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The California Poem by Eleni Sikelianos. Coffee House Press. $16.00, paper.

Review by J. E. Pitts

A good friend of mine is from California, but “northern California”, as he is apt to correct me. To hear him talk of California, there is a line of demarcation that bisects the center of the state, separating the enlightened of the northern region from the rabble of the southern. But it’s not so easy for him to secede, because, as he grudgingly admits, his heart rests in the whole of California, not just in half. That is how I think that Eleni Sikelianos too must feel about California, except she decided to write an epic to her home state. Epics abound in poetry, ranging in subject from the wars of the Greeks to the Brooklyn Bridge, but rarely has an entire state come under such a strong magnification. That anyone today would write and publish a book-length poem about an American state is the unique part of this story-the fact that the state in question is California doesn’t strike me as strange at all.

California has always been the catch-all for the craziness of our country, nay, our continent. California, the wags chuckle, is where people go to either disappear or become movie stars. But the state gets a bad rap. As the largest state of the lower forty-eight, it occupies a great amount of both physical and psychic space on our national radar. Much of our media likes to focus on the glitter of the movies, or the high-profile trials, or that a former bodybuilder turned action star retired from all that hoopla to go into the easy world of politics. People have always rushed there, even after the gold was gone, and returned to the hinterlands with stories of a modern utopia, replete with sun and ocean and oranges, a dreamland that has always been too big to merely summarize. Who could argue with a place as brazenly American as California?

Sikelianos doesn’t argue, though; what she’s done is give us a dual biography of a place and of a life lived in that place. There are startling moments in The California Poem that reveal this core duality, like this bit:

Everything I know

occurred in California and everything

I know later, everything I know of California

is shaped like a piece of cardboard

and smells like the black plastic pitch that stretched between Bakersfield & apricots

Blue & green & the penny arcade, my dream is just like that:

a thousand miles

long & deep into the otter ice water cliffs

Almonds Fresno when I was nearly blond & knees straight

as an arrow & my name

was Dylan-in-the-grass-blue-grass, when my home-

stead read: Mary of the villas

of-the-vocables-of-conches Jalama ice plant and Spanish

mosses

The core of The California Poem swings back and forth between a work of personal history to a work of physical history, compounded and pressed down, much like the geological layers of California itself, in its plants and animals that keep popping up:

Wherever shallow, standing water remains; along the coast in brackish loops, around

springs, ponds, lakes, and sluggish streams

Common Tule, Bulrush, Cattails, sedge and spike rush, pondweed

Predaceous diving beetle, Giant Water bug, toadbug

Gallinule, Coot, Marsh Wren, Redwinged Blackbird, Yellowthroat

Pond turtles, Treefrogs, Garter snakes

I believe I said

in secret chambers

of the human

heart

in Gold Ruin

amongst hydraulic quark scars

walked Dante

through

tule fog

bunchgrass

yerba santa & chamise, chinquapin, in

tinder-dry CA

in deserts turned to great cities

there were “books……in the…..brooks”

babbling great poetry

The California Poem could be called the first great environmental poem of the 21^st century in the way that it lists species here and there almost like a textbook of wildlife, but there is nothing clinical about it; rather, each piece of the poem intertwines with another, and another, and another, until the whole thing is of one solid piece, much like the state that it describes. And the personal state, of Eleni herself, surfaces on certain pages to provide for some of the most beautiful moments:

Suddenly, this atmosphere lends itself

to strange forms, bizarre musics, of the uncoverers

of early, earthly California, A ship moves down

Cape Flattery. Was it an island, ruled by

Amazons, black, “to the right of the Indies”?

Do my eyes

own this? Oh yes

I think they do

I spin them left

I spin them right

a cool geometry

Take me

down to swoon at large

among the jangling noises, clamoring tongues, yield up

your conquered plains; with a wagon and a bicycle I will take

California and all its free-

way lanes with fear and fervor over

my sweating edge of the sea

(An earlthy beauty shines

through the broken lights)

The California Poem is a work of hypnotic power. When you have taken it all in you realize that it reminds us, simply, what it is like to be alive and to live days of your life in a place that is bigger than you are, big enough to hold your heart in its grip, to trap your soul lockstep in memory. We can all relate, no matter what state we occupy. We all have our moments of longing for home, and for the familiar. That wave comes over all of us at some point, and when it does you know to the core of your being there is no other place to match a place that you dearly love. The California Poem is Eleni Sikelianos’ attempt to put that wave that rushes the heart into words, and she has succeeded, and will be remembered for it.

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