Excerpted with permission from California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present, published in November 2003 by Heyday Books as part of the California Legacy Series.

The writer: Thom Gunn was born in England in 1929 and first came to the United States in 1954 to study at Stanford University. His work chronicles subjects such as the Hell’s Angels in the Fifties, LSD tripping in the Sixties and the scourge of AIDS in San Francisco in the Eighties. Gunn’s books include My Sad Captains (1961); The Sense of Movement (1957); Moly (1971); Jack’s Straw Castle (1976); The Man With Night Sweats (1992); Collected Poems (1994) and Boss Cupid (2000). He has lived in San Francisco since 1960.

The book: California Poetry spans 150 years and was edited by Dana Gioia, Chryss Yost and Jack Hicks. In addition to the eclectic selections from various schools, there’s also a lengthy biographical note about each poet, a page or more, that explores the “complex and often neglected history of California poetry.” In the anthology’s introduction, Gioia says the primary criteria for inclusion was literary excellence, historical importance and representative range. “This anthology rests on a simple but significant assumption that a distinct and memorable poetic tradition has emerged over the past 150 years in California as writers have struggled to assimilate the literary traditions of English with the ‘new and strange’ reality of the Golden State,” Gioia writes. “Encountering a natural world and cultural reality unlike anything the in the traditions of English or American literature, poets had to adapt the language, imagery, modes, and methods of poetry to describe the experience adequately.”

Contributors: From early mining settlements to the coffeehouses of San Francisco’s North Beach, poetry has long been central to the California experience. The anthology includes the work of Ina Coolbrith, Bret Harte; Ambrose Bierce; Robinson Jeffers, Charles Bukowski; Michael McClure; Gary Snyder, Thomas Gunn, Francisco X. Alarcón, Robert Hass, and many others. Read more.

Review: “Fortunately, the task of editing California Poetry has fallen to the triumvirate of UC Davis’ redoubtable Jack Hicks, who also helped edit UC Press’ first volume of its Literature of California anthology; Santa Barbara poet and writer Chryss Yost; and new National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Dana Gioia, California’s best gift to Washington, D.C. since Earl Warren left Sacramento for the Supreme Court,” writes David Kipen in the San Francisco Chronicle. “Thanks to their inspired logrolling — the introduction boasts of including ‘no poem that at least one of us did not genuinely admire’ — the resulting treasury goes a long way toward giving even casual readers of California poetry what the critic Van Wyck Brooks used to call ‘a usable past.’

“As those readers dip into the anthology, a lot of the fun will come from watching one theme or image pass down the generations from hand to hand, like an heirloom.”

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