Photo of Frank Bidart courtesy of Wellesley College.

By Curtis E. Ochocki

Not only do I love T. S. Eliot’s masterpiece modernist poem, “The Waste Land,” but when I slogged through the mean streets of Harlem and Washington Heights, N.Y., as a paramedic during the crack cocaine epidemic of the early 1990s, I saw Eliot’s work as both dark documentary of social disintegration and hopeful prophecy of personal redemption.

So when the California Writers Series presented Frank Bidart on Tuesday, Oct. 20, on the campus of California State University, Bakersfield, I delighted to join more than 125 people jammed into the space to hear the Bakersfield native read from his latest collection, “Watching the Spring Festival.”

What we experienced was a superb illustration of the power of creative language to bring universal meaning to personal experience, and also the necessity to wrestle with understanding this particular art form in a cultural landscape even more fragmented than Eliot documented in 1922.

Certain phrases and lines from Bidart’s most recent work suggested an uncomfortably intimate glimpse into naked personal vulnerability, especially around the issues of love, sex and death. But the sheer density of the poet’s careful linguistic construction rendered the overall presentation as darkly unfathomable to me as the uniformly black clothing Bidart wore.

Attending this event with no previous exposure to Bidart’s poetry was clearly a mistake on my part.  Just as I would never expect someone to comprehend the significance of Eliot’s historical references from a single read through “The Waste Land,” I should never have stepped into the ring with this professor of English and creative writing at Wellesley College without a decent warm-up.  When Bidart’s host and promoter flashed the coolly understated champion’s belt that came along with the $100,000 cash award as part of the prestigious Bollingen Prize from Yale University Library, I was already beaten.

My lack of preparation tripped me as I stepped between the ropes strung around my own appreciation of the reading, though I was heartened by Bidart’s conviction that poetry still has a vital role to play in our contemporary cultural scene.  As I was counted out on the canvas, I agreed with Bidart’s sentiment that modernism has made people feel like they don’t have the confidence to read poetry.

It may be only the bluster of the beaten, but I’ll take up Bidart’s challenge to “wade into the words” and find my own level of comfort in poetry. In fact, this afternoon, I plan on finding a copy of Bidart’s “Golden State,” the poet’s “first book …  about my family” and “growing up here” in Bakersfield and diving headlong into the drama.  Just let me up off the mat first.

Curtis E. Ochocki is a fiction writer in Bakersfield.

Here is one of Bidart’s prize-winning poems:

STAR DUST

Above the dazzling city lies starless
night. Ruthless, you are pleased the price of one

is the other. That night

dense with date palms, crazy with the breath-
less aromas of fresh-cut earth,

black sky thronging with light so thick the fixed

unbruised stars bewildered
sight, I wanted you dazzled, wanted you drunk

As we lie on our backs in close dark parallel furrows newly

dug, staring up at the consuming sky, light
falling does not stop at flesh: each thing hidden, buried

between us now burns and surrounds us,

visible, like breath in freezing air. What you ignore or refuse
or cannot bear. What I hide that I ask, but

ask. The shimmering improvisations designed to save us

fire melts to law. I touched the hem of your garment. You opened
your side, feeding me briefly just enough to show me why I ask.

Melancholy, as if shorn, you cover each glowing pyre

with dirt. In this light is our grave. Obdurate, you say: We
are darkness. We are the city

whose brightness blots the stars from night.

–from Star Dust, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005