a poem about mothers, titled “How Music Stays in the Body,” opens with “Your body is a song called birth/or first mother, a miracle that gave birth/to another exquisite song,” and dilutes its “song = mother” metaphor before it can even get going. “One song leapt/from fourteen stories high, and like a dead bird,/shattered into the clouds.” egregiously mixed metaphor aside, I for one have never seen a dead bird shatter into the clouds, nor do I understand what that might mean. (this was one of the lines my dreadheaded neighbor snapped emphatically for, suggesting he might not have the best poetic judgement). another poem, “Flight,” uses the conceit of an unfinished crossword puzzle, which could be effective for some linguistic calisthenics, but doesn’t really go anywhere: there are glancing references to Frida Kahlo and Maxine Hong Kingston that culminate in wondering whether they would like the same tea. this question is posed, along with “how exactly we fall in love,” as one of the “things we will never/know, as it should be.” never mind why anyone would care to know if these women might like the same tea. it’s a boring question, and while I’m at it, “how exactly we fall in love,” without further elaboration, is a trite one.
after he finished, the floor opened for Q&A. first up was a woman (white) who asked if he’d heard of some writer. Herrick politely considered and said the name sounded familiar, but that no, he hadn’t. “well I really think you should read them,” the woman said, and summarized how the writer focuses on life in Cambodia under the reign of Pol Pot during the Khmer Rouge, something she thinks is woefully understudied in American schools nowadays. what Herrick was supposed to say to that, I have no idea. he handled the asinine audience questions like a true pro though: not a single person was offended.
but what I’ll say is that maybe poetry ought to be a little more like Pol Pot, and a little less like Gavin Newsom.