“Gravy Says A Lot”: The Poetry of Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel

Sonoma State College G E R A L D H A S L A M “Gravy Says A Lot”: The PoetryofWilma Elizabeth McDaniel An artist has emerged from the irrigation canals and Serve-U-Self stations and cotton patches of California’s San Joaquin Valley, an artist visioning toward life’s core. Monday used to be the day after Sunday it meant washday to most women on Persimmon Road but seance to Ardella Pitts who always hung her dead husband up with wooden pins beside a yellow trousseau gown and allowed the wind to whip him with daffodil might while she washed his shirts . . . (from “Clothes Dryer”) Although she remains unknown to general audiences outside California, Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel is nonetheless exciting critical attention with what Cornelia Jessey has called her “dry and burning phraseology,” and with her poignant portraits of the poor gritty people who form society’s foundation. She is also benefiting from renewed scholarly interest in a sense of place, for she is an intensely local poet, and her locale is Tulare, a rural town located between Fresno and Bakersfield in California’s heartland. If she was merely a local bard -— Tulare’s Bicentennial poet — then 160 Western American Literature local attention would suffice. But McDaniel has developed a lean, direct style that somehow brings universality to her subjects. In “The Death of Ken Clifford,” for example, she writes: H e w ent like winter reluctantly giving up one m inute’s darkness each day until spring arrived. McDaniel’s world — the San Joaquin Valley — is an extension of the Southwest, rich in agriculture, cattle and oil, so that towns like Tulare and Fresno and Bakersfield seem more closely related to Lubbock and Stillwater than to Los Angeles and San Francisco. It is also the home of country music’s most traditional sound. That music, like many of the folks McDaniel writes about, came west during the so-called Okie Migration of the 1930’s. Bom in Okla­ homa, the poet herself migrated to California with her family when she was 17 during the height of the movement that brought some 300,000 displaced Americans from the drought- and poverty-stricken central states. The San Joaquin Valley was the migrants’ most popular destina­ tion, so the tone and style of life there today have been strongly influ­ enced by those people whose endurance and verve are legend. Observes an old mourner in “Transportation” : I knowed her in them days model T ’s model A’s and right on down the list, I hope she’s satisfied riding in a Cadillac today . . . The poet came to California “a gangling girl madly in love with John Steinbeck and carrying lead pencils and lined paper as a torch for him.” She had been “obsessed with writing poetry since I was four years old,” and began experimenting with verse written on bags and grocery lists and the backs of envelopes when she was eight years old, but her work was not published until 1973, when she was in her fifties. The first lines of the initial poem in that collection, The Carousel Would Haunt Me, revealed an exciting new vision: M ooney’s Grove is in my blood like hemoglobin, I suppose Gerald Haslam 161 that I would become anemic if the county barred me . . . Since then, three other collections of her work have been published: Letter to Cleotis (1974), The Red Coffee Can (1974), and The Wash Tub (1976). The latter two books are dominated by stories that might more accurately be called vignettes. They are skillful and closely related to the oral tradition in their form and content, but they lack the immediacy and impact of McDaniel’s poetry, which seems to get better with each passing year. And it is her poetry that will finally build her reputation, for she can make the mundane soar. Gravy says a lot about us people who invoke the southern fried . . . . . . the way it stretches out the dreams from payday till tomorrow smooth on the tongue of toddling babies thick on shoulders lumping at the waist of mothers slipping exquisitely down the throats of toothless visionaries eating with a spoon. (from “Gravy...