In a Foreign Land

To get to her house, I drive south from Sacramento for a half-hour. The trip isn’t long, but time seems to stretch as the modest sprawl of the capital gives way to laden pear trees. I turn off Interstate 5, and the alternating fields of green and yellow, of vines and corn and hay bales scattered like a child’s blocks, become as flat as the Midwest she left behind. When the road ends at the Sacramento River—sluggish and full in the summer heat—I turn down a street overhung with trees. I almost miss the road into Locke, a California Delta outpost bordered by farmland and orchards and the broad swath of the river, where four streets and a few dozen buildings sink into the dirt, and where the poet Laura Ulewicz lived until her death in 2007.

By the time Ulewicz moved here in the early 1970s, Locke’s population had fallen from its 1920s peak of 600 year-round residents and more than a thousand seasonal workers to just under 100 people. Chinese farmworkers and shopkeepers, most of whom originally emigrated from the Zhongshan region on the Pearl River Delta, established the town in 1915. California’s Alien Land Law of 1913 prevented immigrants ineligible for citizenship from owning land, but the group leased nine acres from a pear grower named George Locke, on which they built homes and businesses.

Those buildings, erected between 1915 and 1917, still stand, and are still the town’s most recent constructions. The wood-frame shops and houses along River Road and Main Street have false fronts familiar from Old West architecture: the place has the makeshift quality of a boomtown, or a ghost town. The ghost I’m chasing is that of a woman who once traveled the world and befriended the Beats, won awards and admiration, and wrote poetry rich with insight and full of promise. So how did Ulewicz end up scarcely published and barely known, living and dying in this humble town on the banks of a river long since dredged of its gold?

Ulewicz is remembered, if at all, the way so many female writers are remembered: as a muse. On my bookshelves, I see her only obliquely. In “Without Watteau, Without Burckhardt, Oklahoma,” the poet Jack Gilbert, with whom Ulewicz had a relationship, writes:

In April, before the concealment of beauty,
the vacant landscape of America, bright,
comes through me. Comes through my house like Laura.

I doubt this legacy would satisfy the woman whom the poet Erica Goss describes as “fiercely independent” and “a true original.” Stephen Vincent, a friend of Ulewicz’s and the executor of her estate, calls her “brave, tough, and compelling,” with a “suffer-no-fools approach.” If I’m chasing a ghost, it’s because I can’t imagine her at peace.

Ulewicz wrote her way across America and across the Atlantic, wrote through poverty and illness and her final, self-imposed exile to Locke. “I tasted the world / with my whole free tongue,” she writes in “The Woman Speaks As Herself” (later retitled “The Woman Speaks as a Blackbird.”) She might not have been heard by the male-dominated Beat movement, nor by publishers that saw women’s writing as accent pieces, but her power remains undiminished by its long neglect. “Yes,” she writes in the final line of “Pinpoint,” as if defending her lifetime of solitary work, “that was the right obsession.”

***

Ulewicz was born in Detroit in 1930, the daughter of first-generation Polish Americans. Her parents worked in the automotive industry. After losing their home in the Great Depression, they lived in a house that Ulewicz’s father built on the then-outskirts of the city, near 8 Mile Road. “I have come home,” she writes in a poem of the same title, recalling a youth of woods, wild animals, and berries plucked from their bushes:

I have come home, and I find
they were all unnecessary—
those glorious imperfections—
and they are all gone.
I have come home, and oh my God,
I am in a foreign land.

Where once there were wild strawberries, Ulewicz writes, now there are “carefully potted and sprayed begonias.” Where once she saw deer and owl, now there is “the six-lane highway and the automatic heart.”

Anything automatic was antithetical to Ulewicz, who in her work and her life was preoccupied with the ramifications of choice and the daily work of constructing a self. “She always wanted to be a writer, from an early age,” says Dona Leblanc, Ulewicz’s cousin, but this aspiration clashed with that of her parents, who wanted her to be a math teacher at a local school. Ulewicz’s relationship with her family was fraught. “My uncle [Ulewicz’s father] was…easily cruel to children,” Leblanc tells me.

Ulewicz moved with her pet collie to nearby Wyandotte, Michigan, allegedly to be closer to a man with whom she was in love. The relationship soured, though, and she left Michigan a few years later, heading first to New York and then to Chicago before landing in San Francisco in 1950. A brief marriage followed, to a writer named Bernie Uronowitz—who published in Bob Kaufman’s legendary Beatitude magazine—and then a divorce. In San Francisco, Ulewicz befriended Kaufman, Gilbert, Kenneth Rexroth, and Allen Ginsberg. Gilbert and Ulewicz pursued a relationship in the 1950s and ’60s, and maintained correspondence until the early 80s; his debut, Views of Jeopardy (1962), is dedicated to her. “It came like light out of the walls, / Like sunny days, like judgment,” Ulewicz writes in “Pinpoint,” a poem dedicated to Ginsberg and Kaufman, “Like not owning but loving, / Like not having to lock doors.”

Though she ran in Beat circles, Ulewicz refused to label herself as such, and “Pinpoint” bears a postscript: “Written in recollection of the days before a movement got stopped by being named and publicized too soon.” Ulewicz left San Francisco in 1955—the same year Ginsberg first read “Howl” at the city’s Six Gallery—for Seattle. In 1960, she traveled farther afield, to London, where she joined Edward Lucie-Smith’s circle of poets, The Group. She won a Guinness Poetry Award at the Cheltenham Literature Festival in 1964, an honor previously bestowed on Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and T.S. Eliot. (She also received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1968.) When Ulewicz left London, says the poet Edward Mycue, who befriended her later, it was “with a grand reputation.”

She visited other places, too; poems are set in Athens and Sicily and Jamaica. “She was a Bohemian traveler, with companions to meet up with in various European countries and correspondence received at American Express offices,” according to Vincent. In 1965, Ulewicz returned to San Francisco, where she hosted readings and art exhibitions at the I & Thou coffeeshop on Haight Street, interviewed writers for a radio program on KQED, and joined a poetry group at Lawrence Fixel’s house that included Mycue, Gilbert, and Shirley Kaufman. According to Vincent, an editor of the Penguin Modern Poets series inquired about publishing her work in a volume alongside that of Plath and Denise Levertov, but the project was shot down when the publisher grew wary of the limited sales potential of three women. Levertov appeared in another volume, alongside Rexroth and William Carlos Williams, and Penguin Modern Poets wouldn’t publish an all-female line-up (Carol Ann Duffy, Vicki Feaver, Eavan Boland) until the series’s second coming in 1995.

I’ve found a few of Ulewicz’s poems in an early issue of the Massachusetts Review and the anthology A Different Beat: Writings by Women of the Beat Generation (1997). According to Vincent, a Polish American professor translated some of Ulewicz’s poems and published them in literary journals in Poland. But most of her work hasn’t seen print; the little that has is lost to book collectors, back shelves, attics, the wind. During her life, Ulewicz published a single 18-page chapbook, The Inheritance (1967), put out by England’s Turret Books in a limited edition of 150 copies. Once a publisher of Plath, Dylan Thomas, and Louis Zukofsky, Turret is long out of business; The Inheritance is long out of print.

***

At a 1965 reading with Robert Sward at San Francisco’s Poetry Center, the poet James Schevill introduced Ulewicz as “fearlessly personal” and “always trying to discover, I think, her most essential relation to the world.” On a recording from that event, I can hear Ulewicz take the microphone and crack a light joke (“I’m not Robert Sward”). Between poems, she discusses The Inheritance, which was then forthcoming, and the meaning of its title. The book’s first section deals with family, she explains, and then expands to include “your friends, the books you read, your education, your travel.” Her voice is precise, if a little nervous. “Finally,” she tells the audience, your inheritance “gets to be the whole world—whatever you dare encounter of it, anyway.”

From the families we’re born into to the friends we choose, from what we’re given to what we take, inheritance, in Ulewicz’s view, isn’t linear but centripetal. It spirals, oscillates, branches. Inheritance isn’t the same as continuance or accumulation: there are absences and broken threads and dark matter in its physics. Loss gets passed down with the quilts and photographs. The bequest of kin is felt keenly in poems such as “Prologue,” “Pennsylvania,” “Nightmares to Be Born,” and “In Minority,” in which a family gathers for a funeral:

[T]hey primed me like a pump
To spout “Gin kuyas,” sidestepped her grief with how
The name goes on. One must die sane. Today
There is no longer need for Polish: today
They speak it more.

“What have they learned that I don’t know?” Ulewicz asks in “Elegy for a Drunken Grandmother,” an unpublished long poem. She speaks of her ancestors, traveling from Poland to America, a distance she struggles to fathom:

And I, American and “blessed”,
And I here exiled from my life,
My proper source, my past madness.
What do they know that I don’t?

Ulewicz might have gained the New World, but the old one—my proper source—has been lost, and with it some unrecoverable knowledge. Guilt infuses many of these early poems, as Ulewicz mourns and moves on at the same time: Poland and its language are long-abandoned; the the Michigan of her parents is left behind. She tracks westward in these poems, rejecting inheritance in the common sense: family ties, continuity, property, and money, however little. (“I never realized how poor she was,” Leblanc says, “because she never complained.”)

But if inheritance also means the books you read, your education, your travel, then the particulars of her reading (in English) and of her travels (across America) are its fulfillment. Her free-ranging life was allowed by her citizenship, after all, and by her circumstances, even if those circumstances aren’t what her ancestors intended: befriending Beatniks in North Beach and hippies in the Haight, marrying briefly and divorcing, having no children, working in coffee shops or canneries, living in a hundred-dollar house and not owning the land below it, writing poems and rarely attempting to publish them. She was American, yet she left the great American cities for Europe, for the Caribbean, for an impossibly tiny Chinese hamlet on the sinking dirt of the Sacramento Delta. “Long may they work that their grandchildren / Will be me,” she writes, and I imagine that line read aloud, a little wry, a little sorry.

Her inheritance, like many inheritances, is a burden as much as a gift. As Ulewicz grapples with her family’s past and her own present, history assumes the inevitability of cause and effect:

Because my grandmother moved with her clothes
In a bed sheet, her children in the future, I speak
In second generation English
And cannot get over loving America
As my homeland.

In an unpublished manuscript of Ulewicz’s selected poems, “Expatriation” follows “Inheritance” as the title of the second section. “I kept wanting to go home, / But I was home,” Ulewicz writes in “Introductory Party.” She was home and not-home everywhere she went; she wasn’t able to shed her citizenship when she left the country’s borders behind. “Being American, I am full of need,” she writes in “Americans and Fools Rush In.” The movement, distance, and independence that once looked like freedom—an achievement often claimed by the Beat scene that she forswore—became flimsy and unnourishing. In “Considerations, 1965,” she writes:

Impervious I sit—and disciplined—
Not even much wanting to run out in the rain. Balancing
Morning truck-stops in my head—where
I have gone, what I have been. Balancing hotcakes,
Egg foo yung, Leber Knödeln, fresh figs…

The ledger is full or full enough—not even much wanting—and she grows ready to return in this poem, ready to be sated from within instead of without. “Which way is back?” she asks. “Hashbrowns and over easy / Is where I am. The rain, like old age, waiting.”

The word freedom occurs throughout Ulewicz’s work. “Freedom is what she knit this fence against,” she writes about her mother in “Take 5, Detroit.” In “Letter Three,” she writes: “You who escaped with yourself from the garden / need strength beyond that to create / freedom in freedom.” And in the Poetry Center reading of “Elegy,” Ulewicz’s elders confront her with the word: “‘Why are you willfully poor,’ says Lotte, ‘when you have freedom?’” The speaker replies, “I have one subtle luxury. I can consider freedom personal.”

These lines were cut from the manuscript version of the poem. Did Ulewicz deem them too naïve—a word she used during her banter between poems at that 1965 reading—or simply wrong? The distinction between personal and political freedom preoccupies her throughout the poems of “Inheritance” and “Expatriation.” Her life is often contrasted, both subtly and explicitly, with that of her migrating ancestors. Having a great deal of political freedom as a white, English-speaking American, she faces the challenge of personal freedom: what to do with it? What to make of it?

In “Within One Temperate Zone (1),” the speaker’s car stalls in the California hills. “It wasn’t on the map,” she says of the place. Waiting out the heat, the speaker climbs the nearest peak with her traveling companion, Carl, who tells her,

how on his mother’s grave in Concord,
While drunk, he first made love to another man.
In Concord—where the hills are monumented
With Hawthorne, Melville, Walden Pond, and our first
Revolution for severance—the fought one.
Now we looked eastward across a namelessness
Of hills. For beyond this one was another equal
In size, and beyond it another, until
Our minds, wanting to fix, were trapped in freedom.

On the Poetry Center recording, Ulewicz reads the line as “wanting somewhere to fix” (italics mine), as if a place could be salvation, a solution to the paradox of freedom. But looking eastward, back toward the aforementioned Concord, toward the rest of America, she finds neither answer nor relief. This California view is the somewhere she abandons and reencounters, runs away from and to; its sun and hills and riverine flatland recur in the topography of her work. (“California” is the title of the manuscript’s third section.) Her view of this pristine landscape is colored by what lies beyond it: protests at the Republican National Convention are mentioned; the war in Vietnam simmers below several lines, and sometimes surges to the surface. For a woman obsessed with freedom, in her writing and in her life, it must have been troubling to see her country spout the word so readily and yet betray it so blatantly. What use is her personal freedom now?

I think of an essay by Rebecca Solnit, in which she writes, “Americans too often imagine freedom as ‘freedom from’—that is, as disconnection—when it can also be ‘freedom to’—freedom to do, act, connect, the freedom that comes with responsibility.” I think, too, of Ulewicz’s work beyond her poetry: from 1966 to 1969, she managed the I & Thou coffeeshop, a de-facto community center in San Francisco’s Haight that often served runaways. “Laura was great and tough with young people,” says Vincent, who met Ulewicz while both were reading poems to students as part of San Francisco State’s Pegasus Project (an early version of Poetry in the Schools). “She was always so kind to my brother and myself,” adds Leblanc, who was 12 years younger than her cousin. “You know how an older person is different to children? She wasn’t. She made us feel so special.” Later, while living in Locke, Ulewicz got a job with the Sacramento County District Attorney’s office, working with the Victim Witness Assistance Program until she retired. “When she had a heart attack, everyone in her department donated their sick time to her,” Leblanc tells me. “That’s how well-regarded she was.”

Ulewicz got involved in the unique politics of Locke soon after she moved there: agendas, minutes, and ordinances relating to Locke’s Historic District sit in her archive at Emory University, alongside journals, drafts of poems, and letters from Gilbert, Lucie-Smith, Rexroth, et al. “She was up to her shoulders in the politics of the place,” recalls Vincent. “When it came to local powers she could be quite cynical and cutting. On the other hand, her name in the [town] memorial is testimony to the way the community valued her.”

***

I arrive in Locke during the thick of a midsummer heat wave, with the temperature well into the 90s. Sweat buds under the bridge of my sunglasses. Pop music drifts down the street from the swinging doors of Al the Wop’s, a saloon with an American flag over the door and neon beer signs filling two tiny windows. It’s mid-afternoon on a Tuesday, but both the Lockeport Grill & Fountain and the Moon Cafe are closed. OPEN WHEN THE DOOR IS OPEN! :) Thanks reads a sign on the closed door. At least half the buildings I pass are in disuse, notices pasted to their doors or “For Sale” signs in their dusty windows. One building bows out over the street, its wooden planks straining as if holding a breath.

At the end of the short road, where Main Street meets Levee Street and the thick green of the Delta’s trees becomes foreground, I find the house where Ulewicz lived for more than 30 years. Rising rents drove Ulewicz out of the Haight, Leblanc tells me, and the possibility of owning her own home took her almost two hours northeast from San Francisco to Locke, where a friend sold her his house for a pittance. The house is two stories, built of wood, with a small front porch and a large yard where Ulewicz planted a garden—one of the place’s appeals, says Goss, who recalls the “sweet william, nemesia, linaria, cleome, nasturtium, alyssum” and other flowers that Ulewicz grew. “Remember Adam, how he wept / Once for the loss of a God / But twice for a garden,” Ulewicz writes in “Letter One.” Certainly, the lines echo her own priorities. “It was the garden that gave her a sense of charge and order,” Vincent says. “She was a mix of plants and earth and loved growth, inside and outside her house. I think the garden became her poem.”

I duck around the side of the empty house—an official notice too small to read sits in a window I can’t reach—and imagine the expanse of short grass before me riotous with flowers and vegetables. “The last zinnias, the spent cucumber vines,” Ulewicz writes in “Notes Toward the River Itself,” a long, multi-part poem, the last in the manuscript. She writes of pumpkins and sunflowers, pear trees and safflowers, even “the flowers called weeds”: buttercups, dandelions, catkins. She writes like a lover enamored of the dirt itself: “There earthworms work / so quietly. / They do not think about fame.”

According to Goss, Ulewicz had a fear of rejection, and “published only if requested.” That’s surprising to hear about a woman who was otherwise so fearless in her travels and her opinions. Why wouldn’t she push her poems into the world with the same ferocity? Writing is not the same as publishing, and perhaps by avoiding the vagaries and disappointments of the latter, Ulewicz was able to sustain her faith in the former. I can only surmise that her refusal to send out poems was a self-defense mechanism.

In Locke, the garden is gone now. The yard has been cleared and the trees recently trimmed: an open trash barrel filled with dry branches and leaves stands alone in the emptiness. I can’t find a flower, not even a weed. I move from spot of shade to spot of shade as I circle the house, trying to find a cool moment to stand in, to think in, but the air remains thick and hot. In “Notes Toward the River Itself,” Ulewicz writes,

Light. More light. The weight
of its heat pressing layers
of your flesh down, till hope
is a small dried bird. That’s
why the time in the middle
is called an age.

I walk back up Main Street and wander between two shuttered buildings, where the Locke Memorial Garden honors the Chinese history of the region with a tall monument of dark stone. Hundreds of pale bricks have been set into the garden’s walls, each commemorating a person or family’s ties to the place. “In Memory of Laura Ulewicz,” reads the one I crouch before, “Neighbor, Gardener, Poet.” Rose bushes cluster at the garden’s corners, interspersed with flowering trees and waxen plants that I can’t name.

I find another kind of memorial inside Strange Cargo, a used bookstore and vintage shop across the street. At the back of the store, behind shelves of used CDs and a spinning rack of chapbooks, eight wooden picture frames (all hanging slightly askew) hold fragments of “Notes Toward the River Itself,” each part of the poem accompanied by a James Motlow photograph. Preserved behind glass, the poem seems like an artifact I came to this place to find—though I didn’t, of course. I can read these lines on any placeless screen. Still, I feel like a pilgrim who’s been rewarded, to have found her words here where they were written, hanging in the air they were written about. In the printed and framed version of this, her longest poem and perhaps her last, a sentence has been added after the lines “Somehow I have not spoken, / really, of the river— / so big, so obvious / to our lives.” In thick capitals, the handwritten addition reads: “It’s hard to remember the important things.” The amendment was felt—by her? or someone else?—to be so necessary, so urgent, that it was penciled onto the typeset page.

Ulewicz’s work is rife with amendments of a different sort, as she seems constantly aware of the differences wrought by time and age. She writes in “A Day at the Slough”:

These flowers I grow
You call old-fashioned.
I never liked them as a child
They were so common.
Now they stand for something—
What they lasted through—
                        Now they are rare.

The poem is one of just three in the manuscript’s final section, titled “Locke.” From “Inheritance” and “Expatriation,” from the whole world—whatever you dare encounter of it, anyway—to a state (“California”) to a single town, the movement of Ulewicz’s oeuvre suggests a sharpening of vision. These final poems are longer than her earlier work, loosed from more formal rhythms, wandering and wide-open. Far from the Michigan wilderness of her youth, she returns to those glorious imperfections. “I go,” she writes, “to the river. / Not for renewal, / but continuance.” The endless world lies within now, instead of without. What a hard-won pleasure, “To like / yourself again in the river / air, the tides of the transient // ocean pulling your blood.”

“When I pulled her archive out of the water-logged basement of her house,” Vincent tells me, “I had to dry it for a long time to get rid of the mildew.” It’s hard not to read neglect into the unfit container of Locke’s damp soil, hard not to imagine Ulewicz’s poems devoured by the dirt that had replaced them. (I think the garden became her poem.) I mourn the poems she didn’t publish, but perhaps those mildewed pages speak of a different kind of achievement.

If poetry is one source of freedom, then here are others: this house, that garden, the children and victims to whom she devoted herself, a small town on a broad river. The easy-seeming freedom of her younger days, the freedom we associate with the Beats and the open road, was a false front, a few wooden planks stark against the sky, and no floor to stand on beyond them. Steadier ground lies beneath the freedom that Solnit writes of, not freedom from but freedom to. In Ulewicz’s case, this meant a job with the county, a garden, a few dogs, a water-logged house to tend to, and a community to hold accountable and be held by in turn. How worthy these occupations grow, this understanding that the struggle is not to get over loving America but to get on with it, to turn from one’s personal freedom (that subtle luxury) to the other kind, political freedom, and to find it ever needful.

Yes, I think, answering Ulewicz’s ghost, that was the right obsession.