Poetry Los Angeles: Reading the Essential Poems of the City

7. Interiors: Kinds of Sanctuary

224 Seven Interiors:Kinds of Sanctuary The space we love is unwilling to remain permanently enclosed. It deploys and appears to move elsewhere without difficulty; into other times, and on different planes of dream and memory. —­Gaston Bachelard1 I Thanks to the largely benevolent climate and a century of boosterism celebrating the outdoor attractions and spectacles of Southern California—­ the beaches, deserts, and mountains, the freeways and open-­ air stadiums, Disneyland and Universal Studios theme parks, Griffith Park and the Santa Monica Third Street promenade—­ the exteriors of Los Angeles and environs have become fixed in the public imagination as the essential sites of the region. Even the fiction writers have focused on outdoor surfaces, recreational sites, and vistas rather than off-­ street life. The Day of the Locust gives us detailed descriptions of interiors, but who remembers them? It is the mob riot on Hollywood Boulevard, the movement of nineteenth-­ century infantry through the studio lot, and the facades of homes disguised as“Mexican ranch houses, Samoan huts, Mediterranean villas, Egyptian and Japanese temples, Swiss chalets, Tudor cottages” up and down the slopes of the canyons that remain memorable to the reader. When we pass through the doors of dwellings in this novel, the insides reveal themselves as drab and poorly furnished just like the bleak inner lives of the characters. Poets have shied away from evoking the splendor and misery of inner architecture and intimate relations of public and private spaces, as the poems I have analyzed to this point suggest. Yet there is a way of arguing that the scene of rumination in Robert Hass’s“Old Movie with the Sound Interiors 225 Turned Off ” is a paradigm for the imaginative possibilities of confining the subject-­ speaker behind protective borders. (A classic model would be Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “This Lime-­ Tree Bower My Prison.”) The writing desk, the figure of the beloved at her writing desk, and most of all the televised movie drawing the mind’s eye back into history—­ these images and situations point to the rhetorical strategies and advantages of the domestic mode. As in fiction where the furnishings and décor provide significant clues to the psychology of the characters, so in poetry the living room, the media room, the children’s room, the bedroom, even the patio, have the power to evoke the mysteries, the enchantment, of the country or city. I intend in this chapter to move from outside to inside and observe what is hidden, what is discovered, what is valued in the various domains presented as simulacra of either the home or self-­ chosen enclosed spaces in the Los Angeles community. Gaston Bachelard’s landmark study of the phenomenology of claustral structures beloved of poets, The Poetics of Space (1958), provides some useful clues as to why interiors are so often cherished in poetry.“The first, the oneirically definitive house, must retain its shadows,” Bachelard remarks.2 For his psychoanalytical purposes, this alpha dwelling is the child’s vividly remembered chamber of joys and afflictions, the shadows of which linger in the psyche from the inception of consciousness till death. Sites of comfort, safety, and love consort in our memories with the jealousies and anxieties that merge, to use Bachelard’s terms,“felicitous space” with“hostile space” to create a psychic arena charged with contrarieties. Refuges and shelters can and do become threatening spaces in the course of reverie. Even the objects arranged neatly, or not, in drawers and closets may return in memory as disturbing images called forth by troubles in mid-­or later life. Yet all these potent emblems play less of a role in poems about Los Angeles than one might expect, perhaps because relatively few of the city’s inhabitants spent their first years in the city, and/or because of the impoverished nature of the first house. The aura and amplitude of the indoor spaces in, say, the novels of Tolstoy, Wharton, Proust, Nabokov, Woolf, and Salinger bear no resemblance to the standardized urban and suburban houses built on a grid and offering few amenities. I grew up in one of these minimal houses, and so did D. J. Waldie, who comments in his history of Lakewood, Holy Land: The critics of suburbs say that you and I live narrow lives. I agree. My life is narrow. 226 Poetry Los Angeles From one perspective or another, all our lives are narrow...