More on California's Poet Laureate, Al Young

Hat tip to TBV reader Joan Peterson, who caught my piece on California's new poet laureate, Al Young, even though it had scrolled off the front page — and pointed me to a story about Al in today's L.A. Times.

Times writer Scott Martelle captures the qualities that make Al so remarkable a figure in the worlds of literature, music and academe — as well as a great international spokesman for the best in American culture. Al brings the full, immediate, emotional power of poetry to readers and listeners. As he says, there's nothing hard about poetry. It's natural. It's social. We ordinary folk are distanced from poetry today, and he blames the Modernists and their co-conspirators in the academy for that:

"Eliot and Pound and that whole bunch made poetry seem difficult," Young said during a lengthy interview spanning the train rides between Berkeley and Sacramento. "They generated the idea that if poetry weren't obscure or learned, then it wasn't really poetry…. For Americans in the 19th century, poetry was one of the main forms of entertainment. People memorized poems, they sat around and read it to each other. They bought poetry. Poetry was reviewed like novels are now." With modernism, "poetry disappeared into the academy. We teach it as something that we're not going to naturally understand."

The article makes mention of a website Al had told me he hopes to set up, wearing his Poet Laureate hat — as part of his lifelong project to "bring poetry to the people, and people to poetry" (to paraphrase our BE for Change motto). It will be a "virtual coffeehouse" for poets, set up under the aegis of the state library.

"It would be of particular use to students and teachers," Young said. "We're hashing it out, but I think it could be a really good thing. There's so much going on with poetry in California."

In a strange ironic twist, Al's longtime publisher closed its doors some time ago, and his books are out of print. He told me that there's a new "Collected" in the works, but meanwhile, you can find his novels and poems through used book sellers. Barnes & Noble has the most complete list I've come across. "Sitting Pretty," "Seduction by Light" and "Who is Angelina" are the novels I'd go to first. Al has a remarkable ability to tell stories through the eyes and voices of strong women — no small accomplishment for male novelists. As for the poems, well, you will get lost in them. Not lost as you might in the intellectual convolutions of Pound and Eliot. Lost, as in immersed in worlds beyond your own boundaries.

I can safely promise that you will embrace the journey and be amply rewarded for the effort you make to track down Al's books and experience him for yourself.