A Santa Rosa Muse

D.L. Emblen, "Under the Oaks: Selected Poems of Place," 1960-1982. Santa Rosa Junior College, 1982. $3.00.

Civilized countries appoint poet laureates because we've come to know that societies need such help to keep their memories (and thus their identities) sharply in focus. Flourishing institutions profit as well from being celebrated in choosy words; indeed, they thrive beyond mere surviving when their collective experiences are so clarified. The Greek word from which "poetry" derives means "to give form to chaos." It's one of the blind spots of our culture that we regard poetry as a frill, lace doilies a rough and tumble society can do without.

Santa Rosa Junior College has less reason than most institutions of higher learning to take the muse too lightly. For since 1959 it has had an unofficial laureate in the person of English instructor Don Emblen. Here we have the author's own choice of 100 of the almost 2,000 he has been moved to write in his past twenty-three years there. They are "attempts to express the strong, sustaining (sometimes confining) sense of place that pervades this campus, a sense that has always seemed to me to nurture both conflict and communion and to show how the local can be a means of both understanding and misunderstanding the universal."

As a reader who has been privileged to share only one of those richly productive years with the writer, I have found relishing them a double pleasure: for reminding me of why I enjoyed my year out of time in Santa Rosa, and for letting me vicariously live in those other twenty-two years with an ever-deepening sense of place. I cannot doubt that old grads as well as longtime colleagues will find this collection a continuing source of joyful recollection on their share in Emblen's finely tuned memories.

What especially appeals to me is the exemplary ecumenical humanism of his muse. In the thirty years I taught literature, I heard a lot of loose talk about how the "humanities" civilized us all, inside and outside English departments. Needless to rue, the realities were often closer to mean-spiritedness and petty inter- and intra-departmental backbiting. How marvelous, then, to read his tribute to a phys. ed. teacher who was also a Sunday painter: "The muscle that leans into those strokes / brings different strengths to bear / than those he earns his living by."

. . .
But there is artistry in his way
of showing boys how to move like men,
to put their weight where their words are,
to find a balance in themselves
that could, if held beyond the playing field,
so tilt the listing world
there would be time and place for Sunday seeing,
daffodils and all.

No news to those old Greeks and Romans, with their sound mind / sound body Ideal, but how easily we fail to see the old verities in our own local places.

No venue is beyond his far-ranging muse. In a biology lab, scrutinizing Vesalius's treatise on dissecting the human body, Emblen is an anatomist of words with a line like "When you are stripped of dignity of flesh / that makes a frown possible . . . "

When all is tared and ticketed
In search of soul to save us all,
When all is torn and taken from you
But the fundamental sticks and skull
And clever wires that hold you up,
You skinny, shiny skeleton,
You lean on a sexton's slender spade
And crack your speechless mouth awry
In some dry mock of vengefulness
And point with palm-less hand--
How large the lunar landscape vaguely looms!

Under his benign eye, cadaverous illustration escalates to spiritual illumination.

But above all this is the documentary of a teacher who has worked wisely and well with a generation of fortunate students. Especially moving is an interior monologue of his being interrupted by an Uruguayan student who wants a tape recorder to play back a taped letter from home. It has been a tacky semester, and he's coping with his sense of failure by composing a bitch of a final exam. The girl's luminous spirit, unreeling to love thousands of miles distant, shames his black bile away:

. . .
She left, at last, and so did I, the test
unfinished on the floor where the janitor
could clear it off with all the other small,
discouraging debris--the scattered ashes,
paper clips, a rubber band--the products of
my day until that girl came in and brought
an untranslated joy to test my heart.

Emblen passes such perennial "finals" summa cum laude.

Other poems witness his sharing his students' sense of outrage at the Cambodian "incursion," needling well-dressed defenders of "dress codes" who have slovenly souls, siding with a beleaguered colleague defending a controversial film on campus, channeling his contempt for our ancestors' treatment of California Indians after hearing a scholarly paper on the subject read by a colleague, observing a Swedish poet visiting campus come to terms with the transcendence of Armstrong Grove. It's a moral history of our times.

But it's his own biography as well. What we too cavalierly call "occasional" poems are the stock-in-trade of the laureate, local and universal. (Perhaps only "occasionally" we can muster the force needed to shape language into valid poems.) Emblen fixes moments of high transition in the amber of his gaze--deaths of colleagues or their children, and births of theirs as well. (He beguilingly dedicates the book to his daughters, "Cirre and Clovis, who, like me, did much of their growing up in this place.") He quickens the truths frozen beneath copybook maxims--he sees his life and the lives around him steadily and as parts of a meaningful whole--whether he's dealing with the retirement of a janitor who loves to fish, or a colleague's perishing in the Jonestown debacle (fond elegy for a trapped idealist: "Better that fiery glimpse / than no vision at all, then dull eyes fastened / on the square end of a tube / and a long safe life in a cold blue haze.")

For reading Emblen, we realize what ails American poetry--its cruel polarization between "Sunday poets," who foolishly try to console themselves with lollypop cliches, and Seminar Poets, who daily (and, alas, dully) reach for eternity without bothering to stop by the here and now: between poetasting so trite it's given the craft a bad name and attitudinizing so cosmically cryptic even the intelligent turn to sci fi in despair. Emblen's no great poet (God save us from the GP's of this generation). He's merely a man who has chosen to bless his local place the best ways he knows how--from the same de-metropolitanizing spirit that makes Robert Bly brag about living in Madison, Minnesota, as far from Madison Avenue as it's possible to be.

When you talk roots in Santa Rosa, you talk oak roots. And when you teach at Santa Rosa Junior College, you write poems occasioned by headlines from the student paper, "The Oak Leaf:"

'Oak Tree Falls Due to Rain'

Due to old age
lack of restraint
excess of leaning
excess of bird-weight
too much growing of leaves
and losing them
inordinate throwing down of shadows
and acorns
greedy clasping of suns
moons stars in bare branches
indulgence of thirst
(the drunkard)
all these years
sopping it up
like a huge, black, bent straw
that finally crumples
with that obscene little noise
at the bottom of the glass.

This jovial jeu de tree is the elfin spirit of Santa Rosa's muse. The final (and newest, 1982) poem in the book, "Working," also about an oak, is his less flip side, a Whitman purged of Brooklyn bloat:

The black cat watches the weather--
that's its job.
That is how it came to be black,
from standing up through all that night,
not countable nights, just nightness,
darkness, undifferentiated black,
a main ingredient in cold
and also used by the wind
to convince us something's going on out there.
The job wears off on whoever does it,
(what do you do for a living?)
already has rusted his leaves,
and this only October,
with all the winter storms still to come
and spring and the demand for new leaves
as insensitive as fashion,
and summer crying for shade,
and hundreds of skies to account for . . .

It defies the demonology of Academe that this poem, somber and deeply appreciative, was written for the academic vice-president of the institution, a man who has paid his local dues by staying rooted there four years longer than the poet.

And it is an emblem of the poet's ample humanism that he sees in the newest building on a campus begun in 1918 the metaphor of hope and community, not facile Luddite gloom and doom. (The building, by the way, is a jewel of contemporary architecture, its shapely, concrete forms already being humanized by the horticultural magicians who keep Luther Burbank's memory green.) Emblen does for oaks what Frost did for birches. One could do worse than be a savorer of such limbs.