From “Geography of Home”
My grandparents moved to the San Joaquin Valley not long after the turn of the century. From that time until the 1970’s, the Valley consisted of small farm towns separated from each other by vast stretches of cultivated land. When I left home in the 1960’s to go way to college, I didn’t expect to return . I hated the blistering heat in the summer, the fog in the winter, the lack of culture, and the absence of geography. I wanted to live in beautiful places . And , for a brief while I did- Santa Barbara, Laguna Beach, San Francisco, New England and later North Carolina. However , I eventually returned to Fresno to study poetry. I also returned to the orchards and vineyards, to to the home of field workers, Portuguese dairy farmers, and my old Armenian neighbors, to the Fresno poets, to Levine and Everwine and group of talented young writers all celebrating the place I had once mocked. Levine championed everything from the valley dust to the factory worker. ; Miquel Hernandez wrote of love from his infested Spanish prison cell; and William Saroyan had crafted a charming story of a bicycle ride from Fresno to Hanford, my home town.
Over the last thirty years, I have come to learn that two essential components of this celebratory tradition in poetry are passion and careful observation . While I was never lacking in the first, the second was a task made all the more difficult that often seemed desolate and impoverished. Even now , if you drive east a few miles into the countryside or the nearby foothills, the fields of yellow grass with their outcroppings of rock and skeletal oaks are still reminiscent of beauty of southern europe...
