The Plain of Smokes Review

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(More customer reviews)Anyone interested in viewing Los Angeles through the medium of superb poetry should read The Plain of Smokes. It is a wonderful book-length poem on the city from four points of view. Like Hart Crane's portrayal of America in The Bridge, Mudd reveals Los Angeles through a variety of styles and voices.
The first is a formal, nearly nineteenth century meditation on the city by William Wordsworth, who, speaking to his sister, is looking down at "a plain/ so homogeneous in turmoil and market-place intrigue/ that I experienced a sinking awe."
Next is Philip Marlowe, who examines the underbelly of the city in tough-guy talk as he tools around
twelve hours a day
in a mortgaged automobile
out in a shark-colored air
that eats the lung
negotiating
the monotonous circles
van nuys
to southgate
boyle heights
to watts
LAX
to the beach at Venice
A third voice is the poet's maternal ancestor, who is caught on "The Sea Bird,/ south from San Francisco,/ coasting in a bad fog/ raises San Pedro,/ April of fifty-two."
The most powerful voice is the poet's own, when he traces his life in Los Angeles from childhood and youth into maturity. Mudd's aural and imagistic brilliance reminds me, partly again of Hart Crane but even more of Pound's mixtures of lyric and erudition, poetry and personae. (Mudd ironically and fondly acknowledges a debt to "mutterings from old Ezra,/ his mind gone Sargasso." in the after word.) The tones range from the historical:
The last zanja [water ditch]
is paved-over in the Twenties.
No more orchards along Figueroa,
once called the Street of Grasshoppers,
now the longest street in the world,
Dodger Stadium to the sea.
and the stoic:

I brood also
on the dilemmas of the spirit:
how they are mirrored
in the monument of City -
yearnings realized
but endlessly defeated
in the cold permanence of stone.
to the triumphant:

I've seen possibly
much of Her,
but glimpses only,
body
glistening
in California,
surf-dappled, emerging
like a single arresting note
from the slow drowning
in the sea's roar
The Plain of Smokes is a profound and deeply felt discourse on contemporary life and love, and the drawings by the California artist and ceramist Ken Price capture the modern city's red funk jazz of movement and light.



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