San Jose State University SJSU ScholarWorks San José Studies, 1970s San José Studies 11-1-1976 San José Studies, November 1976 San José State University Foundation Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sanjosestudies_70s Part of the American Studies Commons Recommended Citation San José State University Foundation, "San José Studies, November 1976" (1976). San José Studies, 1970s. 6. https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sanjosestudies_70s/6 This Journal is brought to you for free and open access by the San José Studies at SJSU ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in San José Studies, 1970s by an authorized administrator of SJSU ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. SAN .JOSE Volume II, Number 3 ARTICLES Poetry, Revolution, and the Age of Paine . 6 Roy Harvey Pearce The "tendentiousness" of ideology precludes successful poetry The Ethnic Voice in American Poetry ........................ 26 Arnold Rampersad Poetry - the best language of truth for America's minorities From Colonial to Revolutionary: The Modern American Woman Poet . 37 Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi Poetry as insight into socio-psychic experience The Regional Incentive: Reflections on the Power of Place in Contemporary Literature . 51 William Everson Locality as an adjunct of human personality Andrew P. Hill and the Big Basin, California's First State Park . 70 Carolyn De Vries The birth of the "Save the Redwoods" Movement A Frontier Agrarian Settlement: San Jose de Guadalupe, 1777-1850 . 93 Daniel J. Garr California's first civilian settlement California State Normal School: The First Years in San Jose ......... 106 Benjamin F. Gilbert The beginning of public higher education in California STUDIES November 197 6 The United States Army's First Flirtation with the Bicycle .......... 119 Ted C. Hinckley "The soldier looked sweet, upon the seat . ... " POETRY Bicentennial Blues . 60 Bill Tecku Vegas: A Few Scruples ................................. 62 A. Wilber Stevens At the Writer's Conference. To a Hurt Husband . 63 Lou Lewandowska "During the collection at the First Lutheran Church" . 67 Nils Peterson SPECIAL FEATURES Acknowledgments . 125 Announcements ...................................... 128 Bicentennial Poetry Celebration . 5 Notes on Contributors .................................. 126 SAN JOSE STUIIES Volume II, Number 3 November 1976 EDITOR Arlene N. Okerlund ASSOCIATE EDITORS Billie B. Jensen Ellen C. Weaver EDITORIAL BOARD Richard Ingraham Robert Spaulding Leon Lee Jack Sutherland James Murphy 0. C. Williams Ralph Parkman Celia de Zapata COMMITTEE OF TRUSTEES Hobert W. Burns John Sullivan John Galm Rose Tseng George C. Halverson Gerald Wheeler W. Donald Head 0. C. Williams, Chairman Vida Kenk Robert H. Woodward BUSINESS MANAGER John Sullivan GRAPHICS CONSULTANTS Jack Canty Nancy Favier Sheila Evans Doris Gilbert SAN JOSE STUDIES is published in February, May, and November by San Jose State University. San Jose, California 95192. MANUSCRIPTS, BOOKS FOR REVIEWING, AND EDITORIAL COMMUNICATIONS should be sent to The Editor, San Jose Studies, San Jose State University, San Jose, California 95192. SUBSCRIPTIONS AND BUSINESS COMMUNICATIONS should be sent to John Sullivan, Business Manager, San Jose Studies, San Jose State University, San Jose, California 95192. SUBSCRIPTIONS: $8.00 per year for individuals ($10.00 for foreign subscriptions). $15.00 per year for institutions. $3.50 for single copies. Patron subscriptions: $50.00 per year. Benefactors: $100.00 per year. Single copies are available at the Spartan Bookstore, San Jose State University. SAN JOSE STUDIES publishes articles and literature appealing to the educated public. Critical, creative, and informative writing in the broad areas of the arts, humanities, sciences, and social sciences will be considered. Please limit contributions to a maximum of 5,000 words and avoid footnotes when possible. All manuscripts must be typewritten and double-spaced on standard 8~ by 11 white bond, and the original and one copy submitted to the Editorial Board. The author's name and address should appear only on the cover sheet of the original. Please enclose a stamped, self-addressed envelope for return of the manuscript. ONLY PREVIOUSLY UNPUSLISHED WORK will be considered. Authors and reviewers will receive two free copies of the journal in which their contribution appears. THE BILL CASEY MEMORIAL FUND, established by friends and relatives of the lute Bill Casey, will award $100.00 to the author of the best essay, story, or poem appearing in each annual volume of San Jose Studies. © San Jose State University Foundation, 1976. Bicentennial Poetry Celebration The following essays in this issue of San Jose Studies were lectures in the Bicentennial Celebration of American Poetry sponsored by the city of San Jose, California and San Jose State University: "Poetry, Revolution and the Age of Paine" . Roy Harvey Pearce "The Ethnic Voice in American Poetry" ........... Arnold Rampersad "From Colonial to Revolutionary: The Modern American Woman Poet" ............... Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi "The Regional Incentive: Reflections on the Power of Place in Contemporary Literature" . William Everson Additional essays from this series will appear in future issues of SIS. Selected poems from the national competition for the Bicentennial Poetry Awards will be published in a special issue of San Jose Studies, sponsored by a grant from the City of San Jose Fine Arts Commission. From the approximately 2,500 entries received, the following poems received awards: The Holly Drew Geary Cooper Bicentennial Poetry Award ($500) "Garrison" ................................ Tom Wayman Windsor, Ontario The San Jose Awards Second Prizes {$100) "Letter from the Colonies" ....................... Dick Allen Trumbull, Connecticut "Pony Prayer Translation from Blind Lazarus to Cristobal at Circle of Enemy/Always/Warrior, 1874-1974; 1976" .......................... Bruce Edwards Lompoc, California "The LaCrosse Game" ......................... William Joyce Norwalk, Connecticut "Women in Early Plymouth" ..................... Lyn Lifshin Niskayuna, New York Third Prizes ($50) "Finding a Home" .......................... Elaine Dallman Watsonville, California "Whale Songs" .............................. Clark McCann North Hollywood, California "Massachusetts Fantasy: The Doberman in the Dune Buggy" . TerriO Shepard Soules South Hadley, Massachusetts Judges of the contest were Josephine Miles, Kathleen Fraser, and Robert Hass. ARTICLES Poetry, Revolution, and the Age of Paine Roy Harvey Pearce for Kathryn Preyer N his middle age retired to Quincy, at once angry and meditative, I John Adams wrote his good friend Benjamin Waterhouse, 29 October 1805, as follows: I am willing that you call this the Age of Frivolity as you do: and would not object if you had named it the Age of Folly, Vice, Frenzy, Fury, Brutality, Daemons, Buonaparte, Tom Paine, or the Age of the Burning Brand from the bottomless Pit: or any thing but the Age of Reason. I know not whether any Man in the World has had more influence on its inhabitants or affairs for the last thirty years than Tom Paine. There can be no severer Satyr on the Age. For such a mongrel between Pigg and Puppy, begotten by a wild Boar on a Bitch Wolf, never before in any Age of the World was suffered by the Poltroonery of mankind, to run through such a Career of Mischief. Call it then the Age of Paine.1 Adams, we can now say, protests too much. His own view of the causes, occasions, and ends of the Revolution, deriving from his whiggish conser­ vatism, is directly expressive of his high-principled stubborness, self-assurance, and agonizing sense that the Revolution had released forces (among them, Tom Paine) which were virtually beyond controlling. In spite of himself, as it were, he was caught up in the Age of Paine, his own moral and political ideology being just one variant of a larger, more inclusive, more complex, and internally contradictory ideology - that of the Revolution as an over­ whelmingly accomplished fact: a fact, to use that terribly complicated enlightened word, of Nature. That larger ideology subsumed its internal contradictions, and also the violence and dissension produced by those contradictions, in the notion that the Revolution itself was nothing if not eminently "reasonable" - the reason being that of Nature and Nature's God, fiXed in the very structure of things as Americans sought to design and to 7 bring about the social, political, and economic arrangements that their sense of themselves in their world "naturally" demanded of them. Thus the thousands of pamphlets they wrote, from whatever "reasonable" perspective, conceived the Revolution as being above all "ideological." So powerful and telling was this "ideological" emphasis that it set the tone and style of interpretations of the Revolution through the end of the nineteenth century and beyond. The great study of poetry in the American Revolution, Moses Coit Tyler's Literary History of the American Revolution {1897), is in this sense ideological. The same logic that drove the participants to view the Revolution as peculiarly intellectual also compelled Moses Coit Tyler, writing at the end of the nineteenth century, to describe the American Revolution as "preeminently a revolution caused by ideas, and pivoted on ideas." That ideas played a part in all revolutions Tyler readily admitted. But in most revolutions, like that of the French, ideas had been perceived and acted