Bolinas, California, is a settlement along the San Andreas Fault, about thirty miles north of San Francisco. The Coast Miwok people once hunted salmon

What the Bolinas Poets Built

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2021-05-30 22:30:08

Bolinas, California, is a settlement along the San Andreas Fault, about thirty miles north of San Francisco. The Coast Miwok people once hunted salmon there, before they were displaced by Spanish and Mexican colonists, in the early nineteenth century. Later, in waves, loggers, miners, and summer tourists took over. The town’s hotels collapsed into the bay during the 1906 earthquake, and by the mid-nineteen-sixties, when the poets started showing up, Bolinas looked like a quickly erased drawing. A small colony of psychedelic busy bees soon formed, with plans for a variety of structures, from geodesic domes to tree houses. Many of the homes were made of wood recycled from old ranches and the Navy barracks on nearby Treasure Island. Lloyd Kahn, the legendary D.I.Y. guru and an editor at the “Whole Earth Catalog,” lived in town. Philo T. Farnsworth III, whose father invented the all-electric television, was there, too, planning his Yantra House, an orblike structure that had reportedly attracted the interest of the architect Buckminster Fuller.

With these alpha hippies on site, like a pack of taller, better-looking Thoreaus, the poets faced a high bar for thrift, adaptability, and invention—both on and off the page. Many, like Joanne Kyger, Gary Snyder, and Philip Whalen, arrived from San Francisco; others, including Lewis and Phoebe MacAdams and Tom Clark, road-tripped from New York. Those cities’ countercultural arts scenes had begun to congeal into aesthetic schools, but there was something contradictory about their pedagogy: it was a mug’s game to apprentice yourself to, say, Jack Spicer, the San Francisco writer who compared poetry to transcriptions from Mars, or to vie for a spot among the New York poets, whose art-world and Ivy League channels seemed just as interstellar. The Bolinas poets, many of them women, wrestled with more terrestrial dilemmas. “You can turn the pages / while mommy changes / you” is the entirety of “Poem for Strawberry,” by Gailyn Saroyan. “A dog killed a duck & the kids found it,” John Thorpe wrote in “September.” “A huge gash was gone from its back but I thought we could eat the breast legs & wings.” Bill Berkson’s poem “A-Frame” was named for the simple houses that some people in Bolinas built, often with scavenged materials.

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