The below poem was written for Zócalo Public Square, part of a partnership for an event on June 11 featuring local leaders in discussion on the power and politics in the Central Valley. Check out the full discussion and a recap from the event here.
I’ve driven by a few times, is the most common response I get when I tell folks I’m from Fresno.
I can imagine them on the 5 headed to the Bay or L.A., seeing a sign for Fresno and not knowing that they are still 50 miles west of downtown. I do my best to hold my tongue while flashing a peace sign. I say: Thank you for driving by and FresYes forever!
As the former poet laureate of Fresno, I’m a dutiful ambassador for my city and one of its harsher critics. You have to love this place to know its flaws and see its beauty. Our poets thrive on the outside world’s propensity to overlook what goes on here. We’re like a row of oleanders in full bloom, flourishing in heat and drought, pink and poisonous in the middle of the highway, splitting orchards of citrus trees and 500-foot wind turbines. This place perplexes us with its endless contradictions. And it has a gravity that pulls us back.
I spent 10 years living away from Fresno. I went to Berkeley for college and L.A. for a change of scenery. I’ll admit, part of me thought I had to get out. Writers traveled, I was told. They lived in romantic cities like New York and Paris. They hung out in cafes and alleyways like the Beats in San Francisco. They cruised the gritty bus lines through Bukowski’s L.A.
But when I sat down to write in these other places, all that came out were poems about Fresno, poems about my childhood, poems about the neighborhood four generations of my family called home. Getting some distance created space to really see Fresno for what it was, all its grandeur and flaws. I opened the valve, and grief came pouring out.
I wonder/if it is better to disappear into Aztlán
or Mazatlán or Mazapan the way you did
or stay in Prather or Marysville and slowly fade
into a sofa chair and reruns of Bonanza.
I published my poetry book while living in L.A. On the flyer for my first public reading, the promoter mistakenly wrote that I was a Bay Area poet. I had to correct him.
“Bro, I’m from Fresno.”
He said, “I know, man, that’s the Bay Area.”
I said: “Dude, you can’t be serious.”
He asked: “To get to Fresno, you gotta go over the Grapevine, right?”
I said: “Well, yeah.”
He said: “It’s north of here?”
I said: “Yeah, foo.”
He said, with his whole chest: “Well, then that’s the Bay Area, dog.”
This is what we Fresnans have come to expect from our good-intentioned, uninformed California neighbors. Writers like me are often called to defend the Central Valley from outsiders and the uninitiated. That I’ll show you, foo-attitude is often all the motivation one needs to make good art.
The promoter was right about one thing: You must traverse the perilous Grapevine—that 6% grade, 11-mile unforgiving climb—to get from Los Angeles to Fresno. We are 200 miles north of L.A. and 200 miles south of the Bay. As the mayor of Huron says, “Fresno isn’t in the middle of nowhere. It’s in the middle of everywhere, carnal.” Because of this, the Grapevine has played a principal role in our literature and lives. Plainly, it has been a steep mountain adversary in our path literally and figuratively for generations.
My grandfather was a master at buying used cars from the classifieds. He had a keen ability to suss out a lemon. The air conditioner could be shot and the roof lining might be hanging from clothespins, but he could tell if the rig could make the trek to L.A. without overheating.
I’ve noticed sussing out a lemon is a superpower among Fresno poets, too. I once heard that the U.S. poet laureate Philip Levine, who taught at Fresno State, used to fold students’ bad poems into paper airplanes in the middle of workshop. I can imagine Phil saying to himself, “This poem wouldn’t make it to L.A.” as he launched someone’s work and watched it nosedive between a row of old schoolhouse desk chairs.
Traveling up and down the Valley and getting to know its rural towns is essential to the experience of living here. The San Joaquin Valley is 10,000 square miles of the most fertile farmland in the world. Most of your food comes from the area. Your chicken, your beef, your milk, almonds, tomatoes, grapes, melons, garlic, onions, oranges, strawberries, olives, peaches, and pomegranates. Probably you already knew that—it’s what goes in the brochures. You buy organic at the farmer’s market in Silver Lake or Pac Heights. You’ve seen the black and white photos of Dolores Huerta. You re-share memes thanking a guy from Zacatecas named Jesus for the bounty of your Thanksgiving table.
But this land, these highways, are also the stuff of our literature. The people who came and continue to work this land, following the crops and scratching a living on the road, had children who grew up to be poets. Read Tomás Rivera’s short stories or José Montoya’s 20 Years of Joda for the browner side of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath and Kerouac’s Dharma Bums.
Before William Saroyan won a Pulitzer and an Academy Award, his family escaped the Armenian genocide and sought refuge in Fresno. Cambodians, Filipinos, Hmong, Serbians, Mexicans, and Salvadorans also found their way to the city as refugees, fleeing wars and persecution. Our poets Brynn Saito and Sara Borjas urge you not to forget the Japanese internment camps in Fresno’s Pinedale. Don’t look away from the prisons just outside the cantaloupe fields in Mendota, Chowchilla, and Corcoran, or the private ICE detention center in McFarland, where Disney made an eponymous film about farmworker cross country runners. Listen to Mark Arax: The water table is being drained for your almond milk latte and the rivers are being tamed with concrete.
Fresno’s literary landscape is not just the work of a singular person or poet, but a culmination of generations of survival and the preservation of language and culture. And yet, we do not simply exist in the past. Some of our most celebrated writers are still alive, still working. There is freedom in being from a place people drive by. You’d be amazed at the work you create when you think no one is paying attention.
Sesshu Foster, L.A.’s radical sage poet, says it best. He has been paying attention. He drove through town like so many before him and he was inspired to write a poem, “Fresno Postcard.” It’s a sweeping ode to this town and its writers. Foster’s poet scribbles lines on a napkin in a Basque restaurant in front of the Greyhound station. He writes: “here I am in the capital of poets, here I am in Fresno.”
Joseph Rios is the former poet laureate of Fresno and a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford University. He is the author of Shadowboxing: Poems & Impersonations, winner of the American Book Award. This was written for Zócalo Public Square, with permission to republish at Fresnoland.
