Poetry Los Angeles: Reading the Essential Poems of the City

8. Exteriors: Signs of the Endtime

253 Eight Exteriors:Signs of the Endtime Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we need them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else. This is where California comes in. Mud slides, brush fires, coastal erosion, earthquakes, mass killings, et cetera. We can relax and enjoy these disasters because in our hearts we feel that California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-­ style. This alone warrants their doom. —­Don DeLillo, White Noise1 I All lives take place in a constant exchange of interior and exterior situations . It’s not simply a matter of moving between the domestic realm and the out-­ of-­ doors. The garden, so beloved of poets, is often a space fenced in and adjoining the domicile so that no useful distinction,topographically,can be drawn between the flower or vegetable beds and the garage, back porch, patio, or lanai supplementary to the main housing unit. Without thinking much about it we all pass constantly across the liminal space from inside to outside, and then advance further outside. The subject of David Hockney’s famous painting Beverly Hills Housewife (1966) stands at the house’s border, outside of the living room demarcated by a sliding glass door, but inside the patio space between house and pool—­ an in-­ between space with its own decorative features, such as a Courvoisier chair and a modernist sculpture. If our eyes go right to the woman caught within these zones with no clear definition, we can understand how the poet Dick Barnes finds it necessary to sympathize with this emblematic figure seemingly lost in a wilderness of mirrors:“In case you thought it was so easy being / a Beverly Hills housewife .”2 The swimming pool became an icon of Southern California before it spread across the country as a middle-­ class amenity. Not just a functional 254 Poetry Los Angeles place for family recreation,it swiftly achieved symbolic status as a mark of social class aspirations. Those like myself who came of age in 1950s Los Angeles will remember the first swimming pool in our middle-­ class neighborhood, following upon the first television on the block, and how the newly popular owners became the envy of the less fortunate. A fixture in advertisements, movies, and paintings of the period, the pool did not lend itself to poetry; it lacked resonance and gravitas, especially compared to the sublime surf within easy reach. But the backyard pool, it now seems obvious, holds a unique place in the public imagination precisely because it is an exterior phenomenon lodged within the penumbra of the overarching house, literally walled off from the neighbors’children who may be tempted to play near its concrete borders or plunge into its apparently safe but actually perilous depths. The swimming pool became an agora for friends and family members—­a selective, intentional community set off from the anonymity and randomness enforced by the zoning patterns of Los Angeles real estate.The pool certainly appealed to David Hockney, who put it on the cognitive map of art connoisseurs with his near-­ obsessive attention, in photographs, drawings, and paintings, to the lines and angles of poolside architecture, the central figure of the blue pool itself ,and the frequent presence of naked young men in postures of enjoyment. David Trinidad HOCKNEY: BLUE POOL Los Angeles, California: a summer afternoon. One boy sunbathes on a yellow towel beside the pool; another stands at the end of the diving board, gazing downward. Palm trees sway in the blue water. Overhead, a few Exteriors 255 clouds float by. To the right, sprinklers lightly spray the green lawn. The sunbather slips off his red and white striped swimsuit and rolls over; the other boy dives into the pool. The artist snaps a photograph of the splash.3 —•— This is a poem to which we might give the same title as Carol Muske-­ Dukes’s lyric in the previous chapter:“The Image.”In fact,the poem partakes of the poetics of the Deep Image movement of the 1960s and thereafter, in which the poet attempts to conjure a mystical sensation by focusing on some natural object or objects. Readers familiar with James Wright’s canonical poem“Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota ” will notice some similarities with that litany of images, as well as the poem’s ambition to picture...