I don’t know a writer who doesn’t struggle in some way with the place that they’re from. Often I wonder if my hometown, the place that I was raised and spent my youth, is the only place I will truly ever resonate with. The only place I can ever understand. Some writers leave and find it impossible to resonate with any place but home—take Cesar Vallejo who left Peru for Paris after producing his master work Trilce only to feel stunted for the rest of his life, perpetually waiting for some redemptive future that might never arrive. Some return to that home wherever they go; Joyce with Dublin, Olson with Gloucester, Opstedal with the California coast. Opstedal was born and raised in Venice and at moments in California Redemption Value it becomes evident that nobody knows California like he does.

But it’s a complicated knowledge, and the struggle is apparent. California Redemption Value captures the melancholy of this “indistinct Paradise,” (106) the eclectic, ferocious beauty of the coast, and the poverty of relationships in vagrant encounters. A landscape dominated by nature where relationships exist only in the memory of past nights and in the face of the ambivalent tide. In this condition of transience, the most completely conceived characters are Kevin’s (and my) favorite literary figures and they are cross-dressing and hitch-hiking in zigzags along PCH in a world where California is Rome and all roads inevitably lead back. But this is a condemnation, imagine Kerouac’s On the Road but with no getting out.

I’m interested most by the cosmology of transience found in Opstedal’s poems. The players of the book are characterized by their lack of articulation—effigies of figures pulled from the pages of a book found in a junk pile at “the Existential Thrift Store.” (25) I think these poets running around serves as a foil for the relationships with the living inhabitants of Kevin’s California, with whom understandings cannot seem to be formed. That: “Baudelaire / bottled beer” (80) and “Drinking cough syrup with John Keats” (79) are there in place of the connections that are constantly faltering.

Moments where actual people come into the poems mirror the speaker’s loneliness: “her eyes/ were chrome-plated replicas” (24) as though Opstedal might step into them like Orpheus into the silver mirror. Or this frighteningly beautiful image found in In The Wind:

Always silent, always inextricably pulled by the wind or the tide, so that this description of a wave becomes also a metaphor in all respects for the coming and going of people in the collection: “I watched walls of sheet glass stand up like vertical swimming pools then crash soundlessly in on themselves. It was all very quiet.” (23) The building-up is inseparable from the falling away for Opstedal. And the descriptions of these wraith-like acquaintances go on, they are the stuff of legend: “resembling nothing so much as those faceless inhabitants of dreams who carry messages from deep in where the dreaming’s stored.” (100)

This California terrain becomes as the beach, a broken, a jagged piece of a puzzle; but as any puzzle section it inevitably fits into another and with one poem in particular titled Long Division we hear echoes of Long Beach, and pieces of Pismo, and of course Ted Berrigan’s Sonnets:

California Redemption Value

By Kevin Opstedal

UNO Press

ISBN:978-1-60801-066-0