Spring Lit Issue 2005
Drunk on Words
Ffunny Fforde
Death Row Discourse
Judi Bari
Poetics of Friendship
Junkie Journals

Chalk and Cheese

Despite their differences, poets Dana Gioia and Kay Ryan share a primary passion

By Jordan E. Rosenfeld

Author and radio host Garrison Keillor, known for the radio variety show Prairie Home Companion, launched a new series on Minnesota Public Radio this winter called Literary Friendships, which features writers who are “exploring the solitude of writing and the company of friendships.”

The show includes writers who have been friends for as long as 40 years, such as poets Donald Hall and Robert Bly, the married novelists Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman, but more to the point, the unexpected friendship of Dana Gioia and Kay Ryan.

Gioia is, in almost every way, a very public person. He is a former businessman with an MBA from Harvard Business School, the former vice-president of General Foods and currently the chairman for the government-run National Endowment for the Arts. His 1991 book of essays, Can Poetry Matter? sparked a national debate on the importance of poetry, and he stirred up another storm when, at his direction, the NEA last year launched a report called Reading at Risk about the sad state of reading in the United States.

Kay Ryan is a self-proclaimed “private poet,” who was all but unknown to the larger world of poetry when she and Gioia became friends back in 1996, though she had published four volumes of poetry with small (read: non-New York-based) presses.

Gioia, who claims he “fell in love with her work” almost immediately, became her public advocate, including her in anthologies he edited and writing the first essay ever published about her work, “Discovering Kay Ryan,” in the Dark Horse literary journal in 1998. Ryan is no longer an unknown, having gone on to be published in The New Yorker magazine and recently winning the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Despite a wider fame, she still maintains a private life, living in the same house in Fairfax that she has shared for the past 26 years with her partner, Carol Adair, riding her bike as her main form of entertainment and reading the paper each morning. Her most recent book of poetry is Say Uncle (Grove Press).

“Ten years ago, a small publisher gave me a review copy of Kay’s book Flamingo Watching. I couldn’t put the book away. Kay’s work is funny and metaphoric, and I felt that Kay was the best new poet I had come across in years,” says Gioia by phone from his office in Washington.

When he discovered that Ryan lived in Marin County, not far from his own home in Sonoma County, Gioia sent her a postcard saying he admired her work. Part of the postcard, which Ryan read live on Keillor’s show, says, “Dear Ms. Ryan, I hope that Northern California is not so big a place that we will not eventually meet.”

They did meet and quickly became friends, continuing to get together when Gioia came through town and maintaining a steady phone relationship to this day.

“I was quite flattered by his attentions,” says Ryan. “Dana was quite a phenomenon to me because he is a man of so many parts. He was absolutely dazzling in his energy and in the wide variety of projects that he is always involved in. That’s very opposite to my nature, which is to undertake one or zero projects at a time.”

“After you’ve known her a while, you realize there’s an absolute continuity between the poetry and the woman,” says Gioia. “She often scolds me for working too much. Kay knows a workaholic when she sees one.”

In addition to their common literary leanings, both Ryan and Gioia are from Southern California. “We’re both working-class, blue-collar kids who studied at the school of hard knocks. Both of us developed as poets outside the formal literary establishment,” says Gioia.

Gioia grew up in Hawthorne, Calif., born to a Mexican telephone-operator mother and a Sicilian father. He was the first in his family to go to college, at Stanford University.

“I had an odd but typical American childhood, which is to say an immigrant childhood. Sicilians can’t bear to be away from their relations, even if they can’t stand one another,” he laughs. “There were always 30 or 40 relatives nearby.”

Ryan grew up in the Central Valley. Her father was an oil driller, and her mother, a part-time elementary school teacher.

“My mother was a person very much against any kind of airs or self-display. When I asked her what she thought I should do with my life, she said that I should probably go to secretarial school so that if my husband died, I’d have a way to support the children,” says Ryan. “I knew I was going to leave the little desert town where we lived. I knew that education was the only way out, the only thing I could see that suggested a future for me.”

Ryan first attended a local community college and then UCLA, but found the latter “numbing in its anonymity,” preferring more intimacy and a slower pace. This need for the slow and the simple may be one of the greatest differences between Ryan and Gioia, and one of the things that makes people curious about their friendship.

“Dana finds meaning in connecting other people and in making projects. He’s a maker of anthologies, a creator of conferences and programs. He is profoundly a multitasker. I am a mono or an a-tasker. The most important aspects of myself can only be accessed through the process of writing,” says Ryan.

Yet when each writer talks about the other, similarities quickly become apparent. Both have a penchant for cracking jokes and for not falling prey to the sloppiness of slang or vernacular when speaking.

“When you’re involved in some intense kind of solitary creative activity, you wonder if you’re not at some level slightly insane,” says Gioia. “It’s wonderfully reassuring to meet another writer and discover that he or she shares your insanity.”

“For most of the world,” Ryan reflects, “writing, especially writing poetry, might be a nice hobby or recreation, but not a primary passion or the deepest engagement with life. It’s wonderful to have someone as a friend for whom it is essential and central.”

Both describe the other as “down to earth” and both say that they laugh a lot in each other’s company. Both also express having felt themselves to be outsiders in the literary world at one point, having developed themselves as poets without the shaping hand of an academic institution. Ryan says, “I think that all genuine poets are outsiders, really. I don’t think you can be taught. If your writing resembles something else, then that’s already been done. The very definition of poetry is that something eternally true is articulated in a way that makes it seem as if it was just invented.”

When asked to describe Gioia’s work, Ryan says, “I think Dana writes very elegant poetry that is deeply grounded in his experiences and informed by his noble heart.” One of the words that Gioia uses to describe Kay’s poetry is “spiky,” which delights her.

“I think poetry should sort of poke through your skin, shouldn’t fit you quite right. I don’t think that poetry should be ingested easily,” she says.

“Every single thing that I write has a different inspiration and comes from a different source. What I can say is that the act of writing, what keeps me writing, is that I can only know through writing–my major sense organ is apparently a pencil.”

The idea of writing poetry actually embarrassed me at first,” Ryan adds. “It was alien to my roots.”

Gioia expresses a similar feeling. “I never let anybody know I was a poet while working at General Foods. It seems sort of pretentious to tell someone you’re a poet.”

“Nobody ever says, ‘I need that poem by Friday,'” Ryan chuckles.

In Gioia’s essay “Discovering Kay Ryan,” her poem “Paired Things” is featured. At the time the essay was written, Ryan and Gioia had not been friends for very long, but a line in the poem seems as though it could have been written about their friendship: “So many paired things seem odd.”

When asked about it, Ryan laughs, “I think that’s absolutely perfect for us! Dana and I are as different as chalk and cheese–that’s a British euphemism–but then I thought, ‘Who is going to get to be the cheese and who the chalk?’ I think Dana’s the cheese.”

The ‘Literary Friendships’ show featuring Dana Gioia and Kay Ryan is archived online at http://literaryfriendships.publicradio.org.

From the April 13-19, 2005 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Spring Lit Issue 2005
Drunk on Words
Ffunny Fforde
Death Row Discourse
Judi Bari
Poetics of Friendship
Junkie Journals

At Loggerheads

Judi Bari makes news posthumously–again

By Bruce Robinson

Berkeley-based writer Kate Coleman calls her unauthorized biography The Secret Wars of Judi Bari: A Car Bomb, the Fight for the Redwoods and the End of Earth First! ($25.95) “a quick read,” but it’s hard to say the same about the exhaustive online rebuttal her book has prompted at www.colemanhoax.com. Taken together, however, they provide a perversely contrapuntal portrait of the determinedly controversial North Coast activist and the ongoing debate over her political legacy.

Coleman, who considers herself a member of the political left (“Even if nobody wants me,” she quipped ruefully at Copperfield’s Books in Sebastopol last month), has come under fire, not just for what she wrote, but for the company she’s keeping.

Secret Wars is published by Encounter Books, a San Francisco­based imprint that has also put out a slam against Hillary Clinton (The Hillary Trap), as well as releasing titles by such well-known archconservatives as William Kristol and David Horowitz. Her book had its origins in a 1999 article, “The Ghost of Judi Bari,” published in The Anderson Valley Advertiser, a paper known for its combative stance and tone, but hardly for being a bastion of neoconservatism. Encounter publisher Peter Collier, with whom Coleman had previously worked when he edited Ramparts magazine (and when his politics were decidedly more liberal), suggested expanding the article into a biography.

“The publisher and I agreed on the book,” Coleman elaborates in a telephone interview from her East Bay home. “No one restrained me, no one told me what to say ideologically. There are many things about my publisher that we don’t agree on. But he’s a First Amendment guy, and he believes in giving a writer freedom.”

If Coleman’s writing was not constricted by her publisher, her reporting was certainly hampered by a lack of access to many of Judi Bari’s closest associates, including most of her family members, her ex-husband, Mike Sweeney, and Darryl Cherney, the Earth First! eco-agitator who was injured along with Bari in the 1990 Oakland car bombing. Consequently, the portrait provided is drawn largely from the recollections of numerous former friends and allies, virtually all of whom had experienced some kind of falling out with Bari before her death from breast cancer in 1997. While Coleman cites sources for everything she is told, she fails to make clear which sources were estranged from Bari and when, or to offer any independent assessment of their relative credibility, even when contradictions arise.

Although the juicy hearsay is augmented by extensive citations from Bari’s own writings and published interviews, and third party reporting from the Press Democrat and other sources, the net result is a fragmentary mix of empirical fact, Bari’s own hyperbolic rhetoric and dishy gossip. This all might be easier to accept were it not for the disdainful tone that creeps into Coleman’s prose. Repeated references to Bari’s bralessness, for example, become almost comic, especially when the rest of her wardrobe scarcely warrants comment. But gratuitous insults to even minor figures (IWW union storyteller and folksinger Utah Phillips is dismissed as a “graying Pete Seeger knock-off”) reinforce a disparaging tone inconsistent with genuine journalistic objectivity.

Asked at last month’s Sebastopol reading about her book’s “tone of disrespect,” Coleman demurred. “I think I was fair,” the author replied. “I think there are things to admire in her and things to criticize.”

In fact, it is Bari’s politics that Coleman seems to most admire. She approvingly notes that the activist’s parents were both communists in the early 1950s, and traces her history of activism back to anti-war demonstrations at the University of Maryland in the early 1970s, long before she moved to Northern California. “She was a Maoist who fell in love with the trees,” Coleman says. But Bari’s personal life, as portrayed by Coleman, was a series of “secret wars”–a mess of trashed relationships and estrangements, from her parents, her sister, and most of all, from her husband. Sweeney is accused, at various times, of planting a bomb at a Santa Rosa airfield, hitting or threatening Bari, writing the infamous “Lord’s Avenger” letter that sought to take credit for the car bomb and even of being the bomber.

No wonder he’s pissed.

Sweeney is reportedly the uncredited voice of outrage behind ColemanHoax.com, which offers an almost paragraph by paragraph refutation of Coleman’s text, from major assertions about the extent and effectiveness of Bari’s environmental activism after the bombing to quibbles over such minor details as whether Philo’s Hendy Woods is a national forest or a state park. The sheer number of alleged errors–more than 350 in a 232-page text–is certainly imposing, even discounting the numerous repetitions, and Coleman has acknowledged that her book was rushed into print without adequate fact checking. Still, one wonders how many mistakes might have been averted had Sweeney or other Bari intimates consented to be consulted as the manuscript was being drafted.

Looming over all this is the still unanswered question of who was actually responsible for the car bombing, a mystery that law enforcement appears to have abandoned long ago. Coleman cites various theories but expends little effort exploring them. She makes a point, however, of clarifying the popular misconception that Bari and Cherney’s eventual court victory against the FBI and the Oakland police affirmed the duo’s frequent speculations that law-enforcement officers had planted the bomb. The 2002 court judgment instead focused on charges that Bari’s and Cherney’s rights were violated during the investigation of the blast, and that they were defamed by police and FBI statements that portrayed the pair as violent radicals injured by their own bomb.

While there can be little doubt that her court battles sapped some of Bari’s time and energy that might otherwise have gone toward what she hailed as “the fight for the redwoods,” it was her very public wars–against Maxxam and Pacific Lumber, as well as the FBI–that made Bari an iconic figure. Coleman’s flawed but intriguing portrait has served to renew interest in Bari’s role and influence, and perhaps set the stage for a more thorough telling of her life’s story in the forthcoming biography from feminist writer Susan Faludi.

From the April 13-19, 2005 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.