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Poetry Is Deeply Rooted In Rural California Valley

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would have to stop. Ruben spun

the van into an irrigation ditch,

spun the five-year-old me awake

to immigration officers,

their batons already out,

already looking for the soft spots on the body

There were no great truths

revealed to me then.

Poet Philip Levine, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for his collection "The Simple Truth," moved to the San Joaquin Valley from Detroit in 1958 to join the faculty of California State University at Fresno.

Other poets followed, giving rise to the regional literary movement that continues to flourish, producing writers Lawson Fusao Inada and Juan Felipe Herrera -- who studied under Levine -- along with Tim Z. Hernandez and many others.

"This place is very dramatic and uncompromising and vast," Levine said. "When you sit down to write, you think: 'I want to write large to measure up to this.' "

Joyce Jenkins, editor of Poetry Flash, a magazine focused on West Coast poetry, said Levine's writing style meshed perfectly with the valley.

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