This course is taught by Sharon Daniel in Winter 2009
How does memory (as a personal experience) connect with place?
Poetry is not the least popular pastime because it has lingered its way around the public for centuries. Poetry is the quiet queen of the arts; it is the reverberation around the lines of place. Poets are often connected to place, more than artists, as place is a relevant connection to understanding everything outside of the semantics of the actual poem. Language, dialect, symbolism and memory are strongly connected to place. A poet who talks about the revolution will change the context which influences the meaning of the poem; the difference comes with that identity of the poet who grew up in Serbia, Cuba, South Korea or Myanmar.
Gary Young is a poet whose writing strongly resonates with suburbia, perhaps more than it does with his home state of California. But he, in a way, wants others to know he is a California poet because his poetry reflects around the landscape of the geographical and cultural context of the area he was born in and identifies with. His poetry also reflects memory as it connects to place and personal experience. Though California serves as a geographic convergence of collective visions, his familiarity with California is with the sprawl and nature outside of large cities and writes about a personal connection with the experience of the surrounding landscape like the fairgrounds and mountains of Santa Cruz County. He received his college degrees from two small towns in the 1970s; his BA from UC Santa Cruz and his MFA from UC Irvine.
Suburban towns in the United States may have slightly different nuances depending on place as cities have a lot more stronger resonance. Perhaps the strength of nuance comes in the density in population in suburban towns versus cities. What I suggest is that the difference is in people and how they actively participate in changing the environment correlates with the culture of their surroundings. The idea, not necessarily the mission, of the Participatory Culture collaborative group connects with Gary Young and his poetry in the historical sense that a culture of participation is situated around place. A participatory culture connected -- and divided -- through digital communication, in contrast, connects with younger poets. The center of digital culture is fragmentation; and there is as specific of a familiarity with the internet as there is with the town somebody grew up in.
The act of distributing literature, memories and poetry about California to other places outside of California through his 35-year-old Greenhouse Review Press can also be considered a mission of a participatory culture.
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