Alan Soldofsky | September 2021

Alan Soldofsky

Albert James Young was born in on May 31, 1939—on Walt Whitman’s birthday. And just like Whitman, Al Young contained multitudes. He told his friend, the late Santa Cruz, CA poet Morton Marcus, “It’s just a sense of wonder that makes me the way I am.” And a wonder is a good way to describe Al Young. Young was a much acclaimed and beloved poet, novelist, and nonfiction writer, and also California Poet Laureate, Emeritus (2005–08). Al Young died on April 17, 2021 in Concord, CA, from complications due to a stroke he suffered in 2019. But the Al Young his legion of readers and friends remember lived most of his active literary life in Palo Alto and later Berkeley (which proclaimed Feb. 13, 2013 “Al Young Day”), producing a substantial oeuvre of writing. Over the last fifty years, Young published more than twenty-two books, including ten collections of poetry, five novels, several volumes of nonfiction, and a number of screenplays.

Sandra Meek is the author of six books of poetry, including Still, An Ecology of Elsewhere, and the Dorset Prize-winning Biogeography. Poetry Editor of the Phi Kappa Phi Forum, cofounding editor of Ninebark Press, and Dana Professor at Berry College, she has received an NEA Fellowship, the Poetry Society of America’s Lucille Medwick Memorial Award, three Georgia Author of the Year Awards, and two Peace Corps Writers Awards.

 

  Al Young first came to California in 1960 from Detroit, where his parents relocated after leaving Ocean Springs, Mississippi, during the Great Migration. Starting in the ’60s, he dug deep roots in the San Francisco Bay Area literary community and developed a long association with Bay Area writers and poets. He is a recognized inheritor of the traditions of such luminary writers as Kenneth Rexroth and Kenneth Patchen. Those writers, like Langston Hughes before them, often performed their poems with jazz accompaniment. Al Young’s work also represents the cross-pollination of Bay Area dissident poetry traditions with the Black Arts Movement, led by such writers as Amiri Baraka, Quincy Troupe, and Ishmael Reed. In a very real sense, Al Young’s poetry established its own idioms, combining linguistic improvisation and vernacular language, with the formal prosody of the Anglo-American tradition.

  Here is an example of the way Al Young can make his language swing, in “Jungle Strut,” a poem dedicated to the titanically powerful tenor sax player Gene Ammons:

Of all the nights, yours were greenest, Gene,
bluebreathing son of your boggie-bled dad
who, like you after him, left this dry world
a treasure tray of cocktails for the ear.
You loved making people high with your song
just as you must’ve loved soaring some yourself.
How high? Moon high, scaling neon heights like
an eagle humming along on silence and a bellyful.¹

  But Young can work his linguistic bebop into writing a poem about almost anything. Here are two stanzas from a poem titled “Squirrels,” about watching squirrels messing around in a tree seen through his Palo Alto bedroom window:

Squirrels are skittering
outside through the trees
of my bedroom window,
laying it on the line
of my consciousness.

Brown & black and flurry
& scurrying, how can I not
help loving them like
an old bopster loves licks
laid down building up
so many beats to the moment?²

  I first got to know Al Young’s poetry through his 1976 collection, Geography of the Near Past, his third. I heard him read at a mid-1970s San Francisco Poetry Festival, and was drawn to his poetry’s expansiveness and the gracefulness of his prosody. His poems seem to have the freedom to go anywhere, like work by the New York School poets that I admired. But Young’s work also had the emotional generosity of a poet who didn’t have the need to compulsively reify and ironize his subjects. Also, he was a Black poet who was not only politically conscious, but also had a bebop sensibility. In a poem called “Studio Up Over In Your Ear,” he depicts his pre-computer era writing practice, working in his downtown Palo Alto second-floor writing studio above a jazz joint: “My Smith-Corona’s cleaned and oiled / with a fresh nylon ribbon / for the hard miles ahead.”³ And near the end of the poem, he tells us:

Out on the sidewalk just below my half-
opened window, three young men split
a fifth of Bali Hi & shoot the shit
& and some craps 1940s style to the music

Up here in free lance heaven
I’ve got my own floating game going on

The ante is tremendous & side bets
are OK, but youre lucky if you walk out
with the clothes on your back⁴

  The ending is prescient. Three nights after he finished the poem, as Young tells us in the poem’s endnote, the cabaret below his studio caught fire and the building burned down. The poem for me displays the virtues of many of Young’s early narrative-lyric poems; the poem’s narrative moves the authorial speaker out of the foreground, panning out to the wider world. In the poem, the speaker quiets his inner voice to enter as he says “my characters’ worlds,”⁵ immersing the reader in the poem’s world. As the speaker looks out the window, the poem makes a seemingly casual allusion to the bebop era, to shooting “the shit / & shooting craps 1940s style to the music”⁶ where he sees young men drinking Bali-Hi on the street. In that moment, we’re given a glimpse of the street-wise experience which bebop and blues—both central to Young’s work—is imbued. Yet, the poem’s writer/speaker remains isolated from the world he both occupies and observes “in free lance heaven,”⁷ a prized yet precarious location. Like in many of Young’s poems, the speaker writes of both hardship and exaltation, and ultimately finds a bemused and hard-won epiphany: “You’re lucky if you walk out / with the clothes on your back.”⁸ For most of his life, Young worked as the consummate freelancer, selling music and literary journalism, liner notes for jazz and pop music LPs, and occasionally a screenplay for the likes of Sidney Poitier or Richard Pryor.

  Young’s poems occupy some of the same linguistic space as jazz improvisation and the blues, and appropriating language from African American popular culture. In a recently recovered interview, published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, with poet/anthologist Persis Karim, Al said that “blues are a kind of vernacular music—the term pops up routinely these days at a time when so much about culture is closely studied and scrutinized… But, growing up in the small-town and rural South of the 1940s and 1950s, the separation between the ways people actually spoke and conversed and the way they sounded when they sang everyday music or the blues was only scrim-thin.”⁹

  In his early collection, Geography of the Near Past, it’s also easy to see Young’s canniness as a poet who knows that poetry must “race thru the ruins of what was / hip once.”¹⁰ That is, he finds ways to repurpose the jazz and blues vernacular to produce a hybrid lyricism that reflects his poetry’s literary and musical sources. He often would sing a bit of a blues or jazz standard at his poetry readings—sometimes improvising a tune around one of his own lines. Some of what he sang carried irony, but singing was more often a natural segue from the rich baritone of his reading voice. Al Young’s poems strongly connect back to the dissident, modernist, jazz-infused traditions that evolved in Northern California, an inheritance whose DNA runs through Young’s work.

  Young was initially drawn to the Bay Area by the magnetic pull of the San Francisco Renaissance poets, whose work he’d encountered while starting an undergraduate degree at the University of Michigan. He first settled in Berkeley while working a variety of jobs, including a stint as a disc jockey for the Bay Area’s then-leading jazz station, KJAZ-FM in Alameda (1961–69). Later he moved to Palo Alto, where he became a Stegner Creative Writing Fellow at Stanford University (1968–69). He also finished his undergraduate degree at Berkeley in 1969, earning an AB in Spanish in 1969, the same year he sold his first novel, Snakes, to Holt, Rinehart and Winston. After completing his Stegner Fellowship, Young was appointed a Jones Lecturer at Stanford. It was when he lived in Palo Alto that he befriended one of his favorite poets, Kenneth Patchen, and his wife Miriam, who were also residing there. Young’s poem “For Kenneth and Miriam Patchen,” honors both Patchen’s dissident aesthetic and his progressive politics. In Kenneth Patchen: The Art of Engagement, Young says, “Patchen operated very much in the jazz tradition, that is to take something—to take a form—and to go beyond it. To improvise, and to express your feelings and insights of the moment, superimposed over a given form. Patchen was a real master of that.”11 Young’s poems, especially from the ’60s and ’70s, establish a direct link to San Francisco Renaissance poets, like Patchen, who were dominent voices.

  About Patchen’s poem “In your body all bodies lie,” Young writes: “Kenneth Patchen’s poem has quivered in my heart, almost word for word, for all of my lyric life. I was fifteen when I first plucked it from the poetry shelf of the Detroit Public Library. It still gives me goose-bumps.”¹² Here are a few lines from Patchen’s prose poem:

Life’s end is life. What is universal cannot be lost. The opinion of grammar has become the opinion of your world: through use of their own action, words rule the heads of men. Your native zone is silence; everything you want is within you.¹³

  Given that Young had worked as a jazz musician when he was in his early twenties, the merging of poetry and jazz sensibilities came naturally to him. So, it was only natural that he’d be attracted to the jazz-inflected poetry of San Francisco Renaissance poets including Kenneth Patchen, Kenneth Rexroth, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Bob Kaufman. When asked in a 2011 NPR interview to name some of his favorite poets, he listed “Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Kenneth Rexroth, and Denise Levertov.”¹⁴ In fact Rexroth—notable for his performances of poetry with jazz accompaniment—blurbed the hardback of The Geography of the Near Past

  Early on, Young experimented not only with poetic form but also with the mode of the poem itself, moving between lyric and narrative, and even dramatic monologues. His work initially seems influenced in part by the open poetics of the San Francisco Renaissance with its interest in oral language and American idiom, its progressive social consciousness, and the spiritual sensibilities from Asian poetries. And into that rich fusion he added his own improvisational and narrative sensibilities. The result was an altogether new voice in American poetry, one that could proclaim—in the title poem from “Geography of the Near Past”:

The trick
without anyone’s
catching on to it
is to swim against
world current
knowing it to be as much of a dream
as it is dreams on the highest stage
but without losing touch
with spirit or with light…¹⁴

  Equally adept at writing a sonnet, a blues lyric, or a dramatic monologue, in “Sampler,” from his 2001 collection, The Sound of Dreams Remembered: Poems 1990–2000, he declares “Poems occur; they don’t get written.”¹⁶

  As his poetry broke new ground, Young’s work entered American poetry’s mainstream. His second and third poetry collections and his first novel Snakes were published by the New York trade publisher, Holt, Reinhart and Winston—Robert Frost’s publisher—in the ’70s. And his work began appearing in anthologies and in magazines like The Iowa Review, The Paris Review, and other prestigious journals. Young’s poems characteristically utilize an array of personas to destabilize the speaker’s identity, what he called “momentary identities,” in a 2012 interview with Heather Van Wallendael for The Carolina Quarterly. In that interview, Young said, “If you read a poem of mine that’s a first-person poem, you shouldn’t trust it to be Al Young literally disclosing intimate details of his life, because imagination is what powers that.”¹⁷ He elaborates, “in general…the ‘I’ is a social construct. You can’t pin it down… one of the ways to accommodate the possibility that this ‘I’ is not necessarily fully you is to write from different ‘I’ perspectives.”¹⁸

  One of Young’s early personas is “black nationalist” poet “O.O. Gabugah,” who (tongue in cheek) Young depicts as “a militant advocate of the oral tradition, he chooses to dictate his poems through me rather than write them down himself.”¹⁹ The name “Gabugah,” as Ploughshares editor Al Lee explains, comes from South African jazz musician and poet Hugh Masekele’s album The Americanization of Oogabugah—the phrase Masekele heard African “natives” uttering in old Tarzan movies.²⁰ O.O. Gabugah first appears in The Geography of the Near Past, claiming “to be born in a taxicab right smack in the middle of 125^th and Lennox in Harlem on Lincoln’s birthday, 1945”²¹ As Frances Davis explains in an New York Times book review of Young’s 1986 book Things Ain’t What They Used to Be: Musical Memoirs O.O. Gabugah is described as “a contemporary variation of Langston Hughes’s Simple who thinks of Mr. Young as inhibited and somewhat pedantic.”²²

  O.O. Gabugah’s voice punctures the inflated posturing that was not uncommon among militant poet/activists who proclaimed Black Nationalist politics of the late ’60s and ’70s:

My simple song my not have class
but you cant listen with impunity
We out to smash your bourgeois ass
and by we I mean The Community!²³

In “The Love Song of O.O. Gabugah,” Young, uses the Gabugah persona to ironize both the black militant poet’s voice and high modernist white Anglo-American poetry:

Time to split now, you & me
got things to do, got stuff to see,
like Frankenstein breakin loose from his slab
all charged up with juice & ready to swoop
right out the front door & down the stoop
past alleyways & neon signs
& people waitin in movie lines:²⁴

  Here Young’s language cleverly undermines the weighty language of Prufrock while simultaneously flexing on hipster, Black speech: “Hey, don’t stand there goin, ‘What’s happenin, Gus?’ / Let’s split before they start zappin us.”²⁵ This is a line that seems eerily prescient in the current era of police shootings and racist profiling of Black men.

  Young even retains O.O. Gabugah to write the introduction to Heaven: Collected Poems 1965–1990. “What I like about the man’s poems is that they’re coming out of the same tradition I’m coming out of, a traditional where people be talking with one another.”²⁶ O.O. Gabugah’s double-edged and cuttingly ironic playfulness stands in contrast to the restrained but lush, loose blank-verse lyricism that Young’s poems at the other end of his mellifluous range can generate:

In ancient Chinese paintings we see more sky than
earth, so when clouds hurry by in silver-gray
inkbursts of rolling readiness right along the river,

ripe with rain, rushing the road of time along,
pushing back light, belittling the black and white clarity
of Hollywood in its prime, the eye climbs down to greet

with shining gusto trees along the shore…²⁷

I had the great pleasure of working with Al Young as a colleague when he was appointed the 2002 Lurie Distinguished Visiting Author-in-Residence at San Jose State University. Young, who was already a well-known and salutary presence in Silicon Valley and in the San Francisco Peninsula, rapidly became a vital member of the SJSU literary community. Young continued to be a revered presence at SJSU after his teaching appointment ended, regularly participating as a reader and a celebrity emcee for the university’s annual Legacy of Poetry events and other activities. Beginning in 2005, after becoming California Poet Laureate, Young energetically took up his role of public poet, accepting invitations to appear at events up and down the state, from San Diego to Crescent City. When he met with then-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger about becoming Poet Laureate, Young remembered being interviewed for almost an an hour in the governor’s “cigar smoking tent” in the Capitol courtyard. As Young recalled in his 2008 interview with Persis Karim:

The Governor said, “Let’s talk about one of your poems,” pulling from his notes the text of “Conjugal Visits,” a ballad I composed in the voice of a woman who paid monthly visits to see her husband imprisoned at San Quentin. Based on the experience of a non-traditional student enrolled in a class I was teaching at UC Santa Cruz in its Community Studies program in the 1980s—and at a time when administrators at San Quentin were experimenting with humane conjugal visits, the poem has become popular… Governor Schwarzenegger began to recite by heart the core of the poem, the lines that go:

All these Black men crammed up in jail,
all this I.Q. on ice,
while governments, bank presidents, the Mafia
don’t think twice.

They fly in dope and make real sure
they hands stay nice and clean.
That chump-change Reece made on the street
— what’s that supposed to mean?

Having quoted these lines, the governor pushed his pages aside and leaned across the desk. “You wouldn’t think I’d like a poem like this,” he said. I assured him that he’d taken me by surprise. “Well, first of all,” he said, “I follow hip-hop. And, Mr. Young, I, too, am for prison reform.”

…Suddenly, he asked: “Mr. Young, what are your thoughts on poetry and politics?” “Well,” I said, “they definitely go together.” “How do you mean?” “Poetry is about everything really.” “Are you political?” he asked outright. “Very political,” I said, “and I intend to get even more political.” “Why is that?” “Because these are very dark times, governor, in case you haven’t noticed.”²⁸

Young was nothing if not strong-minded, but stated his opinions in such a direct and open-hearted way—and in such a mellifluous voice—that it was difficult not to like him. As the California Poet Laureate, he readily accepted SJSU’s commission to write a commemorative poem, “Ways and Ways to San Jose.” He begins the poem with a dedication: “In the spirit of Edwin Markham and Henry Meade Bland,”²⁹ two of California’s most prominent turn of the 20th-century poets. (Bland, an SJSU English professor, was appointed California’s second Poet Laureate in 1929.) But it’s hard not to miss the nod to Burt Bacharach and Dionne Warwick in the poem’s title:

Markham loved the underdog;
we jail and kill and cut.
So how to link our wind-toxic, sky-blasted,
fear-bloated blues and the cannibal gobbledygook
look, scent and taste of our time-twisted views
to an American populist’s poetry of the used-to-be?

Sticking to the who, the why, the how long
enough to come back to the endangered now,
we come back home, we come back breathless.
Relativity, you whisper. Relatedness, I think.

The Man with the Hoe that›s all most ten-year-olds need
to hear. So what’s the big deal? Is this poet for real?³⁰

Al Young is indeed “for real.” His gift is the works he has left us. He has written in a multitude of poetic styles and voices over the decades, drawing upon a multitude of musical and literary traditions. The reality of Al Young as a poet, as well as a novelist and memoirist, is that he made it his life’s work to establish such a generous, unself-assuming virtuosity.

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Alan Soldofsky's most recent collection of poems is In the Buddha Factory. With David Koehn, he is coeditor of Compendium: A Collection of Thoughts About Prosody, by Donald Justice. His poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and he has published poems, interviews, and critical essays in numerous magazines and journals. Soldofsky directs the MFA Creative Writing program at San Jose State University where he is a professor of English.

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Notes