Lee Rossi: California Poets Part 9, Three Poems

Lee Rossi

December 22nd, 2025

California Poets: Part IX

Lee Rossi

Three Poems

Wanderung

That morning we set out as prepared as we could be

with thousands of calories in each of our knapsacks

and an autographed edition of Heine’s “Journey

in the Harz Mountains.” For the first dozen miles

we goose-footed it along the autobahn enjoying

the whizz and counter-wind of Beamers and Mercs.

To our right the smokestacks of the now defunct

People’s Glorious Steel Works reached for the sky,

the fingers of some giant hand, while across the roadway

sugar beets, piled like cannon balls, blazed in the bright autumn

sun. As our thoughts turned from weißwurst to sauerkraut,

we left the autobahn and entered a thick woods

that rose like a forest of pipe organs along

the suddenly steep grade. So musical was the wind

through this mixed deciduous biome and so fragrant—

the scent of balsam and pine—that we almost halted

before we had truly entered the place, what seemed

even to our agnostic eyes, a shrine. But we

strode on, our purpose as sturdy as the thick

leather soles of our boots, past food carts

manned by werewolves and flights of vampire

bats. We knew we could expect anything

on a walk like this, even the brilliant telegraphy

of tracer rounds streaking past our heads and

the green fog of mustard gas settling in the

tranquil hollows between hills. None of us

had forgotten our gas masks and protective

clothing, and we were steeled by Heine’s

admonitions against laziness and self-absorption.

Heine is an interesting case, because although

he himself was a victim of laziness and self-

absorption, he never ceased to rail against

these vices. As such, he is a model for all

of us who have been raised in an atmosphere

of permissiveness and ease, and yet must

master a world in which evil and violence

are the norms. From a ridge overlooking

a deep glacial tarn we saw a mountain village,

beautiful, and suspect, in the way of all things

beautiful. We crept to within five hundred yards

of the village before loosing a barrage

of mortar and rocket fire, and then going from

house to blazing house we machine-gunned

the surviving inhabitants, the way we had been

schooled in our arithmetic and entomology classes.

Tumult in Cobalt

                        “let be be finale of seem”

As if I had been walking, suddenly

tripped and was about to fall,

scraping wrists and knees,

I steadied myself in my chair. 

This mental emergency

came, it seemed, from nowhere.

A cool wind was blowing

the lemon tree's sparse green.

Trumpet flowers stirred.

It was summer, its arrogant

height, but all I could do was sit,

sovereign of a small kingdom

and watch the jaded fanfare,

swaggering green,

the plush purple and lime,

and wish there was more of me

in this brilliant, jostling scene,

less seem and more be.

A Jar

Grandma lived in a tarpaper shack on the outskirts of Memphis. Grandma was sixty, and then she was 92. She died when she was 92. Before that she picked cotton and birthed five children. Dad was Number Four. The other ones came out dead. She worked in the fields with grandpa. She picked cotton and pole beans. She shucked pole beans and cooked them in water she pumped from the well. The pump was hot in summer, icy in winter. The water was always cool, although sometimes it tasted like soap or kerosene. Grandma had a wood stove and would cook the children, one at a time, in a big washtub. Or else she would wash them in a big cook tub. Tootsie, the baby, before any of the rest. Grandma liked her vino. When she died she only had three teeth left in her head, maybe four. (You didn’t want to look too close.) She kept the rest in a jar under her bed except for the gold ones which she kept with her ring. Tootsie got the ring. Don’t ask who got the jar.

Interview

January 18th, 2026

California Poets Interview Series:

Lee Rossi, Poet

interviewed by David Garyan

DG: Let’s begin with how you discovered poetry. Is there a specific event that brought you to it, perhaps a specific poem, or was it a greater need to express something you felt?

LR: It wasn’t an event, it was a person. My best, perhaps my only, friend in high school was a boy named Tim. I don’t know which came first, poetry or friendship. We’d meet on weekends, sit in his room, listen to records and talk about books. His room was full of books and records. He belonged to both the Quality Paperback Book club and the Columbia Records club. For a teenage boy living in suburban St. Louis, he was immensely sophisticated and cultured. Or so it seemed to me who was as polished as the clods in my father’s vegetable garden. On weekends, I’d drive to his house in North St. Louis and listen to Barbra and Frank or hear Tim recount the story of Nanook of the North. Later, sometime in our senior year, we snuck into a movie theater that was showing La Dolce Vita. It felt so daring. That movie of course was Condemned by the Legion of Decency, and I understood nothing about it except the allure of Anita Ekberg’s breasts.

Somewhere along the way we began writing poetry. I’d started reading fellow St. Louisan T.S. Eliot, and tried imitating his quatrains. Tim was more of a free verse guy. But at some point we had enough poems that we wanted to publish them so we talked the principal into letting us do a literary magazine. All it was were Tim’s poems and my poems and one or two poems from other kids. After that I never really let go of the belief that I might one day be a poet, even though for the next twenty years I wrote at most one or two poems a year.

That of course doesn’t answer the question, why poetry, or even why I felt the urge to write. But that’s a question whose answer is more vaporous and impossible perhaps to fathom for anyone who hasn’t been subjected to the tyranny of nuns and the prospect of eternity.

DG: As with the three poems featured in California Poet Part 9, you write, overall, in both prose form and the more standard line. Does the amount and way you edit generally stay the same when working in both forms?

LR: Prose comes more easily to me. I love English syntax and grammar. Having studied Latin in high school, I learned early on to appreciate complexity, periodic or compound- complex sentences. And yet the people around me, my parents and relatives, spoke in a limited, demotic English. Short simple sentences interspersed with expletives and obscenities. One of my early teachers used to say, “Your strength is your weakness, and your weakness is your strength.” So I know if my poem starts sounding too much like a lecture or an essay, it’s in trouble. If I can, I’ll re-work it, make it sound more like someone talking. Occasionally I’ll have a piece that’s strange, a stranger to English grammar. I like that. It gives me more room for play. But more often I’ll find somebody else’s poem that speaks to me, almost a foreign language, English as a foreign language, which I then try to answer with my own poem in that same foreign language.

DG: For five years, you studied to become a Roman Catholic priest but eventually walked away from the seminary. What was the reason behind the decision and to what extent does religion in general still play a role in your life?

LR: Oooh! Now that’s tricky. It took me about two years after I left the seminary to leave the Church altogether. I was kneeling in church one Sunday, my mother kneeling next to me, when all of a sudden the whole thing, the altar, the statues, the prayers, the marble, all suddenly seemed ridiculous. It might have been late-onset adolescent rebellion, but it was definitely life-changing, my lightning bolt on the way to Damascus, but with the reverse effect.

Also, let’s not use the term religion, let’s use “totalizing systems.” After I left the Church I flirted with Zen, but by the time I got to grad school, I got engaged and then married to dialectical materialism. Its notion of progress, from primordial communism, thru slavery, then feudalism, then capitalism, and finally the workers’ paradise. That really appealed to me. But then 20 years down the road I ran into problems, emotional and psychological problems. Depression mainly, and I started investigating the roots of that depression. Therapy but also the Twelve Steps. Eventually I found my way back to Zen (one of my poetry teachers, Peter Levitt, was a serious Zen practitioner), and even later back to Marxism. It’s taken me nearly 60 years to integrate my various interests—spiritual, psychological, and political—into my current world view. A religion of one. Which is how I found my way to Unitarian Universalism—there’s no escape from a prison that has no bars and no walls.

DG: Your collection, Darwin’s Garden, describes a fascinating search for meaning. Spanning childhood and adulthood, it encapsulates the coming-of-age struggles in the context of post-WWII America. The evolution of the psyche traces the collection, but in fact, as Michael Diebert writes in the introduction, the book is ultimately a “wake-up call to keep evolving.” Would you say this was the most difficult work you ever wrote, given the development of a manuscript bearing the name of someone who, in many ways, represents a worldview totally opposite of the one you walked away from? 

LR: Hey. Let’s give credit where credit is due. Darwin fomented one of the greatest intellectual revolutions in world history. My beef isn’t with Darwin himself, but with what people, especially conservatives, make of Darwin. Churchmen hated Darwin because he made it possible to think of life without inventing a Creator; they knew they’d be out of a job if everyone started taking Darwin seriously. The rising capitalist class, on the other hand, found a great use for Darwin, or what they understood Darwin to say. They had no doubt that they were the fittest, and if they survived and everyone else perished, well, that was just the law of Nature. So Darwin’s Garden is Nature red in tooth and claw, a notion that latter-day Darwinians might find a bit too simplistic. Of course, my book also includes a takedown of that other foundational garden, the Biblical Eden. My hope is that my book offends anyone who takes their own righteousness too seriously.

But thanks for your other comment, and thanks to Michael Diebert. I don’t know if Darwin’s Garden was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but it represents a shift in how I approach my material. Whereas many of my earlier poems were imbued with a kind of “Prisoners of Childhood” paradigm—dysfunctional family, alcoholic parents, etc.—the new batch is much more attuned to the social placements of this particular dysfunctional family, lower-middle class, rural, racist, etc. I’m as excited by these poems as I was by the earlier work, since they are a different door into me the poet.

Another thing I like about them is the consistency of voice. Many of the poems are spoken by a bright, unsympathetic adolescent, who is struggling against his heritage, He wants to find his own way in the world without all the baggage mom and dad and the Church have piled on his back. This little donkey brays and brays, shakes and rattles his load, hoping the goddam thing will fall off. Which of course, it doesn’t. I especially like the poem “Ole Folks,” because on the one hand it captures the epistemological trap which adults, culture bearers, set for children, and yet, on the other, manages to treat the adult in question, a nun, my grade school principal, sympathetically.

DG: You were born in St. Louis but settled in Northern California. When did you arrive and had you already been writing poetry at the time?

LR: Now I’m not a world traveler like some of my friends, but in between St. Louis and Northern California, I spent 4 years in upstate New York (grad school), 2 years in West Germany (before unification), and 30-plus years in Southern California. Even though I’ve lived in the Bay Area since 2008, I still think of myself as an honorary L.A.-poet. It was in L.A. that I found my vocation as a poet. Earlier I’d considered the priesthood, but that wasn’t true enough. It wasn’t until I’d been in L.A. for 15 years that I set out like Bashō on the Narrow Road to the Deep North.

On the other hand, a lot of what I write about, especially my childhood, which I’ve never quite escaped, is located squarely in the post-war suburbs of St. Louis, Missouri. I used to think of it as Nowhere, but have come to realize that in fact it’s Ground Zero in the ongoing War Between the States—Mark Twain, slavery, share-cropping, racism—I’ve inherited it all, from mitochondria all the way up to Superego, it’s the racist patriarchy that conquered and despoiled this place we call America.

My job as a poet—as I understand it—is to penetrate and undercut the myths and delusions which built that place.

DG: One of the turning points in your writing pursuits was studying with Jack Grapes, a person you’ve described as “one of the most gifted poetry impresarios in the whole world.” How did you come to study with him and what did the instructional process to do change your creative approach?

LR: I met Jack in 1986, the year I turned 40. Having twice gone through grad school, I was still very far from doing what I wanted to do with my life. Part of the problem of course was that I didn’t know what it was I was supposed to do with my life. One grows up in a working class family with parents traumatized by the Depression and World War II, and the last thing one imagines is the life of an artist. Now beginning in high school I began to write poems, two or three a year. But that was no reason to think of myself as a writer, much less a poet. During one of my trips through grad school I did happen to meet a couple of poets (Bill Matthews, Archie Ammons) but they were such strange, exotic creatures, I couldn’t imagine myself in their place. And even now after 5 books of poetry, I still suffer from bouts of imposter syndrome. But then in my 40th year, at the urging of my wife, I enrolled in a writing workshop with the estimable Mr. Grapes.

It changed my life. Suddenly I knew what I was meant to do. Whether I do it well or ill, that was what I wanted to do. Week in, week out, for five years, I attended Jack’s one-room schoolhouse for poets, trying and often failing the various gambits he presented to us, gradually acquiring a set of tools that I might employ while writing my own poems.

Jack’s approach was formalist—not in the sense of neo-formalist, all those worn-out rhymes and meters—but in inhabiting the different voices and registers available in English. Sometimes he asked us to rant like Shakespeare, or wander haphazardly over the imagination like Ashbery or stroll down some urban skid row with Frank O’Hara. Everybody, living and dead, had something to teach. And I was there to learn.

DG: Apart from writing poetry, you’ve also interviewed the likes of Carolyn Forché, Kim Shuck, and Peter Neil Carroll. In one of your bios you’ve written about taking “inspiration from poets living and dead,” and in addition meeting “as many not yet dead poets” as you can. And so, which poet no longer with us would you interview, given the chance?

LR: Once upon a time, I interviewed John Keats. I’ve always been a big fan of Keats. He did something wonderful to the auditory dimension of English poetry. And as a consequence, I also dig poets who internalized their Keats, poets like Hopkins and Dylan Thomas and Wallace Stevens. But to return to Keats, at first he seemed like an unlikely candidate for an interview, but then I was able to lure him out of retirement (the kind of thing Yeats might do), even though it had been 187 years since his last interview. And we had a lovely conversation. For instance, I asked him what he thought about the welter of voices and styles in contemporary poetry, and here was his response:

The diffusion of poetic technique, the proliferation of taste, the variety of voice and style which characterizes the current moment in poetry seems beneficent in every respect.  There is a journal, a program, a teacher for every taste and aptitude. Today’s poetry speaks with as many voices as there are flowers proclaiming the different inflections of rain and sun. After being for so long the province of elites, poetry is becoming more democratic, a fact in which we should all rejoice.

I suppose that some day I might try someone whose sensibility and politics are diametrically opposite to my own, someone like Dryden or Tennyson, but that will have to wait.

DG: Your latest book, Say Anything, features a striking black and white cover, yet the poems themselves have undergone somewhat of a shift, taking on a more celebratory tone of life’s peculiarities. How were the circumstances and writing process, in this case, different from your other collections, if at all?

LR: Before the introduction of color, movies were all black and white. Actually they were all gray scale, with as many shades of gray (a whole lot more than 50) as were needed to convey the full range of human emotion. Dreyer, Eisenstein, Sternberg, Chaplin, Welles. The neorealism and noir traditions. What I like about the cover of Say Anything is its mingling of threat and playfulness. Magritte’s in there somewhere. I love Magritte. And I love the photographer who created that image: Loretta Young-Gautier. Loretta Young (the Elder) was one of Hollywood’s great stars, and I remember watching her as a kid sweep into a fake living room to introduce some television play. This was after her movie star years but when she still had appeal to housewives and young lads like myself wishing for relief from afternoon boredom.

But you’re asking me if my poems have gotten lighter, more celebratory. The short answer is no. I’ve tried writing odes. And indeed the ode, the praise poem, seems to have cornered the mainstream poetry market. A major part of the market. As if it might be the literary analgesic we all need in this time of burgeoning fascism. But I’ll be honest, I’m just not good at that sort of thing. Horace was good at that sort of thing. But Martial and Juvenal were not. I’m not panning for a gold medal, but I’ll certainly take a silver.

I think that if you engage with my poems, you’ll find an undertow of darkness. It’s not all white sand beaches in California; we’ve got some very nasty rip tides. Check out “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Fashionista” where I imagine myself as a 3-year-old surveying the scene at Venice Beach—surfers, sun bathers, skaters, and dope smokers—but having a vision of the La Brea Tar Pits:

pleistocene watering holes

that lured giant sloth and mammoth

saber tooth and dire wolf to a sticky end,

forty thousand years of megafauna

stacked haphazard in a petroleum pipe?

Along with agriculture, oil (the bubbling crude) was one of the first big drivers of the Southern California economy, what underlay all that sunshine and fantasy. So my girl, my artist, sees this, the tension, the contradictions, and asks the question we all ask ourselves. Who the f*** am I?

Who did she become, that darkness,

engulfed by so much light?

DG: What are you reading or working on at the moment?

LR: After I retired from my day job, I realized that I wanted to do more for the poetry community. But what? Teach? I’d tried teaching, but found myself wanting. Editing? Who was I to tell someone else how to write? Curating a reading series? Even in a cultural backwater like the Bay Area there seemed to be more than enough reading series. What there wasn’t so many of were poet-critics. Now I know dozens, perhaps hundreds of poets, but only a handful of folks who are willing to take the time to seriously engage with someone else’s work and to communicate that experience to other readers. I guess by default, I decided to start reviewing books of poetry. I’m slow, I’ll admit, but I try to be honest and to feel and think my way through the books I review. For a while I was able to do five or six reviews a year (I told you I was slow), but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve really slowed down. If I get 2 or 3 done this year, I’ll be very surprised.

Aside from that, I continue to write poems. I’ve put together a new manuscript and am hoping to find someone foolish enough to publish it. More than anything, it focuses on my dismay with literature as a profession. There’s a quote from Marx, it may be from The German Ideology, where he talks about an ideal day in the life of socialist man—now I’m going to get this totally wrong, but it’s something about being a farmer in the morning, a hunter in the afternoon (or maybe it’s a carpenter in the afternoon), and a literary critic in the evening. I’ve always thought that sitting at your desk for 10 hours a day was just as alienating as 10 hours on the assembly line. If we’re going to be complete human beings, we need to exercise all the faculties that make us human.

Author Bio:

Lee Rossi is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Say Anything, from Plain View Press, and has appeared in numerous anthologies, including Don’t Leave Hungry: 50 Years of Southern Poetry Review and Grand Passion: the Poetry of Los Angeles and Beyond.

His poems have appeared in many journals, including The Southern Review, The Harvard Review, Poetry Northwest, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Poet Lore. His has published reviews in, among others, Poetry Flash, The Los Angeles Review, Rain Taxi, and Pedestal. He is a winner of The Jack Grapes Poetry Prize, as well as the Steve Kowit Prize. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and a Contributing Editor at Poetry Flash. He is currently Poetry Moderator at Portside.org, “Materials of Interest to People on the Left.”

More information about Lee can be found on his website: www.leerossisez.com.