J A C K E T # S E V E N | C O N T E N T S | H O M E P A G E |
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"It is very beautiful to feel the rhythms that hold a man together," notes poet Michael McClure on a small book of poems by Lewis MacAdams called News from Niman Farm. The poet, activist and journalist who authored that book played a prominent role in New York city's avant-garde poetry scenes of the late 1960s and early '70s. Later, moving west, he settled in the Northern California village of Bolinas, where poets such as Robert Creeley, Donald Allen and Joanne Kyger retreated to participate in an experimental community isolated between a marshy lagoon and the rugged coast of the Pacific Ocean. MacAdams' first book in many years, The River, continues an exploration of the rhythms noted by McClure. This new book, however, shifts focus from the Bolinas Mesa of Northern California to that desert metropolis of Los Angeles where MacAdams has lived in recent years, active in the struggle over that city's water resources. | |
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The Friends of the L.A. River, a group actively concerned with the river and its management, combat an environmental catastrophe that has been encouraged through years of political corruption. The waste, pollution and drainage that plague this river are symptoms also of a potentially larger environmental disaster for MacAdams. "Very intense dreams," he writes. "I must be coming / down with something. / I hope it's nothing / nearly as intense / as my vision of Earth / as the New Mars- / red dust storms rolling / around a planet / that died a long time ago." | |
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Although political corruption, industrial pollution and other causes contribute to a global environmental crisis, MacAdams pursues local and specific causes to begin an active process of change. As a local activist leading a controversial environmental group, MacAdams acknowledges his impassioned, but limited ability to work within the well-placed walls of the politically savvy.
The reporter uses the quote, "Over our dead bodies," in the morning's paper, revealing the intense passion felt by The Friends of the Los Angeles River. But as any modern politician knows, caution and innuendo structure the language of power. So, in this instance, MacAdams sounds like the stock 'radical environmentalist,' so easily reduced to the butt of conservative jokes. Still, there is deep pleasure in anger and speaking one's mind against the polite defenders of waste and corrupt bureaucratic structures. MacAdams does not hesitate to remind his reader of William Blake's epigram: "The Tigers of Wrath more powerful / than the Horses of Instruction." | |
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The eye for startling detail, expressed through a lyric energy of confidence and optimism, balances the otherwise dreary circumstances facing The Friends of the L.A. River. | |
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Although his enthusiasm can be limited by an equal weight of depression, MacAdams continues to surface his own deeper rhythms. The lovely, the truly human and courageous strength of this small book is his struggle to preserve, clean, and care for a river while fighting against his own self-righteousness, so great it threatens to overwhelm him.
MacAdams' determination in the face of rotten odds and his strength to face himself in the poem make this a fascinating book. The poem's lyric pulse and the poet's stoic honesty form an inward relation of environment, accountability and prophetic urgency. The River is a rare accomplishment, both for its emotional balance, and for its dignified expression of an active dissent. . . . Dale Smith
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J A C K E T # 7
Back to Jacket # 7 Contents page |
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MacAdams introduces us to the complex history of the Los Angeles River, with its political web of brokers who have mongered its resources throughout the century. The L.A. River was also the focus of Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974), where elite interests controlled the river's wealth through extortion and political corruption. In that movie, Jack Nicholson's character discovers that the river's water is being diverted into the ocean. MacAdams reminds us also that "there used to be / enough water to / irrigate with / nearly all year-round / around here." But more than fifty years after the setting of Chinatown, the poet is left with only a question that echoes the movie:
