Aleta George brings to life Ina Coolbrith's "Bittersweet Song"

    Aleta George of Suisun City does not consider herself a poet, yet the life and personality of California’s first poet laureate, Ina Donna Coolbrith, has captured her imagination. The subject of George’s interest is relatively unknown even to most modern poets--that puts Coolbrith into an even smaller minority of unknowns: if poets haven’t maintained her memory, who will?
    Biographer George is trying to change this. "Coolbrith has been condensed into footnotes over the years," she says, adding, "I want to dust her off, bring her story to light by following her path as an artist. She should be celebrated as one of America’s most important pioneer poets." George’s work-in-progress, Bittersweet Song, is a historical narrative describing Coolbrith's struggles and triumphs as an artist whose life span stretches from ante-Bellum America to the eve of the Great Depression.
    Known as "the pearl of her tribe," Coolbrith was a passionate Victorian woman who held court at frequent San Francisco salon gatherings between the mid-1860s and 1920. She helped secure the reputations of many of her fellow artists and writers, including Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Charles Warren Stoddard (pictured at left), Robert Louis Stevenson, John Muir and Ambrose Bierce. Her last years were spent negotiating two coastal cultures, as she traveled to New York for four winters to hole up in a hotel room and concentrate on her own writing, occasionally venturing out to bring the news of the West’s blossoming literary life to a myopic East Coast establishment. While there, she  chummed around with fellow Westerners Edwin Markham, Gertrude Atherton, Mary Austin, and with Carl Seyfforth, a handsome young concert pianist she called “her boy.”
    Coolbrith was a true daughter of the American West. She was the niece of Mormon pioneer Joseph Smith and friend to Joaquin Miller whose daughter, born to a Native-American woman, she helped raise. She was the first state poet laureate in the nation and represented California from 1915 until her death in 1928. There is a park on Russian Hill in San Francisco to commemorate her, and a poetry membership organization founded in 1919 in her honor. Yet, her poetry has been deemed old fashioned and her role in American letters consistently overlooked. For decades, her grave in Oakland’s Mountain View cemetery was neglected until the Ina Coolbrith Circle brought her an elegant tombstone in 1986.         
    Journalist and geographer Aleta George usually writes about the natural world for Bay Nature magazine and the San Francisco Chronicle. She also writes for Smithsonian and the Los Angeles Times. While researching an article about the Farallon Islands, she came across references to the vibrant literary salons of post-Gold Rush San Francisco. As she read about the men--and a few women--who wrote and published at this time, she kept encountering Coolbrith: "People were infatuated with Ina Coolbrith," George says, "I’m not the first." Coolbrith’s natural beauty and vivacity--with an "undercurrent of sadness" according to George--are evident in photographs taken of her at this time.
    George followed up, but found only one extant biography, a book written in 1974 by librarian Josephine DeWitt Rhodehamel, a well-researched book printed in purple ink that "was painful to read." As she dug further, George learned that many of Coolbrith’s books and papers had been scattered to the winds; Coolbrith’s home, the repository of all her papers, letters, and books, was burned to the ground in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. When Coolbrith died, her niece sold off most of what remained. Some papers are held in the Coolbrith Collection at the University of California’s Bancroft Library, Pasadena’s Huntington Library, as well as at Oakland’s Main Public Library and library at Mills College.
    Coolbrith published three books in her lifetime, contributed to all the leading periodicals in her day, and was the most beloved poet in the West for 50 years. As sole support for her mother and her sister’s children, Coolbrith worked hard as Oakland Public Library’s first librarian. Until she found a home in Oakland, she slept on a cot in the library. She hated to leave San Francisco for a town that was still mostly marshland and culturally backwards. Coolbrith "loved to see the Bay and the ocean" and loved the vibrant life of San Francisco. But, she was much the working woman, having responsibility for the children of her dead sister (she had none of her own), and working long days as Oakland’s first librarian where she placed books into the hands of such bright ambitious youths as Jack London and Isadora Duncan.
    She did not keep a personal diary but George believes "her poetry was her journal," providing glimpses of Coolbrith’s inner life and emotional world. George believes that her relatively slim output can be explained by the difficulties of her life and the fact that "a lot of crap happened to her." Her early life was dominated by forced migrations and the taint on Mormonism culminating in the assassination of Joseph Smith; Coolbrith’s father died when she was only six months old, and Coolbrith was married young and divorced soon in order to escape from an abusive husband. She eventually made her way to northern California.
    George says it is sometimes difficult to read her letters. Frustrated by the long working hours that kept her from writing, "she was a bit of a complainer." "I want her to rise above her circumstances," George says, acknowledging the great differences in opportunities that exist now that did not exist in Coolbrith‘s time. In addition to working 14-hour days, six days a week, Coolbrith--like most women of her day--were completely responsible for all household chores and the manufacture of many household supplies, such as soap and clothing. "I sometimes get disappointed in her during her library years," says George, "but I also understand that she had to write most of her poems as she was doing the dishes." George loves that Coolbrith had the courage to pack up her life at age 78 in order to write in New York. Financial support from the Bohemian Club allowed her to do so.
    Although she does not consider herself a qualified critic of poetry, George is dismayed that Coolbrith’s work has received short shrift from the academic establishments that groom writers. In general, literary critics have felt that her poetry hasn’t stood "the test of time." George, however, has found meaning and beauty in it, particularly in the understanding about how a poet relates to her own worth and the impact she may be having on her field of endeavor. It is clear from Coolbrith‘s poetic meditations that she grappled with the question of "what‘s art for?" and, because a lot of her work reflects Western imagery and the California landscape, "She can come up with a phrase that is really brilliant, particularly with regards to her love of nature."
    George, a Native Californian born in Novato and now living in Suisun City in Solano County, is familiar with that natural landscape and writes about it frequently, exploring the relationships between people and the land that has been a resource and an inspiration to them.
On Friday, March 12, Aleta George (shown at left) will share some of her discoveries about Ina Coolbrith at the “Writing Women Back Into History” program sponsored by the Solano County Library Foundation. Tickets are $25 per person and include a luncheon, a poetry reading by Suzanne Bruce, and an honoring of Ann Cousineau, past director of Solano County libraries, and Jan Hewitt, first woman to serve on the Solano County Board of Supervisors, as Women of the Year. Fern Henry is the honorary chair for the event which will be held at the Joseph P. Nelson Community Center, 611 Village Drive, Suisun City, 11:30-1 pm, Friday, March 12. For tickets and information, contact Jennifer Barton at bjenbarton@msn.com or call 707-429-0412, or send checks to Solano County Library Foundation, 601 Kentucky Street, Fairfield, CA 94533 (707-421-8075).

The National Women’s History Project is celebrating its 30th anniversary of promoting projects and programs that “write women back into history.
A FEW POEMS BY INA COOLBRITH

You can find many more Ina Coolbrith poems at Poemhunter.

Honey-Throats

Honey-Throats, upon the boughs,
Piping all day long--
Sun-flecks in the leaves that house
Quickened into song--

In your notes a gospel lies--
Teach it yet to me!!--
What the Maker in the skies
Meant His world to be.
*

Sorrow is Better than Laughter
(Eccl. VII, 3) To Uncle George Bromley

I hold not that sorrow than laughter
Is better for man;
The storm-clouds that darken the heavens
Than rainbows that span.
Ah! rather the skies in there shining
Than dreary with rain,--
And the heart that is lightsome in gladness
Than heavy with pain.

There are thorns in the smoothest of pathways
Enough and to spare;
No wheat-field so carefully tended
That knows not the tare;
But the harvester gathers the harvest
In the gold of its sheaves,
And the briar is forgot of the branches
In the laugh of its leaves.

The voice in its merriment ringing
The laughter-bells clear!
May their melody linger about him,
And the seed he has sown
Of joy in the heart-fields of others
Find bloom in his own.
*

Across the Chasm

To feel your arms about me,
To see your living face,
Of all within God’s giving
This were supremest grace!

To be again together
As in long years ago,
Were all, were all of Heaven
My soul would ask to know.
*

In the Orchard

Tent me within your cool, leaf-latticed house.
Pomegranate bough!
A carpet, sown with blossom-rubies, spread,
A queen might tread.
Toss your pink-petal banners to the breeze,
Bloom of the almond trees;
Tide to and fro
In seas of frangrances,
Peach blow and apple-snow--
Of every blossoming thing I am a part
Since love is at my heart.

They are talking very busily, the birds,
With such soft words
And sudden just-can’t-help-it-bursts of song,
The nesting leaves among!
Listen, that trill and tone!
Was ever such ecstatic rapture known?
Ah, sweethearts! Yet a moment pause, I pray--
I know what you say,
Since love is mine today.