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Scott Timberg on Creative Destruction

Robinson Jeffers and Big Sur

September 8, 2009 by Scott Timberg


“NO major American poet has been treated worse by posterity than Robinson Jeffers,” poet/critic dana gioia wrote in 1987, lamenting the lack of scholarly attention, an up-to-date selected poems, or a full-dress biography of this california writer who was once read voraciously and still inspires environmentalists.


a few things have changed since then, but the great poet of california’s central coast is still widely overlooked. HERE is my humble attempt to try to bring this austere and charismatic man some attention. this is basically a travel piece about big sur and carmel, but with jeffers’s life, work and times — mostly the 1930s — providing the framework.

so we visited Tor House — the stone house jeffers had built, and the tower he built, almost single-handedly, for his wife by rolling stones up from the pacific — the point lobos state park he captured in verse, as well as the henry miller library, dedicated to a writer who knew and admired jeffers.

while watching at the pacific’s waves slam into the towering rocks, it was hard not to be struck with jeffers’ vision of the california coast as both the geographic end of western culture’s grand experiment and a renewing source for it.

Filed Under: "green", big sur, carmel, poetry, robinson jeffers, west coast

Comments

  1. Ty Griffin says

    September 9, 2009 at 7:14 am

    Scott–

    In 1987, I published a book on Robinson Jeffers. I didn’t know anything about the business aspects of publishing/marketing/selling a book, so it didn’t do well. But it’s a great book (!), and I’d like to send you a copy. I read your article in the Times the other day and thought, Damn!, I wish I’d gotten you the book before the article.

    If you give me an address at the Times or any place else, I’ll send you a copy.

    Please respond to tygrif@gmail.com

    Thanks,

    Ty Griffin
    San Luis Obispo

  2. Robinson Jeffers says

    September 14, 2009 at 5:39 pm

    Scott —

    As you may know, Occidental College is spearheading a “Big Read” this October 1 to November 7. Funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, we and fifteen community partners of the Northeast Los Angeles area are presenting poetry readings and special events that focus on Jeffers poetry connecting it to our own place and environment. I hope you will join us on October 1 to share your personal connection to Jeffers poetry. I believe Charlotte Innes may have mentioned this to you. Please contact me directly at dstieber@oxy.edu.

    In the mean time, I’ll be linking to your blog from our JeffersBigRead blog and hope you do the same.

    Dale Stieber, Special Collections Librarian, Occidental College.

Scott Timberg

I'm a longtime culture writer and editor based in Los Angeles; my book "CULTURE CRASH: The Killing of the Creative Class" came out in 2015. My stories have appeared in The New York Times, Salon and Los Angeles magazine, and I was an LA Times staff writer for six years. I'm also an enthusiastic if middling jazz and indie-rock guitarist. (Photo by Sara Scribner) Read More…

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My book came out in 2015, and won the National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Award. The New Yorker called it "a quietly radical rethinking of the very nature of art in modern life"

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Here is some information on my book, which Yale University Press published in 2015. (Buy it from Powell's, here.) Some advance praise: With coolness and equanimity, Scott Timberg tells what in less-skilled hands could have been an overwrought horror story: the end of culture as we have known … [Read More...]

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