Is There a Distinctive California Poetry?

It’s amazing that California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present, edited by Dana Gioia, Chryss Yost and Jack Hicks, is the first such historical anthology. The anthology shows how English-language poets struggled from 1850 to today to apply the latest European poetics to talk about a natural landscape and social world in California quite different from Europe’s. California Poetry provides a good history of the state’s English-language poetry and illustrates California’s tradition of well-crafted verse. The book, which ably captures the diversity of California’s English language-poetry of the last 50 years, makes a huge contribution but also leaves out a lot.

What has been left out? In Dana Gioia’s introduction he admits “the editors lacked both the expertise and the space to examine, evaluate, and present the best work from the state’s rich American Indian literatures or the substantial Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, and other traditions.” He further argues that only a monolingual volume could accomplish the book’s two purposes: “to establish California’s rightful place in the history of American poetry and to insist on the state’s position as a significant and distinct region in English-language literature.”

Gioia also mentioned California’s historical and geographical uniqueness: the state faces Asia; was formerly owned by Spain and then Mexico; has always been being dominated by huge farms, not small family farms. Yet the anthology neglects to show important poetries--Native American, Asian, Latino/a, working class/political poetry— reflect the state’s geography and history. These marginalized poetries also had histories that were crucial to creating California poetry.

In Section 1 on 19th century poetry, California Poetry rightly includes the significant Anglo poetry: Ina Coolbrith and George Sterling mainly wrote a derivative romantic poetry praising the California landscape while Bret Harte and Joaquin Miller combined frontier populist voices, English poetry forms, and Anglo nationalism. The anthology’s excellent introductions shows how poets in the late 19th century collaborated and helped guide the next generation, but there is a problem with this 19th century poetry. Gioia in an essay in My California astutely comments that British nature poetry “careful developed over centuries from close observation of nature” but English-language poets such as Coolbrith and Sterling didn’t find in California British nightingales, roses, and foxes but meadowlarks, poppies, and coyotes. Gioia feels that these Anglo poets and their descendants have been struggling for 150 years to find the “right images, myths, and characters” for this state’s literature.

After 10,000 years of living in California, the Indians have had thousands of years of closely observing nature, which permeates their literatures. In fact, the ubiquitous coyote is a comic star in Native myths while the meadowlark as well as Coyote sings the world into existence into the Maidu creation epic. Besides writing poetry saturated in the natural world, Native singers created love lyrics, dramatic narratives, mourning songs and vision chants. This poetry emerged out of spiritual visions and is alive with mythic characters. Including this astonishingly brilliant Native traditional poetry would help show how truly distinctive California’s poetry is. Since Malcolm Margolin published The Way We Lived: California Indian Reminiscences, Stories and Songs, his book began to make this wonderful literature available to an English-language audience.

Despite the abscence of Native traditional poetry, the anthology does include poems by two famous turn-of-the century prose writers, Ambrose Bierce and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Their two poems are Section I’s most delightful surprises. Bierce’s “A Rational Anthem” smartly satirizes turn-of-the century political corruption while Gilman’s “Matriatism” contrasts the violence of men fighting for the “fatherland” with the peacefulness of women struggling to create the “motherland.” Happily, the anthology includes Edwin Markham, the most successful poet from this era, as he decries the exploitation of farmer laborers in his “Man with the Hoe,” a poem published in newspapers worldwide. Markham’s poem as well as Frank Norris’s novel The Octopus began California’s literature of protest against the Octopus—the railroad and large landowners—which dominated the state.

Bierce, Gilman and Markham—all riding the wave of late 19thand early 20th century protest—wrote a new, original California poetry. Yet a few good poems don’t make an original literature in California. There’s really little distinctive about this 19th century California poetry until you add in poems from the California Indian languages and translations from poems written by Californios in Spanish. Then, California becomes a its own poetic region from 1850-1900 with three distinctive poetries: English; Native American languages; and Spanish.

In Section II on the California modernist the editors have happily included equal numbers of men as well as the lesser-know women poets—Hildegarde Flanner, Janet Lewis, Rosalie Moore, and Josephine Miles--and rightly evaluate two of most original voices as Robinson Jeffers and Kenneth Rexroth. Again the anthology’s excellent introductions to poets in Section II, III, and IV show how modernists in Section II taught, inspired, and encouraged the rebels and traditionalist poets of Section III and IV. This anthology’s introduction to Rexroth states that this poet, the father of the beats and California alternative lifestyles, was a radical and pacifist; loved the natural world of Northern California; and translated poems from the Chinese and Japanese; Gioia calls these translations “relevant sources for a California literary identity.”

Alongside Rexroth’s poetry, this book could have included selections from the Chinese poems of those immigrants who were imprisoned at Angel Island. The poems were published in Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigration on Angel Island, 1910-1940, edited by Mark Lai Him, Genny Lim and Judy Yung. Angel Island poems are the beginning of Chinese-American poetry. During this period Rexroth as well as Pound translated from the Chinese, praising the condensed powerful imagery of Chinese poetry. The Angel Island poems have the condensed powerful imagery as well as emotional power that the early modernists so admired in the Chinese poems they translated.

Also including Japanese-American haiku poets from the concentration camps would have contributed to a developing California poetic identity. In the 1920s and 1930s immigrant Japanese joined haiku-clubs, published in Japanese-language newspapers, and competed for literary prizes. These haiku poets, who continued writing during the war, had their haiku collected and translated in Violet Kazue de Cristoforos’s May Sky—There Is Always Tomorrow: An Anthology of Japanese American Concentration Camp Kaiko Haiku. Cary Nelson has said that among the writers were members of California’s haiku-writing clubs who were writing a free-verse modernist haiku popular in the 1930s. Indeed, the haiku Nelson includes in his Modern American Poetry are stunning in their imagery, restraint, and immense sadness—they are brilliant poems. If the book had included the translations of the Japanese haiku poems from the concentration camps, it could have begun documenting the history of California’s Japanese-American poetry.

In section II and III the anthology has Japanese-American poets after World War II writing fine English-language work: Violet Kazue de Cristoforo, Lawson Inada, and Amy Uyematsu. In the post-war period two other Japanese-American poets who could also have been included are Southern California’s Mitsuye Yamada, who writes a powerful poetry about her own experiences in the camps, and San Franciscan Janice Mirikitani, who writes wonderfully about her many subjects including mother’s camp experience. These two women have been mainstays of their poetry communities for decades.

Part III should be praised for its diverse coverage of the 1940s through 1960s. The book shows the many inter-connections of poets of the San Francisco Renaissance, both beats and their allies. These poets used free verse, were political dissidents, and often went on religious quests exploring Buddhism and Hinduism. These Bay Area rebels included gay voices of Robert Duncan, Thom Gunn, and Jack Spicer as well as Gary Snyder’s imagistic environmental poetry. The anthology has a good selection of the well-crafted poems of the traditionalists, many of who were students of Yvor Winters at Stanford. It also happily includes two working class poets, Charles Bukowski and Okie poet Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel.

Here California Poetry’s falters, showing Bukowski and McDaniel isolated working class poets which they weren’t. That early 20th century protest culture of Bierce, Markham, Gilman also included Wobblies including Gary Snyder’s father; Kenneth Rexroth’s Christian socialist parents; Ferlinghetti’s Italian anarchist parents; and Upton Sinclair, who settled in Los Angeles where he lived the last thirty years of his life. Sinclair inspired a new generation of 1930s radicals and proletarian writers with his novels and his running for governor of California. By the mid-1930s H.L. Mencken was printing the first stories of young proletarian writers from Los Angeles such as Italian-American John Fante who inspired Bukowski more than any other writer on earth.

Tillie Olsen was another one of the young 1930s proletarian writers in San Francisco. I’d also add to any anthology on California poetry Tillie Olsen’s “I Want You Women Up North to Know,” a powerful political poem about exploitation of Southwest seamstresses. In contrast to Olsen, John Beecher was a descendant of the illustrious Beecher family and Harvard-educated, but he dropped out in the 1930s to work for years in factories and with sharecroppers. Both Beecher and Olsen were blacklisted in the 1950s and only emerged later in the 1960s after the blacklist receded—a tragedy that any anthology of California poetry needs to include. In Los Angeles, the poetic circle around Thomas McGrath was particularly hurt when many of the poets were blacklisted, an act which stunted Los Angeles’ poetry for a decade. One 1950s Los Angeles poet in California Poetry, Bert Myers, learned his craft not from “poets at coffeehouses” as the anthology says but from the McGrath circle of poets. The fine anthology Poets from the Non-Existent City edited by Estelle Gersgoren Novak has at long last featured these writers: Tom McGrath, Don Gordon, Naomi Replansky, Edwin Rolfe, Alvaro Cardona-Hines et al.

California’s dissident tradition was huge by the late 1960s and 1970s, producing young poets who began to publish and appreciate Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel. Also two poets from the working class who really need to be in section four on contemporary poetry are Judy Grahn and Ron Silliman. Grahn was far and away the most important woman poet in California in the 1970s as well as the first important lesbian poet. Her Common Woman series of poems had an electrifying effect across the state. Grahn’s work inspired a whole generation of working class women poets, began a new lesbian poetry, and influenced black poets like Ntozake Shange. The anthology excludes Silliman for leaving California but Silliman is as Californian as any poet in this book. Growing up in Berkeley, his life as well as his poetry is rooted in Bay Area dissident culture and his poetry with its deep social conscience is nourished from these roots.

Though section IV on contemporary poetry includes diverse poetry, the diversity should be broadened further to include important contemporary working class/political poets: San Franciscans Carol Tarlen, Nelly Wong, and Jack Hirschman as well as Southern Californians Fred Voss and Joan Jobe Smith. These poets write an oppositional poetry against the new Octopus of the New Gilded age of the late 20th century. All five poets, totally rooted in a hundred-year old California dissident poetry, have created distinctive voices: Tarlen’s avant-garde visionary take on the working class; Wong’s evocations of the lives of immigrant Chinese; Hirschman’s many translations from European languages and his internationalist poetics; Smith’s brilliant poetry on the sexual politics of work in the sex trade; and Voss, whom British critics have called the best Anglo-American poet of factory work.

Smith and Voss, a married couple from Long Beach, are poetic descendents of Bukowski whom Smith knew. So far, Voss and Smith have been more recognized in Britain than in California while Hirschman has greater recognition in France and Italy than just as Bukowski was first recognized in Germany before any academics in California took him seriously. Further, California working class/political poetry lacks the nostalgia for closed up factories dominating the Midwestern/Eastern poetry of such anthologies as Working Classics.

Starting in the 1970s Hirschman as well as other internationalists did important translations from Latin American poetry, often in collaboration with Latino poets: Alvaro Cardona Hines and Clayton Eschelman each translated Valejo; West End Press while in L.A. put out A Nation of Poets: Writings from the Poetry Workshops of Nicaragua (1988); Alejandro Murguia and Barbara Pashke edited Volcan: Poems from Central America (City Lights). Volcan had twelve translators, both Latino and Anglo. I translated El Salvadoran refugee poets. Just as Rexroth and Gary Snyder’s translations from Asian literature redefined Californian poetry, these translators of Latin American poetry are helping redefine this state’s poetry whose sources are now Neruda as well as Whitman.

In section IV though there are important Latino/a poets included—Gina Valdes, Gary Soto, Francisco X. Alarcon, Juan Felipe Herrera and Aleida Rodriguez—the anthology lacks any sense of the long historical dialogue among Hispanic poets in the state that Juan Felipe Herrera has called “The Califas Movimiento: 1964-1984.” Herrera distinguishes six parts of this movimiento: San Diego’s indigenous consciousness illustrated by Alurista’s 1971 Floricanto; the tough gritty urban avant garde of Los Angeles Chicano/as such as Marisela Norte, poetry’s ambassador from East L.A.; the Fresno school poets Jose Montoya and Louis Omar Salinas often writing about farm workers; and the San Franciscan internationalism of Juan Felipe Herrera himself, a fine poet and one of the translators in Volcan.

Herrera then mentions the strong Chicana voices such as Lorna de Cervantes and Bernice Zamora as well as the impact of some Chicano poets moving from the barrios into the university. Poets like Gary Soto began teaching in universities alongside the large generation of Chicano/a literary critics and scholars. One of these scholars, Reynaldo Ruiz, recently published Hispanic Poetry in Los Angeles 1850-1900 La Poesía Angelina, so questions can now be asked what continuities exist between 19th century, 20th and 21st/ century Latino/a poets.

Having more of a historical sense of the growth of Latino/a poetry as well as having more contemporary Native poets would both show more of the distinctiveness of Californian literature. Traditional Native American poetries are continued in the work of three wonderful contemporary Native poets: William Oandasan, Yuki; Georgiana Sanchez, Chumash; and Janice Gould, Maidu. All three write brilliantly about being Native Californians. Also the African-American poet Kamau d’Aaood, a major voice from SouthCentral Los Angeles, could be included. In the late 1960s he was a member of the Watts Writer Workshop; he has had for thirty year collaborated with L.A.’s world-class jazz musicians; is a superb poet; and founded the World Stage performance space giving 1990s black poets their stage.

Anyone interested in California literature should read this book. In his last paragraph’s Gioia says that his volume as “an historical anthology, it is only in an incomplete and retrospective sense.” Although the honesty and humility is refreshing, this book is only the first step in a journey. Now the state’s other poetries need to have their histories interwoven into the story. Gioia, Yost and Hicks have made the necessary step of creating the first historical anthology of California poets. They should be applauded for their efforts.






















It’s amazing that California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present, edited by Dana Gioia, Chryss Yost and Jack Hicks, is the first such historical anthology. The anthology shows how English-language poets struggled from 1850 to today to apply latest European poetics to talk about a natural landscape and social world in California quite different from Europe’s. California Poetry has tremendously contributed to helping a reader understand the history of English-language California poetry and shows California’s tradition of well-crafted verse. The book, ably capturing the diversity of California’s English language-poetry of the last 50 years, makes a huge contribution but also leaves out a lot.

What has been left out? In Dana Gioia’s introduction he admits “the editors lacked both the expertise and the space to examine, evaluate, and present the best work from the state’s rich American Indian literatures or the substantial Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, and other traditions.” He further argues that only a monolingual volume could accomplish the book’s two purposes: “to establish California’s rightful place in the history of American poetry and to insist on the state’s position as a significant and distinct region in English-language literature.”

Gioia also mentioned California’s historical and geographical uniqueness: the state faces Asia; was formerly owned by Spain and then Mexico; has always been being dominated by huge farms, not small family farms. Yet the anthology neglects to show important poetries reflecting these geographical and historical conditions--Native American, Asian, Latino/a, working class/political poetry—also had histories that shaped this state’s poetry. These other poetries were crucial in creating the distinctive California poetry.

In Section 1 of the 19th century poetry, California Poetry rightly includes the significant Anglo poetry: Ina Coolbrith and George Sterling mainly wrote a derivative romantic poetry praising the California landscape while Bret Harte and Joaquin Miller combined frontier populist voices, English poetry forms, and Anglo nationalism. Gioia in an essay in My California astutely comments that British nature poetry “careful developed over centuries from close observation of nature” but English-language poets in California such as Coolbrith and Sterling don’t find British nightingales, roses, and foxes but California’s meadowlarks, poppies, and coyotes. Gioia feels that these Anglo poets and their descendants have been struggling for 150 years to find the “right images, myths, and characters” for this state’s literature.

The anthology’s excellent introductions show the continuities in this poetry from 1860 through 1910 and how poets collaborated, helping guide and inspire the next generation. Two famous prose writers, Ambrose Bierce and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, have poems that are Section I’s most delightful surprises. Bierce’s “A Rational Anthem” smartly satirizes turn-of-the century political corruption while Gilman’s “Matriatism” contrasts the violence of men fighting for the “fatherland” with the peacefulness of women struggling to create the “motherland.” Happily, the anthology includes Edwin Markham, the most successful poet from this era, as he decries the exploitation of farmer laborers in his “Man with the Hoe,” a poem published in newspapers worldwide. Markham’s poem as well as Frank Norris’s novel The Octopus began California’s literature of protest against the Octopus—the railroad and large landowners—which dominated the state.

Bierce, Gilman and Markham—all riding the wave of late 19thand early 20th century protest—wrote a new, original California poetry. Yet a few good poems don’t make an original literature in California. There’s really little distinctive about this 19th century California poetry until you add in poems from the California Indian languages and translations from poems written by Californios in Spanish. Then, California becomes a its own historical poetic region from 1850-1900 with three distinctive poetries: English; Native American languages; and Spanish.

After 10,000 years of living in California, the Indians have thousands of years of closely observing nature, which permeates their literatures. In fact, the ubiquitous coyote is a comic star in Native myths while the meadowlark as well as Coyote sings the world into existence into the Maidu creation epic. Besides writing poetry saturated in the natural world, Native singers created love lyrics, dramatic narratives, mourning songs and vision chants. This poetry emerged out of spiritual visions and is alive with mythic characters. Including this astonishingly brilliant Native traditional poetry would help show how truly distinctive California’s poetry is. Since Malcolm Margolin published The Way We Lived: California Indian Reminiscences, Stories and Songs, his book began to make this wonderful literature available to an English-language audience.

In Section II on the California modernist the editors have happily included equal numbers of men as well as the lesser-know women poets—Hildegarde Flanner, Janet Lewis, Rosalie Moore, and Josephine Miles and rightly evaluate two of most original voices as Robinson Jeffers and Kenneth Rexroth. Again the anthology’s excellent introductions poets in Section II, III, and IV show how modernists in Section II taught, inspired, and encouraged the rebels and traditionalist poets of Section III and IV. This anthology’s introduction to Rexroth states that this poet, the father of the beats and California alternative lifestyles, combined his populist politics as a radical and pacifist; his love for natural world of Northern California; and his translations from the Chinese and Japanese, which Gioia calls “relevant sources for a California literary identity.”

Alongside Rexroth’s poetry, this book could have included selections from the Chinese poems of those immigrants who were imprisoned at Angel Island. The poems were published in Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigration on Angel Island, 1910-1940, edited by Mark Lai Him, Genny Lim and Judy Yung. Angel Island poems are the beginning of Chinese-American poetry. During this period Rexroth as well as Pound translated from the Chinese, praising the condensed powerful imagery of its poetry. The Angel Island poems have the condensed powerful imagery as well as emotional power that the early modernists so admired in the Chinese poems they translated.

Also including Japanese-American haiku poets from the relocation camps would have contributed to a developing California poetic identity. In the 1920s and 1930s immigrant Japanese joined haiku-clubs, published in Japanese-language newspapers, and competed for literary prizes. These haiku poets, who continued writing during the war, had their haiku collected and translated in Violet Kazue de Cristoforos’s May Sky—There Is Always Tomorrow: An Anthology of Japanese American Concentration Camp Kaiko Haiku. Cary Nelson has said that among the writers were members of California’s haiku-writing clubs who were writing a free-verse modernist haiku popular in the 1930s. Indeed, the haiku Nelson includes in his Modern American Poetry are stunning in their imagery, restraint, and immense sadness—they are brilliant poems. If the book had included the translations of the Japanese haiku poems from the concentration camps, it could have begun documenting the history of California’s Japanese-American poetry.

In section II and III the anthology has Japanese-American poets after World War II writing fine English-language work: Violet Kazue de Cristoforo, Lawson Inada, and Amy Uyematsu. In the post-war period two other Japanese-American poets who could also have been included are Southern California’s Mitsuye Yamada, who writes a powerful poetry about her own experiences in the camps, and San Franciscan Janice Mirikitani, who writes wonderfully about her many subjects including mother’s camp experience. These two women have been mainstays of their poetry communities for decades.

Part III should be praised for its diverse coverage of the 1940s through 1960s. The book shows the many inter-connections of poets of the San Francisco Renaissance, both beats and their allies who as a group finally did create a distinctive California poetry that was in free verse, dissident, including religious quests in Buddhism and Hinduism. These Bay Area rebels included gay voices of Robert Duncan, Thom Gunn, and Jack Spicer as well as Gary Snyder’s imagistic environmental poetry. The anthology has a good selection of the well-crafted poems of the traditionalists, many of who were students of Yvor Winters at Stanford. It also happily includes two working class poets, Charles Bukowski and Okie poet Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel.

Here California Poetry falters, showing Bukowski and McDaniel as isolated working class poets which they weren’t. That early 20th century protest culture of Bierce, Markham, Gilman also included Upton Sinclair, who settled in Los Angeles where he lived the last thirty years of his life inspiring a new generation of 1930s radicals with his writings and running for governor of California; Wobblies who crisscrossed the West including Gary Snyder’s father; Kenneth Rexroth’s Christian socialist parents; and Ferlinghetti’s Italian anarchist parents. In the 1930s H.L. Mencken was printing the first stories of young proletarian writers from Los Angeles like Italian-American John Fante who inspired Bukowksi more than any other writer on earth.

Tillie Olsen was one of the young 1930s proletarian writers in San Francisco. I’d also add to any anthology on California poetry Tillie Olsen’s “I Want You Women Up North to Know,” a powerful political poem about exploitation of Southwest seamstresses. In contrast to Olsen, John Beecher, was a descendant of the illustrious Beecher family and Harvard-educated, but he dropped out in the 1930s to work for years in factories and with sharecroppers. Both Beecher and Olsen were blacklisted in the 1950s and only emerged later in the 1960s after the blacklist receded—a tragedy that any anthology of California poetry needs to include. In Los Angeles, the circle of radical poets around Thomas McGrath was particularly hurt when many of the poets were blacklisted, an act which stunted Los Angeles’ poetry for a decade. One 1950s Los Angeles poet in California Poetry, Bert Myers, learned his craft not from “poets at coffeehouses” as the anthology says but from the McGrath circle of poets. The fine anthology Poets from the Non-Existent City edited by Estelle Gersgoren Novak has at long last featured these writers: Tom McGrath, Don Gordon, Naomi Replansky, Edwin Rolfe, Alvaro Cardona-Hines et al.

California’s dissident tradition was huge by the late 1960s and 1970s, producing young poets who began to publish and appreciate Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel. Also two poets from the working class who really need to be in section four on contemporary poetry are Judy Grahn and Ron Silliman. Grahn was far and away the most important women poet in California in the 1970s as well as the first important lesbian poet. Her Common Woman series of poems had an electrifying effect across the state. Grahn’s work inspired many: black poets like Ntozake Shange, a generation of working class women poets, and also a new lesbian poetry. The anthology excludes Silliman for leaving California but Silliman is as Californian as any poet in this book. Growing up in Berkeley, his life as well as his poetry is rooted in Bay Area dissident culture and his poetry with its deep social conscience is nourished from these roots.

Though section IV on contemporary poetry includes diverse poetry, the diversity should be broadened further to include important contemporary working class/political poets: San Franciscans Carol Tarlen, Nelly Wong, and Jack Hirschman as well as Southern Californians Fred Voss and Joan Jobe Smith. These poets write an oppositional poetry against the new Octopus of the New Gilded age of the late 20th century. All five poets, totally rooted in a hundred-year old California dissident poetry, have created distinctive voices: Tarlen’s avant garde visionary take on the working class; Wong’s evocations of the lives of immigrant Chinese; Hirschman’s many translations from European languages and his internationalist poetics; Smith’s brilliant poetry on the sexual politics of work in the sex trade; and Voss, whom British critics have called the best Anglo-American poet of factory work.

Smith and Voss, a married couple from Long Beach, both are poetic descendents of Bukowski whom Smith knew. So far, Voss and Smith have been more recognized in Britain than in California while Hirschman has greater recognition in France and Italy than just as Bukowski was first recognized in Germany before any academics in California took him seriously. Further, California working class/political poetry lacks the nostalgia for closed up factories dominating the Midwestern/Eastern poetry of such anthologies as Working Classics.

Starting in the 1970s Hirschman as well as other internationalists did important translations from Latin American poetry, often in collaboration with Latino poets: Alvaro Cardona Hines and Clayton Eschelman each translated Valejo; West End Press while in L.A. put out A Nation of Poets: Writings from the Poetry Workshops of Nicaragua (1988); Alejandro Murguia and Barbara Pashke edited Volcan: Poems from Central America (City Lights). Volcan had twelve translators, both Latino and Anglo. I translated El Salvadoran refugee poets. Just as Rexroth and Gary Snyder’s translations from Asian literature redefined Californian poetry, these translators of Latin American poetry are helping redefine this state’s poetry whose sources are now Neruda as well as Whitman.

In section IV though there are important Latino/a poets included in section IV—Gina Valdes, Gary Soto, Francisco X. Alarcon, Juan Felipe Herrera and Aleida Rodriguez—the anthology lacks any sense of the long historical dialogue among Hispanic poets in the state that Juan Felipe Herrera has called “The Califas Movimiento: 1964-1984.” Herrera distinguishes six parts of this movimiento: San Diego’s indigena consciousness illustrated by Alurista’s 1971 Floricanto; the tough gritty urban avant garde of Los Angeles Chicano/as such as Marisela Norte, poetry’s ambassador from East L.A.; the Fresno school poets Jose Montoya and Louis Omar Salinas often writing about farm workers; and the San Franciscan internationalism of Juan Felipe Herrera himself, a fine poet and one of the translators in Volcan.

Herrera then mentions the strong Chicana voices such as Lorna de Cervantes and Bernice Zamora as well as the impact of some Chicano poets moving from the barrios into the university. Poets like Gary Soto began teaching in universities alongside the large generation of Chicano/a literary critics and scholars. One of these scholars, Reynaldo Ruiz, recently published Hispanic Poetry in Los Angeles 1850-1900 La Poesía Angelina (bilingual) so questions can now be asked what continuities exist between 19th century, 20th and 21st/ century Latino/a poets.

Having more of a historical sense of the growth of Latino/a poetry as well as having more contemporary Native poets would both show more of the distinctiveness of Californian literature. Traditional Native American poetries are continued in the work of three wonderful contemporary Native poets: William Oandasan, Yuki; Georgiana Sanchez, Chumash; and Janice Gould, Maidu. All three write brilliantly about being Native Californians. Also the African-American poet Kamau d’Aaood, a major voice from SouthCentral Los Angele, could be included. In the late 1960s he was a member of the Watts Writer Workshop; he has had for thirty year collaborated with L.A.’s world-class jazz musicians; is a superb poet; and founded the World Stage performance space giving 1990s black poets their stage.

Part IV does include a diverse group of contemporary poets, particularly the populist voice prevalent in California’s poetry today as well as given historicized the state’s Anglo mainstream poetry. Anyone interested in California literature should read this book. In his last paragraph’s Gioia says that his volume as “an historical anthology, it is only in an incomplete and retrospective sense.” Although the honesty and humility is refreshing, this book is only the first step in a journey. Now the state’s other poetries need to have their histories interwoven into the story. Gioia, Yost and Hicks have made the necessary step of creating the first historical anthology of California poets. They should be applauded for their efforts.