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Scott Timberg on Creative Destruction

California Poetry and Robinson Jeffers

March 18, 2010 by Scott Timberg

WHEN I put together a blog poll on Best California Poet, I was certain Charles Bukowski was going to barge in, whiskey bottle in hand, and run away with it.

So I’m pleased to report that a far more significant poet ended up winning – and by a landslide. Take a bow, Robinson Jeffers!! He not only presided over the best turned-out vote in the history of The Misread City, he won by nearly as large a margin as Jimi Hendrix did in my Favorite Guitarist poll.

Of course, in most circles, the great poet of Carmel and Big Sur is still largely unknown – as is the runner up, Weldon Kees, who drew nearly double the votes Barfly garnered.
Jeffers – a classically flavored poet of wide-open spaces and the expanses of the Pacific — and Kees – a jazz-loving hipster who (probably) threw himself off the Golden Gate Bridge in 1955 – could not be more different. But I’m quite honored to have both of them championed by readers of The Misread City.
“No major poet has been treated worse by posterity than Robinson Jeffers,” Dana Gioia wrote in his essay “Strong Counsel,” going on to describe his embrace by environmentalists and general readers and his neglect by literary scholars.

“More than any other American Modernist Jeffers wrote about ideas – not teasing epistemologies, learned allusions, or fictive paradoxes – but big, naked, howling ideas that no reader can miss.”

Dana and I disagree on a number of things, but Jeffers is one place where our tastes come together, and we both love Tor House, the poet’s domicile in Carmel.

U.S. Poet laureate and poetic minimalist Kay Ryan also drew a good number of votes, while Kenneth Rexroth and Lawrence Ferlinghetti did less well.

This poll, like all of them, drew protests for who was not included. As I sometimes say, running a poll with too many choices is like throwing a party in a house with too many rooms – you need some compression so people will come together. Still, I wish I’d put Gary Snyder in here instead of Ferlinghetti – Snyder’s career has continued to evolve and deepen, and he will probably be part of my next literary poll.

As for Buk, I have nothing against the guy, and like some of the work okay. No doubt he would be more fun to hang out with than Jeffers, who was often cranky and very austere in his tastes. But much of the cult of Bukowski, I think, turns on the American romanticism of alcoholism. All of the other poets on the list have earned their reputations from something more substantial. Here’s to them.

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

Comments

  1. FILM MAKER says

    March 18, 2010 at 3:08 pm

    Once again you and TMC raise consciousness, promote and expand the cultural horizons of those lucky enough to read your blog as well as provide a forum to discuss wonderful people and subjects.
    Thank you.

  2. Rodak says

    March 19, 2010 at 2:15 am

    Had you included Gary Snyder, he’d of had my vote. I rank Rexroth high because of his translations; Bukowski because of his distance from the academy.

  3. Scott Timberg says

    March 19, 2010 at 8:02 am

    Rexroth will be the subject of an upcoming book late this year or early next. Fascinating, polymathic guy — I will document it on The Misread City.

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…

Culture Crash, the Book

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"

I urge you to buy it at your favorite independent bookstore or order it from Portland's Powell's.

Culture Crash

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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