What Fresno Poets and Their Poems Have in Common:

Subject matter is a personal thing, but Fresno poets have some aesthetic practices in common.

There are no fast rules, as Phil Levine would say. Still, Fresno poems tend to be:

•understandable and grammatical. Nothing is there to stump the reader.

• staged in real places, real landscapes, climates, terroirs.

• image-based, and those images are grounded in the natural world.

• accurate, never vague, and they name things.

• more interested in aspects of ‘form’ than in being Formal. Most are free-verse.

• musical, and this comes from the use and placement of specific sounds, and their rhythms, not particularly from end-rhyme.

In a Fresno poem, you will find that there is something significant—emotionally—at stake. I wasn’t there at the beginning, but my work shares these characteristics, and I’m proud to be a Fresno Poet today. The first anthologies of Fresno Poets’ work are Down at the Santa Fe Depot and How Much Earth. Read them! A new book about the Fresno Poets, edited by Christopher M. Buckley is forthcoming—more on that momentous event later!