Workshops in Utopia

Marin County, the coastal region north of San Francisco, is one of the more beautiful places I have ever visited. It’s the sort of location that makes you feel nearly alarmed when you suspect that locals may be habituated to its splendor. Francis Drake, slave trader and global circumnavigator, arrived at its sharply rising headlands in the late 16th century. He called it Nova Albion, meaning “New Britain” or “New White Place” if we follow the etymology of Latin albus, an adjective denoting dull or matte whiteness, from which, incidentally, the noun elf is also derived. Having sacked a series of Spanish colonial settlements along the Pacific coast, Drake found safe haven on the peninsula now called Point Reyes. The indigenous coast Miwok treated Drake as a guest; their way of life was subsequently catastrophically interrupted in the late 18th century, when Catholic missionaries based in San Rafael, some 30 miles east, began forcibly converting them.

This history of Marin, in which it represents a revelation and a resource to newcomers—with the attendant undertones of theft and destruction, as well as hope for a fabulous, likely impossible utopia—informs three new publications that also describe the region as a source of poetry. Beloved small press The Song Cave, aka Ben Estes and Alan Felsenthal, recently re-released two books related to the artists’ community in Bolinas, California: Joe Brainard’s Bolinas Journal (first published in 1971) and the Joel Weishaus–edited On the Mesa: An Anthology of Bolinas Writing (also 1971 and re-edited by Estes for 2021), both of which were previously out of print. Ceramicist, poet, and groundbreaking businesswoman Edith Heath is, meanwhile, the focus of Edith Heath: Philosophies, a gorgeous dive into the Brian and Edith Heath/Heath Ceramics Collection at the Environmental Design Archives of the University of California, Berkeley. Each volume presents a complex portrait of the interrelation of social life, art making, and place. Together, they can be read as celebrations of creativity and as cautionary tales regarding the impulse to devise a more perfect way of living through art.

***

Joe Brainard (1942–1994) is known for his piquant, deeply intelligent line drawings, often employing characters and motifs from comics, as well as his classic poem-memoir, I Remember (1975). He is a relatively sympathetic figure in the pantheon of second-wave New York School poetry, which in its day was often shaped by the enthusiasms of self-appointed patriarchs. Brainard, a gay man, limns what he takes to be an artfully marginal position in the so-called scene. This is certainly on display in his Bolinas Journal, in which he writes of the more or less contented straight couples he encounters in the community: “Why isn’t this more attractive to me than it is? [...] Maybe it’s just that I don’t see how I can fit into all this.”^[1]

Brainard’s chapbook originally appeared with Big Sky, an imprint and poetry magazine that Bill Berkson operated from 1971 until 1978, and The Song Cave’s decision to reissue it in conjunction with On the Mesa is smart. Brainard’s record of his days and nights in Bolinas, a secluded community in Marin, provides excellent context (even a kind of wry running commentary) for readers of On the Mesa. Brainard arrives from the East Coast in early May of 1971 and is quickly in the mix. He hangs out with poets Berkson (“seems in great shape”); Ted Berrigan (“I love Ted but—”); Tom Clark; Robert Creeley (“alive … and really trying”) and Creeley’s then-wife, Bobbie Louise Hawkins (“a really great talker”); Joanne Kyger (“really something special”); Alice Notley; Diane di Prima (“very relaxed and pure”); Lewis Warsh (“I just don’t understand the ‘way back in there’ position he’s in”); and Philip Whalen (“seems to enjoy feeling put upon”), among others, all of whom are enjoying a retreat from society in cloistered Bolinas, whose road signs along State Route 1 the town’s inhabitants had long been in the habit of confiscating.^[2]

Bolinas, whose population even today barely exceeds 1,000 people, holds an enchanted place in the American counter-cultural imagination. Resolutely unconverted into a tourist attraction—see the fate of some of California’s other famous hangouts, such as Haight-Ashbury and, to some extent, Big Sur—it has little reputation save with those already in the know. For the mostly New York City–based poets who relocated to form the community documented in On the Mesa, it offered utopian possibilities, away from the hubbub and more intractable politics of urban space in the post-civil rights Vietnam War era. However, 1971, the year of Brainard’s trip, was hardly without difficulties. In January, the 800,000-gallon San Francisco Bay oil spill, the largest in the Bay Area’s history, threatened seabirds and beaches in the Bolinas Lagoon when two Standard Oil Company of California tankers collided in the Bay.

This horror does not come in for much mention in Brainard’s writing,^[3] although it had significant political effects within Bolinas. For example, some activists in town got themselves elected to the board of the Bolinas Community Public Utilities District and subsequently resisted joining a larger municipal sewage system.^[4] Brainard focuses more on sex and what he terms “love possibility[ies],” as well as the day-to-day affect, social interactions, habits, and lifestyles of the mostly straight poets who surround him. He works on his cartoons and other drawings, takes brilliant notes, does drugs, and goes to dinner parties, poetry readings, and the beach. In spite of his Great Plains origins, he brings an irrepressibly East Coast, joyfully critical air to the proceedings. He refuses to let readers forget that even escapist communities have rules. Thus, one doesn’t so much get away in Bolinas as become aware of one’s desire to get away. “Everything I fear will someday catch up with me would catch up with me too fast here,” he opines in one of the aphoristic sentences that make all of his writing so pleasurable.

Whatever Brainard might have feared in 1971 would likely be compounded in 2021 Bolinas. As Estes writes in his introduction to the 50th-anniversary edition of On the Mesa, he re-edited this collection to expand what he finds most compelling about Weishaus’s original compilation: its record of poets’ work in “reassessing one’s place in a world that feels extremely illogical.” Estes is gesturing toward the outlandish landscape of late 2020 in the United States, when the country was barreling toward a fractious presidential election under pandemic conditions, but he also has in mind 1971, with Nixon at the helm, the ongoing war in Vietnam, economic tremors, the recent Weather Underground bombings, and the debut of All in the Family, a television show that attempted to—lovingly—dramatize the clash of intergenerational values. The version of On the Mesa that appeared in 1971, published by City Lights, did not include 17 figures whom Estes felt it was a shame to omit: Brainard, Berrigan, Notley, di Prima, Whalen, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Richard Brautigan, Jim Brodey, Jim Carroll, Lewis MacAdams, Phoebe MacAdams, Duncan McNaughton, Stephen Ratcliffe, Aram Saroyan, Gailyn Saroyan, Charlie Vermont, and Anne Waldman. And the anthology really is so much more compelling, fun, representative of the place and time, and, yes, relevant with these additions.

I particularly enjoy the wit of Estes’s choices: for example, his decision to switch out the original selections from Creeley (moving them to a later point in the anthology) for three by Bobbie Louise Hawkins, which treat subjects similar—rain and domestic settings—to her soon-to-be ex-husband’s. The offerings from Notley, “Six Phoebe Poets,” are a series of travesties of writing by John Ashbery, James Schuyler, and other male poets “[w]ritten on purpose,” as the satirist notes, on the occasion of Phoebe MacAdams’s birthday. And whereas Arthur Okamura’s work was present in the form of a single drawing of butterflies for the frontispiece in the 1971 collection, in 2021, multiple illustrations of his appear.

Of greatest interest to me are works by poets with whom I was less familiar prior to reading the anthology. John Doss’s lengthy “Birth,” a relatively graphic depiction of a homebirth, was included in the 1971 text, and I was astonished by its forthright description of the mother’s “Perineum stretching / Glass thin, transparent,” particularly as the mechanics of birth are seldom written about or made visible even now, a half-century after Doss’s poem. I was also drawn to Lewis MacAdams’s “Eamon De Valera,” another long poem, titled for the former revolutionary and, in 1971, president of Ireland. MacAdams writes about tensions between family life and working life as well as how he feels about his partner, with whom he seems to be in a mutually supportive relationship. I know this sounds like dull stuff—perhaps especially when compared to more standard second-wave New York School fare, especially via Berrigan: speed and seedy sex and self-recriminations. However, I can’t help liking it when MacAdams writes, “P.S. You know when to laugh, and you’re indelibly kind.” It’s an expression I may reuse, and perhaps it points to a small flash of genuine, lived and livable utopia, if there is such a thing.

The one point at which the updated anthology falters is its afterword, written by the scholar Lytle Shaw. A bit perfunctory, it misses the most intriguing and challenging aspects of the project. Shaw expends few words on Estes’s careful editorial work or the emerging tensions—identity based or otherwise—among the various poets and poems. The outro instead offers a broad overview of late-1960s culture, along with some notes about Shaw’s grad-school interests. It is most effective in its address of the escapism of (mostly white) commune living. However, as Shaw presumably knows a great deal about each author in question, it might have been productive to reflect more meticulously on the ways in which the Bolinas work—both that which was present originally and that which was added to On the Mesa—reads now, in 2021, rather than use the space to rehash contentions about “poetries of place” that featured in Fieldworks: From Place to Site in Postwar Poetics, a study Shaw published in 2013. However, this missed opportunity hardly diminishes the overall quality of the book, and Estes’s achievement speaks for itself.

***

From Bolinas, if one drives south and then east along Route 1 for a little less than an hour, one will arrive in Sausalito, the location of the Heath Ceramics factory and store dinnerware manufactory. Its former proprietor, Edith Heath (1911–2005), is the subject of Edith Heath: Philosophies (Information Office, 2021), an overdue treatment of her life and methods, edited by Jennifer M. Volland and Chris Marino.

The resources necessary for the production of Philosophies were gathered via a matching campaign hosted by the University of California, Berkeley, crowd-funding platform. Judging from the site, which includes a detailed description of the book’s budget, more than $34,000 was allocated for “Bookbinding, Materials & Printing Quality Management.” This lion’s share had its intended effect: as an object, Philosophies is stunning, satisfyingly hefty and vivid, and the designer, Derek Barnett of Information Office, should be up for some awards. (Barnett’s labor was compensated in a different tranche of the budget: “Design, Marketing & Book Promotion,” to which a little less than $25,000 was allotted.)

It’s worth lingering for a moment over Philosophies as an example of mass-produced book art. The page edges are a bright cerulean blue, a shade that also saturates the cover images. This blue is reminiscent of one of Heath’s signature glazes, which she termed “Turquoise,” featured in a “Turquoise/Brown” combination in her iconic “Exposed Clay Edge” two-tone, porcelain-lined ware, in production from 1958 to 1972. Its use in the book’s design, along with a complementary cool brown on the covers, signals the midcentury aesthetics—and pursuant “philosophies”—the contents will treat. Although the way in which particular color combinations become associated with particular places and eras is rather mysterious, it’s likely that this pairing reflects a regional juxtaposition of water (reflecting sky) and land, along with the emphasis on relative simplicity, employment of local materials, and the good life, so called, that characterized Californian midcentury design. Inside the book, rich color images, sometimes at full bleed and all meticulously optimized for print, make for a fascinating visual experience. Many images are reproduced with their original format visible; readers see the edges of cards, papers, snapshots, drawings. Although tidy and hyper-coherent, the book retains the feeling of a scrapbook; this is in part what makes it so compelling. There is a sense of peering into an actual archive, replete with enigmatic traces of a life as it was lived.

Given the power of these visual elements and the book’s pleasing tactility, the writing on Heath’s biography and practice can seem quieter or, at times, secondary. Heath’s life was one of astounding social, intellectual, and geographic mobility, and at the end of my reading, I still found myself wondering how this had been possible as well as what this might mean for broader histories of American design and artistic practice. A 30-plus page visual timeline, “Edith Heath: Historical Timeline,” is perhaps the most valuable contribution for this reason; it follows Heath’s (née Edith Kiertzner) childhood as a member of a large Danish-immigrant family who struggled to make ends meet in rural Iowa during the Depression to her eventual discovery of ceramics in her early 30s while living in San Francisco with her husband. Also extremely informative and perceptive is Ezra Shales’s essay, “Etiquette in Motion: A Comparative Consideration of Edith Heath’s Ashtrays and Mugs.” Shales explains how the genres of midcentury mugs and ashtrays “can be read as performative.”^[5] Heath’s low-handled mugs were designed to be used without saucers, an act of “radical simplification” that saved dishwashing and table-setting labor.^[6] Heath’s wildly successful line of ashtrays, matched to the company’s dinnerware, were similarly a site of changing social practices in the postwar era. It became acceptable for women to smoke in public, and ashtrays were communal focal points in a room or an office, prominently featured and available, regardless of the smoker’s gender.

A strange oversight in Philosophies is a critical consideration of the chemical composition of Heath’s glazes, as well as the style and forms of the various vessels the company created. Only one of the book’s contributors, Rosa Novak, who has a BFA in ceramics, seems to be a specialist in the medium. However, Novak’s essay focuses on Heath’s architectural tile, so no single essay discusses Heath as a potter or designer of mass-produced pottery. Does this mean that the writers and editors consider Heath’s embrace of an aesthetically progressive lifestyle more significant than the ceramics themselves? Also puzzling is the lack of discussion of Asian and Native American influences on Heath’s work. Of course, edited collections are necessarily incomplete and subjective, and part of the spark of Philosophies comes from the multiple points of view assembled.

Surprisingly, the moment in Philosophies at which readers see Heath most clearly comes in Jennifer M. Volland’s essay, “The World Is Written in Clay,” a discussion of Heath as a poet and writer. Volland quotes from “Some Thinking in Barton-under-Needwood,” an unpublished nine-page poem Heath wrote during a long visit to the United Kingdom in 1969. Here Heath’s personal experience becomes accessible as nowhere else in the book, and it is worth quoting the passage at length:

I spend my days
all my waking hours, whether night or day
talking to myself, silently.
 
I am certain many women do the same
trying to explain, to oneself
or trying to understand, rather
“the meaning of life”—especially
as it pertains to women
educated
living in a section of the non-starving world
theoretically free and emancipated
but living in dread of an emasculating word or deed.

I find it shocking that Heath’s self-awareness extended to recognition that although her material needs were met, her emotional and perhaps spiritual life—the titular philosophies, one might say—were profoundly atrophied, given that “all my waking hours,” as she wrote, were devoted to a dialogue with herself about how not to “emasculat[e]” someone. On one hand, I’m fascinated by Heath’s ability to parse her situation; on the other, it’s tragic that she found herself walking on eggshells even in later middle age.

Volland’s important essay comes near the end of the book. As I read it, I felt I was finally beginning to understand Heath’s legacy. This is a testament to the power and efficiency of poetry, when it comes to revealing a writer, but it also suggests the possibility of a different sort of collection delving into the Heath Ceramics Collection at the Environmental Design Archives, one that puts Heath’s own writing and her experiments with clay and glaze, along with the visual materials already so deftly handled in Philosophies, first. Heath may not have intended for her poems or other writings to be made public in the same manner as her designs in pottery and tile, but, then again, she might have felt the same way about the various snapshots and sketches reproduced in great number throughout the collection. As I read, I wondered what sort of book Heath herself might have designed to explain her life and work. But perhaps there is more on this point to come.^[7]

***

The question of what constitutes the good life, so called, receives a series of contingent answers via the three books examined in this brief essay. I’m reminded of the old chestnut, via Sigmund Freud of all people, that one needs both work and love to be joyful. Where one of these two exists to the detriment of the other, suffering ensues. Certainly, this is part of the difficulty with attempting to devise a more perfect form of life by way of art—since art is work, after all. Some say that making art can be a fine substitute for love, but I am not so sure (not that I always take Freud’s advice). I think Joe Brainard, for one, wasn’t so sure, either.

The poet bell hooks, writing in All About Love: New Visions (2001), observes that in the United States, a nation she sees as shaped by twin drives, “the quest to love” and “sexual obsession,” there is very little public discussion of how to learn in relation to love. “Schools for love do not exist,” she observes.^[8] Although communities explicitly devoted to love, especially the sexual kind, can seem cultish, maybe there is something to be gleaned from hooks’s observation. Whether they were, strictly speaking, schools, the Bolinas poetry enclave and the Heath factory were certainly workshops. That they were not just or simply sites for work is what constitutes their ongoing allure.