Bolinas, California, is a settlement along the San Andreas Fault, about thirty miles north of San Francisco. The Coast Miwok people once hunted salmon there, before they were displaced by Spanish and Mexican colonists, in the early nineteenth century. Later, in waves, loggers, miners, and summer tourists took over. The town’s hotels collapsed into the bay during the 1906 earthquake, and by the mid-nineteen-sixties, when the poets started showing up, Bolinas looked like a quickly erased drawing. A small colony of psychedelic busy bees soon formed, with plans for a variety of structures, from geodesic domes to tree houses. Many of the homes were made of wood recycled from old ranches and the Navy barracks on nearby Treasure Island. Lloyd Kahn, the legendary D.I.Y. guru and an editor at the “Whole Earth Catalog,” lived in town. Philo T. Farnsworth III, whose father invented the all-electric television, was there, too, planning his Yantra House, an orblike structure that had reportedly attracted the interest of the architect Buckminster Fuller.
With these alpha hippies on site, like a pack of taller, better-looking Thoreaus, the poets faced a high bar for thrift, adaptability, and invention—both on and off the page. Many, like Joanne Kyger, Gary Snyder, and Philip Whalen, arrived from San Francisco; others, including Lewis and Phoebe MacAdams and Tom Clark, road-tripped from New York. Those cities’ countercultural arts scenes had begun to congeal into aesthetic schools, but there was something contradictory about their pedagogy: it was a mug’s game to apprentice yourself to, say, Jack Spicer, the San Francisco writer who compared poetry to transcriptions from Mars, or to vie for a spot among the New York poets, whose art-world and Ivy League channels seemed just as interstellar. The Bolinas poets, many of them women, wrestled with more terrestrial dilemmas. “You can turn the pages / while mommy changes / you” is the entirety of “Poem for Strawberry,” by Gailyn Saroyan. “A dog killed a duck & the kids found it,” John Thorpe wrote in “September.” “A huge gash was gone from its back but I thought we could eat the breast legs & wings.” Bill Berkson’s poem “A-Frame” was named for the simple houses that some people in Bolinas built, often with scavenged materials.
One of the most durable local constructions was “On the Mesa: An Anthology of Bolinas Writing,” a collection of work by nearly twenty poets, published by City Lights, in 1971. Now, fifty years later, an expanded edition (which includes almost twenty more poets) has been published by the Song Cave, a small press in Brooklyn—another coastal settlement of artists, though with fewer geodesic domes. A raffish array of individual styles converge in these poems, their shared focus the place itself: they measure, sometimes with annoyance or sarcasm, the distance between the town’s vibe and its hard facts. No Bolinas school ever emerges. The varieties of stanza shape, pacing, and rhythmic organization from one poet to another are remarkable. Anne Waldman, the New York experimental poet, wrote at times like a pre-Socratic:
Some poets gushed (“our babies toddle barefoot thru the cities of the universe,” Diane di Prima wrote), and others mocked: among the “Things to do in Bolinas” recorded by Ted Berrigan was “watch the natives suffer.” Robert Creeley was there, building his ingenious gizmos out of tiny little words: “Things move. You’ve come to here / by one thing after another, and are here.”
These are all distinct contributions to a common tapestry. The poems act almost as dispatches from different mental dimensions. And, in a way, they were: drugs were present in Bolinas in amazing abundance and diversity—from acid and mushrooms to speed and mescaline—and took people to some far-out zones.
In an afterword to the new edition of “On the Mesa,” the scholar Lytle Shaw writes that Bolinas was the “only instance I could think of where a town was essentially governed by poets.” Shaw’s claim is almost too mild: on the evidence of this anthology, the town was governed at least in part by the poetry itself. Its residents met in the cross talk, the gossip, and the spiritual pining found in those verses, which were often read aloud or featured in homegrown periodicals such as The Bolinas Hit, The Paper, and the Bolinas Hearsay News. (Some can be found online, in Kevin Opstedal’s excellent history of the Bolinas scene, “Dreaming as One.”) Poetry was stretched to accommodate all of it: town business, hallucinations, pranks, and reveries. In an untitled poem published in The Paper, in 1972, Ellen Sandler wrote:
The town’s surveying was done partly in its poetry. “Tom’s &/Angelica’s roof, Joan’s roof, eclectic unmoving houses snuggled where / the mesa slopes away,” Duncan McNaughton wrote. Several poems offered advice, Farmer’s Almanac style, about the crops or the weather. “Does a ring around the moon mean rain?” Anne Waldman wrote. “If so: rain.” In a bratty, valedictory poem called “Bolinas Eyewash,” Ted Berrigan and Tom Clark follow the rain downstream:
Some poets—fewer, perhaps, than one might expect—reported on events outside the bubble. Philip Whalen wrote about Vietnam, where a “handsome young Vietnamese guy from Burlington, Vermont / Just got it right in the neck,” and the 1967 Newark riots, where LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka) was beaten by police: “Head bashed in under hospital bandage.”
Poetry was both a message board and a form of social trust. The names in Ellen Sandler’s poem—Tom (Clark), Bob (Creeley), Joanne (Kyger), Lewis (MacAdams), and Bill (Berkson)—suggest a locally acknowledged pantheon, but the scene took pains to level prestige among its poets, whatever their outside reputations. Though non-Bolinas hierarchies were viewed with suspicion (“X has become a great man, Y very nearly / Greater,” Whalen wrote, sarcastically), others took shape. Where you lived, whom you had sex with, what drugs you did, how long and under what conditions of distress you’d stayed in Bolinas became the trappings of local clout.
As Berrigan, the New York City soul whose taste in drugs and poems ran to speed, and Clark wrote in their collaborative poem, “the word-of-mouth network plugs you in to what’s happening inside everybody else’s houses, even if you never go there, & didn’t want to.” Clark’s “Inside the Dome of the Taj Mahal,” a poem about thwarted meditation, reveals how intense the expectation to be mellow could become:
It took a skeptic on a stopover to render Bolinas fully. During a brief visit in 1971, the New York School artist Joe Brainard produced perhaps the most distinctive work to emerge from the place. His “Bolinas Journal,” reissued in a limited run alongside “On the Mesa,” is a characteristic mashup of Brainard’s comics and prose sketches, and his ironic temperament lends an anthropologist’s slant to the scene. Though Brainard feels like “the same ol’ me” in the allegedly transformative locale, he’s nevertheless driven nuts by an area kid who shouts, “Is that Jerry Lewis?,” every time they cross paths. “I smile,” Brainard writes, “And wish the fuck he’d give it up. (Pretty embarrassing.)”
As Brainard learned, the Bolinas poets twice rallied to local causes: first to clean up the beach after the disastrous San Francisco Bay oil spill earlier that year, and then to oppose a regional sewer system that might have opened the town up to development. Brainard encountered “a lot of talk about things I don’t know much about,” including “eastern religions” and English-muffin bread—“Like in a loaf. (Sliced.) That’s how crazy the world really is.” This mixture of the cosmic and the parochial amused him, since he held no titles in either realm:
Then a paragraph break, and then the kicker: “And a lot of talk about houses.”
If you Google “Bolinas” today, you’ll find an article about a boundary dispute that pitted Joel Coen and Frances McDormand against their neighbors, and another about an attempt to quash an affordable-housing project in town. It turns out that it doesn’t take long for “talk about houses” to become talk about real estate. If you want to see what a hippie-era house fashioned by rogue boat builders now fetches, search “Bolinas” on Zillow—I won’t spoil it.
These days, the old prank of stealing the road sign that directed day-trippers and other interlopers to town hits a little different. But with this anthology there are still dozens of other fascinating roads in and out of the place. ♦
