Poetry Is Deeply Rooted In Rural California Valley

colored section, strolling all

purposeful, proud, and casual

into the kitchen, and handing over a package

in exchange for a sip or a snack --

because all the black, brown, yellow cooks

knew me, and would feed me,

just for making my delivery!

Others use poetry to navigate the cracks between cultures.

Hernandez, a performance poet whose first book, "Skin Tax," was published two years ago, grew up at odds with the machismo of Visalia's Hispanic community -- though not with its music.

With the help of bongo drums and two musician friends, Hernandez recently transformed patrons of a brightly lit Barnes & Noble bookstore in a Merced strip mall into raucous backup singers chanting the chorus of his poem "Mama's Boy."

They say I'm a Mama's Boy

like it's a bad thing, when all along

I thought that's what a man was. . . .

A Mama's Boy they say,

with hands too soft for picking

legs thin as sprigs of mesquite

Many of the valley's youth take another way out, joining the military like Fresno poet Brian Turner.

If the isolation of wide-open country made Turner a poet, his grandfather's stories of military adventure gave him the guts of a soldier. But what ultimately pushed him to sign up, like many young people here, was the more prosaic need for health insurance and a steady income.

In Iraq, he was haunted by a landscape that was eerily familiar, where owls rested on grape vines, grasshoppers scratched the dirt and the world was reduced to stillness. Long hours of boredom were frequently shattered by the violence that permeates "Here, Bullet," a collection of poems for which he won the 2005 Beatrice Hawley Award, given by the nonprofit poetry publisher Alice James Books.

In his "Katyusha Rockets," the two places merge, and for a moment, the war is here, and bombs are falling on a Memorial Day parade in Fresno:

where lovers and strangers and old friends

entertain themselves, unaware of the dangers

headed their way, or that I will need to search

among them . . .