A Review Of City Terrace Field Manual

By Sesshu Foster Essay, Research Paper

By Stephen Kessler

From Poetry Flash (February/March 1997) and

Kaya: a publisher of asian/diasporic

literature and culture

On Native Grounds

City Terrace Field Manual by Sesshu Foster (Kaya)

Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir by D.J. Waldie (Norton)

From

Nathaniel West and Raymond Chandler through Charles Bukowski and Joan Didion to Wanda

Coleman and Mike Davis, among various lesser knowns, Los Angeles over the last six decades

has bred an increasingly diverse and distinctive range of literary expression. It also

seems only poetically just that Henry Miller and Anais Nin. those consummate

egomythomaniacs, both found their way to L.A. in their later years just as Bukowski’s star

was rising as the new low-budget bard of the self-made self. Historian Carey McWilliams,

in his classic study Southern California: An Island on the Land, observes that the L.A.

region is a cultural exception within the larger exception of California as a whole, a

geographically and psychologically isolated realm–and thus a microcosm of America–where

escapist and adventurous individuals have traditionally migrated for the sake of

reinventing themselves.

Idiosyncratic Los Angeles artists such as Sam Rodia and Ed Kienholtz, musicians like

Charles Mingus and Joni Mitchell, and authors like some of the above have engaged that

tradition in their own ways by reinventing their respective forms. While the spectacles of

the entertainment industry, celebrity scandals and natural disasters all lend a mythic or

legendary air to mass-mediated versions of the Southland, equally vital in a wide-angle

view of the city and its multiple cultures are narratives of the urban and suburban

enclaves housing the people who work in the factories or wash the dishes in the region’s

restaurants. In recent years, the voices of these less visible communities have been

rising to take a significant place in the L.A. literary landscape. Anthologies have

proliferated, and books by uncelebrated local writers have found their way to the margins

of the

marketplace.

In a barrio called City Terrace in East L.A., Sesshu Foster was writing and assembling

pieces of his recently issued City Terrace Field Manual, a book which in its recombination

of literary traditions begs the question of genre and extends the boundaries of existing

poetic frontiers. In an intensely personal form of documentary prose poetry Foster offers

a vivid

picture–or collage, or kaleidoscope slide show, or smashed-glass mosaic–of the territory

where he spent most of his boyhood and to which he’s remained connected both physically

and emotionally ever since.

In their mixture of imaginative and nonfiction techniques. their blend of narrative and

lyric elements, their musical forms and unconventional structures, even their almost

identical lengths, Waldie’s and Foster’s books have much in common. Both are

extraordinarily effective in conveying the texture and atmosphere of a very particular

geographic setting; both narrator-protagonists are unheroic self-effacing recorders of

local day-to-day life, even as they reveal their most intimate responses to what they’ve

grown to know as normal; both exercise a crafty formal control, an economical compression

which gives their writing tremendous resonance. In the days while reading and after

finishing both these books, I couldn’t stop thinking about them.

And yet in other ways Waldie’s and Foster’s books could hardly be more different from

each other. While both writers have remained close to home (Waldie in the very house where

he’s lived since he was born) and made their living as public servants (Foster as a

teacher in the public school system), their respective experiences and attitudes and

systems of belief are worlds apart. Waldie is a practicing Catholic whose religious faith

suffuses and informs an otherwise dispassionate account of his own

and his community’s development; Foster is a political activist who dreams of and works

for some kind of revolution that would correct the countless injustices so excruciatingly

recorded in his book. Waldie serenely accepts the limits of his world and the tragic or

pathetic failures of average humans to realize some greater accomplishment than quotidian

survival, indeed,

perceives the pattern of that ordinariness as evidence of some greater, sacred order.

Foster protests a social order thnt condemns his friends and family members and students

to lives of poverty and violence and substance abuse and racist degradation even as he

celebrates the near-miraculous vitality that enables the fortunate ones to endure and

thrive. Waldie’s style is cool, measured, almost detached in its commitment to an accurate

factual representation of his material; Foster’s is charged with furious heat, a spiky

verbal salsa of percussive rhythms and ci

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