Kim Young on being a West Coast Poet
I’ve been thinking about what it means to be a “West Coast” writer—and, particularly, a writer from LA. I only began to see this West Coast-ness after I made it into an East Coast graduate school. It was there, among the rolling New England countryside, that I learned about Lacrosse and boarding schools and a certain long-standing literary tradition I was only exposed to in books. I certainly never placed my hands on the grave of Robert Frost or knew anyone involved with, say, the selection process of the Yale Series of Younger Poets (like some of my East Coast friends). Maybe this is just a class issue. More likely, my literary tradition falls under the lineage of Mark Twain—breezing into an Atlantic Monthly dinner party and lampooning “New England Brahmins” Longfellow, Emerson, and Homes.
I’m from LA. I know earthquakes and how collapsible a four story apartment building can be. My father retired after twenty years on the LAPD. I know the Rodney King beating and subsequent riots. I know what cops do off duty. I know how a fast a California arson fire can move. When I lived in Germany, one of the poets I met there lamented the difficulty in writing even a sentence—after her language, the language of Kant and Goethe and Rilke, a language she cherished, had been used so brutally by the Nazis.
Me, I want sentences. I want to string together subjects and nouns and objects, so I can try to make some kind of sense of this chaos. And not just trite, empty, commercial language (we were kids who not only sang Whitney Houston’s “The Greatest Love Of All” for our elementary school graduation, but signed along in ASL) but an utterance that might hold the swirling contradictions of a place that can seem, at times, utterly overwhelming. My reaction to an environment that feels inherently unstable is to chase an aesthetic that can accommodate both disorder and gravity—both the morphing of meaning inherent to language itself, but that rises from the shards with imagination and insight and feeling. Then again, maybe this has nothing to do with being a writer from LA.
While I was away at grad school, walking through those beautiful Vermont meadows, I proclaimed to my friend Athena that I hated nature poems. Recently, though, I heard SoCal poet Marsha de la O read her phenomenal poem, “Coyote Song.” It’s an unflinching poem that takes place on a ranch during San Diego’s Witch Creek fire. I’ve heard de la O read the poem only twice, but what’s stayed with me is the portion centered on an old dog loyally guarding the ranch’s perimeter, while being lured by the call of a male coyote as the pack flees the burning hills. It’s a stunning poem. A stunning nature poem. But nature isn’t represented as a supreme order or as some idealized thing of beauty—something I never completely related to. Rather, nature is a force representing that wild and untamable part that lives inside of each of us.
If I were to characterize writing from the West Coast it would have something to do with this wildness. (I mean, California was once the Wild West.) There’s Twain publicly denouncing that speech at the Atlantic Monthly’s birthday dinner for John Greenleaf Whittier, while secretly relishing its disobedient humor. There something unruly and unconventional—some pioneering spirit to what we create here.
Read Kimberly Young’s poem “My Aunt Believes in Horses” in Issue 7 of the Los Angeles Review.