From Poetry Flash (February/March 1997):
On Native Grounds
City Terrace Field Manual by Sesshu Foster (Kaya)
Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir by D.J. Waldie (Norton)
From Nathaniel West and Raymond Chandler through Charles Bukowski and Joan Didion
to Wanda Coleman and Mike Davis, among various lesser knowns, Los Angeles over the
last six decades has bred an increasingly diverse and distinctive range of literary
expression. It also seems only poetically just that Henry Miller and Anais Nin. those
consummate egomythomaniacs, both found their way to L.A. in their later years just
as Bukowski's star was rising as the new low-budget bard of the self-made self. Historian
Carey McWilliams, in his classic study Southern California: An Island on the Land,
observes that the L.A. region is a cultural exception within the larger exception
of California as a whole, a geographically and psychologically isolated realm--and
thus a microcosm of America--where escapist and adventurous individuals have traditionally
migrated for the sake of reinventing themselves.
Idiosyncratic Los Angeles artists such as Sam Rodia and Ed Kienholtz, musicians like
Charles Mingus and Joni Mitchell, and authors like some of the above have engaged
that tradition in their own ways by reinventing their respective forms. While the
spectacles of the entertainment industry, celebrity scandals and natural disasters
all lend a mythic or legendary air to mass-mediated versions of the Southland, equally
vital in a wide-angle view of the city and its multiple cultures are narratives of
the urban and suburban enclaves housing the people who work in the factories or wash
the dishes in the region's restaurants. In recent years, the voices of these less
visible communities have been rising to take a significant place in the L.A. literary
landscape. Anthologies have proliferated, and books by uncelebrated local writers
have found their way to the margins of the marketplace.
In a barrio called City Terrace in East L.A., Sesshu Foster was writing and assembling
pieces of his recently issued City Terrace Field Manual, a book which in its recombination
of literary traditions begs the question of genre and extends the boundaries of existing
poetic frontiers. In an intensely personal form of documentary prose poetry Foster
offers a vivid picture--or collage, or kaleidoscope slide show, or smashed-glass
mosaic--of the territory where he spent most of his boyhood and to which he's remained
connected both physically and emotionally ever since.
In their mixture of imaginative and nonfiction techniques. their blend of narrative
and lyric elements, their musical forms and unconventional structures, even their
almost identical lengths, Waldie's and Foster's books have much in common. Both are
extraordinarily effective in conveying the texture and atmosphere of a very particular
geographic setting; both narrator-protagonists are unheroic self-effacing recorders
of local day-to-day life, even as they reveal their most intimate responses to what
they've grown to know as normal; both exercise a crafty formal control, an economical
compression which gives their writing tremendous resonance. In the days while reading
and after finishing both these books, I couldn't stop thinking about them.
And yet in other ways Waldie's and Foster's books could hardly be more different
from each other. While both writers have remained close to home (Waldie in the very
house where he's lived since he was born) and made their living as public servants
(Foster as a teacher in the public school system), their respective experiences and
attitudes and systems of belief are worlds apart. Waldie is a practicing Catholic
whose religious faith suffuses and informs an otherwise dispassionate account of
his own and his community's development; Foster is a political activist who dreams
of and works for some kind of revolution that would correct the countless injustices
so excruciatingly recorded in his book. Waldie serenely accepts the limits of his
world and the tragic or pathetic failures of average humans to realize some greater
accomplishment than quotidian survival, indeed, perceives the pattern of that ordinariness
as evidence of some greater, sacred order. Foster protests a social order thnt condemns
his friends and family members and students to lives of poverty and violence and
substance abuse and racist degradation even as he celebrates the near-miraculous
vitality that enables the fortunate ones to endure and thrive. Waldie's style is
cool, measured, almost detached in its commitment to an accurate factual representation
of his material; Foster's is charged with furious heat, a spiky verbal salsa of percussive
rhythms and cinematic jump cuts, sometimes restrained but always rippling with fiery
energy.
(I should note here that in Foster's acknowledgments he thanks me, along with several
other poets, "for supporting his work," by which I guess he means that
in the course of our intermittent correspondence over the years I responded with
admiration and encouragement to the pieces he sent me from the book in progress.
My response to the finished product would be the same with or without that acknowledgment,
or if I'd never before heard of the author.)
As its title implies, City Terrace Field Manual is a guide to survival in a combat
zone--less a 'how-to' set of procedures than a record of experiences from which the
writer/witness has somehow managed to emerge alive. Others he describes are not so
lucky, having succumbed to or been gravely wounded by bullets, car crashes, incarceration,
drug addiction, alcoholism, domestic violence, police violence, on-the-job accidents
and other forms of urban despair and mayhem. Yet this is not a work of sociology.
Foster's eye and ear and nose for the looks and sounds and smells of the city are
attuned to the specific sensations and personalities encountered and remembered in
his tour of duty; he leaves it up to the reader to draw more general conclusions.
The portraits he offers of high school buddies, girlfriends, students, neighborhood
characters, parents and grandparents are fragmentary, anecdotal, not 'developed'
as in a work of fiction, but the people in his pieces of stories are invoked with
totally convincing vividness. These are not characters but human beings, drawn with
a few quick strokes--emblematic individuals, figures in a bigger picture.
Cindy didn't get any respect. The other kids didn't
know she had already been shot three times. She was
twelve, and they called her "Bumperhead" because she
had a big forehead above such light blue eyes. She had
a friendly smile, though like most gangbangers she paid
no attention to me. The day she was kicked out of
school, she went down the hallways threatening other
students. I stood at the door to the corridor, calling her
name. It was like she couldn't hear it. Later on, someone
caught up with her, and she showed up at my desk with
a transfer form for me to sign. "Cindy, Cindy, Cindy,"
I said. But she didn't look at me or say anything. She
just fidgeted, waiting for me to sign her out.
(page 95)
Structurally, Foster's Field Manual is an assemblage of fragments, untitled, unnumbered,
that can be read in any order and which exhibit a great variation in tone, mood and
mode, ranging from fairly straightforward narration to feverish lyrical delirium,
from smoldering rage and baffled grief to tenderness and nostalgia from invocations
of Lenin and Che Guevara to affectionate recollections of hapless cholos whose only
revolutions were those of the rounds their cars made in the varrio. Whatever the
mode, though, and whatever the length of the fragment/paragraph--from seven or eight
lines to a couple of pages--Foster's writing sustains a relentless intensity that
renders the texture of his world in a way that feels physically and emotionally exhausting,
oppressive and exhilarating at the same time. Saul Bellow once said of Dreiser that
while his style was clumsy his attention to difficult detail gave his writing great
"lifting power." Foster's style has a terrific agility--it isn't clumsy
at all--and it's the seriousness of his unflinching vision combined with the snappy
grace of his prose that lifts the heaviness of his material into a realm of almost
giddy revelation.
I was the needle in the rain. I fell through years like a
character in the Mayan calendar. I was the Chinese
woman a floor below the street, bent over her machine
in the dusty half-dark. I was the only white guy on the
Mexican railroad crew, I was the breed who caught it
from three sides. I was the one always on the out. I was
the government worker piling slash after the logging
company had gone, knowing I was laid off when the job
was done. I was the unknown artist sweating out images
in a neighborhood garage. I was the guy whose only call
came to sweep up at the factory, and I hurried to take it.
I listened to the radio in the boarding house when
everyone slept and heard a seagull calling in the middle
of the night. At noon, I was the spots I saw high in the
sun over the telephone poles.
(page 85)
I quote short sections--many of the longer ones have the kind of continuous firepower
that singes your eyebrows--because the only way to get these pieces is in their entirety;
but even in these few lines you can hear the tension between dismay and defiance
that drives the rhythms in the poet's voice, and the Whitmanic self that both is
and is not the author, identifying with his surroundings, moved to affirm the existence
of even the humblest luckless nobody, to hear the lonesome unmusical yet somehow
hopeful call of that unseen gull.
Ethnicity, nationality, class and 'race' play important roles in Foster's cosmology,
not surprisingly when you consider that his father is revealed to be Anglo, his mother
Japanese and his neighborhood predominantly Mexican. The father in Field Manual is
all but missing, except when he turns up drunk in a rooming house or half dead in
a hospital bed after open heart surgery or remembered sending foreign currency home
to his son from some port where he's docked as a Merchant Marine, boozing it up and
fucking the local whores; it's not what you'd call a reverent filial tribute, even
though the bitterness of the portrait is tinged with a certain grudging forgiveness.
The poet identifies more deeply with his mother, but she is scarcely seen as an individual,
more as the child of any Japanese American family relocated in 1942 to one of the
infamous detention camps. Culturally, Foster has the soul of a Chicano; the boyhood
friends he invokes are mostly Latino; his language is salted with Spanish, touched
with a black and blue affinity for Jimi Hendrixesque improvisational departures into
hallucinatory consciousness-bending astronautical flights of song. In other words,
he's American, multicultural to the core, as indebted to Hemingway as to Los Lobos,
yet he cops to the identity of only half his heritage, the half that isn't quite
'white' If one were a Freudian rather than a Marxist, one might attribute the poet's
third-world revolutionary fervor to certain unresolved issues with the father. But
neither psychology nor politics can truthfully be reduced to such simple formulas.
To Foster's credit, he engages neither in ideological diatribes nor in crybaby lamentations
over victimhood or familial malfunction; he plays the hand he's been dealt with enormous
reserves of spirit, creatively transforming the anger and grief of nasty circumstances
into a paradoxical elation, a battle cry of undefeatedness.
Poison summer breeze, least likely to bring any relief
but strangely it does; it's unexpected but I'll take it; the
wrong wrench, the wrong socket set, the only thing you
bring me makes the job take even longer--I'll take it in
place of anything less; your glance, cheeks colored with
sexual frustration and resentment; the broken end of a
bottle waved in my face, two motherfuckers spitting out
insults at the end of the day; skinny dog chained in a
shityard of flies, chain crackling in the dry leaves; no one
has anything to say that makes any sense, the families
walking through heat waves at Evergreen Cemetery;
raggedy-assed palm trees & friends who'd rather read
magazines than try to think--hey, whatever, whatever is
left; whatever you allow--you know what I'm saying--
I'll take it.
(page 111)
Foster's first book, Angry Days (West End Press, 1987), was a strong collection
of poems, yet for all its rage and accomplishment it yields nothing like the overall
voltage of this masterfully sustained long-poem-in-prose. City Terrace Field Manual
is a breakthrough, not just for the author but for anyone else in search of alternatives
to tired forms. (Stephen Kessler)
(This review has been edited for length.)
