Poetry Is Deeply Rooted In Rural California Valley

FRESNO, Calif. -- Work happens here.

Vans full of farmworkers rumble through the darkness before dawn. Produce-laden trucks streak along highways en route to San Francisco and Los Angeles. The mountains surrounding the San Joaquin Valley hide behind a veil of exhaust, dust and soot.

For many born into this bowl-shaped land, there's little time for words, yet poetry grows here like weeds, said Blas Manuel de Luna, who was raised a farmhand and writes poems that are as much a part of the earth as the peaches he used to pick.

His words are straightforward and honest, his themes focused on work and the land. De Luna belongs to a regional school of poetry born in this rural valley that sprawls at the foot of the Sierra Nevada.

"You're not deluded about life if you grow up working in the fields," said de Luna. The valley's poets are "no-nonsense people who want to write about what they do."

Like de Luna, many are immigrants, or the children of immigrants -- Mexican, Japanese, Indian, Laotian -- who came here to pick lettuce, strawberries or plums.

Their experiences often make for poems that are hard to swallow and linger like grit between the teeth, like de Luna's "Bent to the Earth," which he read recently at a high school in Firebaugh, where he teaches English to the children of other farmworkers:

They had hit Ruben

with the high beams, had blinded

him so that the van

he was driving, full of Mexicans

going to pick tomatoes,