By Peter Fish, Sunset editor-at-large
This is Sunset’s week for blogging about the San Joaquin Valley (see MacKenzie Geidt’s cool valley train trip, below.)
I used to spend a fair amount of time in the San Joaquin and even though a lot of people find it a hard place to love I came to love it. I like the way the orange groves press the foothills around Porterville, and the big valley oaks that shade Visalia. I like the oil rigs around Coalinga and Hanford’s town square. I even came to like the valley’s climatic extremes: the clobbered-the-second-you get-out-of-the-car heat in July, the damp clasp of the Tule fog in January.
Because April is National Poetry Month—you knew that, right, you’ve been up every night celebrating?—I want to recommend a poet who does the valley proud: Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel. She’s not unknown—toward the end of her long life she gained some deserved fame—but I hadn’t read her until a couple of months ago. And when I did I was stunned, the way you are when you step out of that car into the valley heat.
McDaniel was part of the world John Steinbeck wrote about in Grapes of Wrath, except that she lived it first-hand. She came to California from Oklahoma at age 18 in 1936. And for the next decades she worked, hard, as a farm worker, sometimes as a maid, scribbling poetry on grain sacks and scraps of paper, not able to publish anything until she was in her 50s. But by the end of her life—she died last year at age 88—she had published 25 small books of verse. You find her work in anthologies like Dana Gioia’s California Poetry. Or, better yet, get one of her own books—say Borrowed Coats or The Last Dust Storm—from her publisher, Hanging Loose Press.
McDaniel’s poems are the ideal thing to read if you think that contemporary poetry is obscure, pallid, and self-absorbed. They’re the ideal thing to read if you don’t think about contemporary poetry at all. McDaniel’s poems shimmer with heartbreak and tragedy and a lot of deadpan fun, and the valley is there, flat and broad and unforgettable, on every page. Reading her is like listening to a favorite aunt at a family picnic, the one who knows all the good stories the other grown-ups won’t tell.
Here’s one of my favorites, possibly the best poem ever written about a pancake house:
WATCHING TRUCK DRIVERS AT PANCAKE HOUSE
Boys
I always order pancakes
he told his buddies
slathered butter on them
poured syrup
like thick maple rain
Nothing much a cook
can do to ruin a pancake
if the stove don’t blow up
