Hugh Steinberg’s response in the comments log to Monday’s note triggered a thought. He was surprised that I hadn’t gotten into Taylor Brady’s work previously – “He's been an important figure in Bay Area poetics for awhile.” I had heard something along those lines when I was in the Bay Area last fall & in January, which is what motivated me to buy the book when I saw it on the SPD list. But it reminded me that, although I’m often associated with the SF writing scene, it’s now been ten years since I last lived there.

Given that I tend to count everything & note all manner of anniversaries, it struck me as odd, or at least noteworthy, that I hadn’t marked that date here with a note when it occurred on May 1. In part, that’s because it’s an ambiguous date. I began working in Pennsylvania on May 1, 1995, when I was hired by a Technology Service Solutions, a joint venture then owned by IBM & Kodak. But my family didn’t follow along for another month – I spent a good part of the first few weeks not only as the guest of Bob Perelman & Francie Shaw while getting to know my new job, but also running around looking at every three & four bedroom rental out in the western suburbs that had some kind of yard suitable for toddlers. Krishna got to see my four of my top five choices – one had already been snapped up – on Mother’s Day weekend, and we moved in two weeks later into a duplex just four blocks from where we ended up buying at the end of the year. I’ve actually owned my current house longer than I’ve lived anywhere since I got out of highschool in 1964.

I’ve long since stopped thinking of myself as a Bay Area Poet, tho I don’t always feel entirely integrated into the Philadelphia scene either. When I note that I live in Chester County, Pennsylvania, I mean that very literally – I have access to, but not immersion in, the Philly scene. For example, I suspect that I spend far less time in the city limits than do either Samuel R. Delany or Charles Bernstein – and they both live in New York City, commuting as needed to their jobs at Temple & Penn. There are also a number of poets who have grown up in Chester County – Pattie McCarthy, Jenn McCreary, Ange Mlinko – but it’s also worth noting that none live here now.

When we lived in the Bay Area, Krishna & I noted that many young poets follow a pattern of spending a few years – sometimes as many as 20 – in one of the two major literary centers of the U.S., NY or SF, but then dispersing outward again, either to an immediate suburb (hence Bolinas, suburb of poets) or further, either to where they originally grew up (Ken Irby & Ron Johnson back in Kansas) or else following a career, especially if that career should be teaching. Perhaps because I’d grown up in the Bay Area, it hadn’t occurred to us that we would be part of this same gathering-and-diaspora process that perpetually renews both literary communities, but sometimes can leave the ex-pats feeling a little stranded.

The economics behind such moves are pretty much unassailable. New York – even Brooklyn – is one of the most expensive places to live in the U.S. San Francisco is even worse. Not that DC or Boston are notably better, necessarily, but in Philadelphia one sees younger poets actually buying homes without coming from significant inherited wealth &, over time, that’s going to have a shaping impact of the continuity of the literary community.

I’ve noted before that I’m not certain I would have accepted the job here if it hadn’t already been clear that the web was transforming the geographic equation for literary networks in the U.S. quite dramatically. In 1995, that meant the Poetics List, the much maligned ur-listserv of the post-avant world. (Indeed, many of that list’s well-documented shortcomings can be traced back to the simple impossibility of running a listserv with more than one thousand active members – discussion beyond announcements devolves into incoherence at that level & those who do post constantly become Rorschach patterns for the rest of us.¹) Today the options are far wider & a poet in Arkansas or wherever is no longer simply stuck with whatever the local scene has to offer. The rise of an actual scene in North Carolina, for example, is something that either has rarely happened before in my lifetime, unless you include Ted Berrigan & some high school kids in Tulsa fifty years ago & maybe the folks around Frank Stanford & C.D. Wright in Arkansas, or else has happened only in settings where the local stayed local, so that hardly anybody at any distance ever got word of it.²

It’s possible over time that the web’s capacity for connecting people at a distance will erode the importance of the literary centers, tho I’m skeptical of that. I think there is enormous good to come from face-to-face feedback in a community setting, whether it’s at a bar or coffee house or over somebody’s kitchen table. That’s why readings are so important – they aren’t where literature itself happens (save maybe for all the scribblers in the front row) but they are poetry’s back office. The few poets who shun readings & reading scenes do so at great risk, not so much in terms of their social connectedness – tho that shouldn’t be underestimated – but even more so in terms of its impact on the quality of their writing. One of the things that made langpo – at least in the Bay Area – so vital during its heyday in the 1970s was how very hard on one another the poets were, tho I know that this sometimes intimidated newcomers to the scene. There’s no substitute for that on the web, not even with online zines & the rise of audio. Writers really need somebody who will look them in the eye and say, you know that second piece you did tonight, I didn’t buy that at all. Not that these people will be right all the time, but there is great value in having to defend one’s own aesthetic, and criticism from a friend or simpatico poet is very different than, say, hearing that Billy Collins can’t read you.

So I look back at the Bay Area scene with great wistfulness at times, not just because of the great views & good bookstores – which in fact are mediocre bookstores in a nation where a good one doesn’t exist – but because there can be a level of resistance in such a community as that, where this same level of push-pull is far more fragile even in a city with as lively a scene as Philadelphia. In the past decade, the closest we’ve come here – and I can claim zero credit for any of it – was PhillyTalks, Louis Cabris’ brilliant attempt to get different poets to address something in common. If it had a weakness, the series’ concept of always involving at least one out-of-towner meant that everybody was at their most polite, when that isn’t always the most useful approach.

The Bay Area scene had already evolved away from that sort of confrontational poetics long before I moved east, but simply because of the critical mass one finds in the Bay Area, it’s something that can erupt there almost at any time. In ten years here, I haven’t seen the same willingness on the part of younger poets to goad one another toward sharper self-definition, even tho I think that the underlying supportiveness for it, an absolute pre-requisite, exists in the scene. I think that must be why I value Linh Dinh so much – of all the poets associated with Philadelphia, he’s the person most willing to ask an impossible question after a reading or talk – and it’s the impossible questions that make better poets of us all.

 

¹ Why, for example, Alan Sondheim uses listservs rather than a blog for distribution of his texts, is beyond me, unless it is because it is harder for readers to opt out of seeing them on a list. It still doesn’t mean that they get read, but it has reduced at least one list, ImitationPoetics, to a kind of Sondheim-driven silence.

² Black Mountain College in the 1950s wasn’t the same sort of thing at all, since – with the notable exception of Jonathan Williams – it involved no local participation whatsoever. It could have happened wherever those displaced northeasterners elected to gather & could just as easily been the Ojai or Bisbee or Clovis or Marfa or Woodstock or Berkshire scene as it was that of Ashville, NC.