Hard To See the Point of Partly Cloudy

Gary Soto's Children's Poems Written By Him Are Too Odd To Charm

Jun 9, 2009

With Partly Cloudy: Poems of Love and Longing,veteran American poet Gary Soto writes brilliantly in the voice of an adolescent, but is it a pointless exercise?

Gary Soto’s The Elements of San Joaquin was one of the seminal American poetry books of the 1970s. In retrospect, it seems a bit derivative of one of the strongest poetic trends of that decade, a deeply serious yet playful surrealism practiced by Charles Simic, Gregory Orr, and others (“When the day shut like a suitcase/And left for the horizon” Soto begins a poem called “Piedra”).

Yet the book announced the entrance of a precocious and immensely talented poet, and its importance in terms of the advent of multiculturism (Soto is a Chicano who spent his youth working in the fields of the San Joaquin Valley in California) is immeasurable.

It Takes Skill To Sound Like a Beginner

Soto went on to produce many more volumes of poetry, as well as some excellent autobiographical works, and other books, gradually shedding his influences and developing his own sometimes tender, sometimes humorous, and always moving voice.

His latest book of poetry, Partly Cloudy, reflecting Soto’s constant searching for new avenues down which to explore his writing ability, is something of a misstep, however.

Kenneth Koch’s Wishes, Lies, and Dreams is one of many books we have now of poetry by children, and teaching poetry to children has become a mainstay of liberal education. No doubt with that tradition in mind, Soto ‘s Partly Cloudy comprises poems written in the voices of children by Soto himself. Not surprisingly, the veteran and wily poet does a bang up job sounding like a beginner with a pure sense of life and a tentative wisdom, but it all threatens to become a pointless exercise.

Hybrid Cars Good, Hybird Poetry Bad

In contemporary America, poetry has a dual function. It’s an intricate and difficult art practiced by thousands and supported by literary magazines and a handful of publishers staffed by people who know terms like “imagism” and “confessional,” and who know their John Ashbery and Jorie Graham from their Stephen Dunn and Linda Gregg. And it’s also an educational tool, and a valuable self-expressive form of emotional therapy that’s open to any and all.

It’s hard not to see Soto’s latest project, therefore, as a strange and perhaps fruitless hybrid, encouraging young people to write poetry and also showing them how it’s done. That is, how it’s done according to one adult poet. The result is poems whose clever, as opposed to instinctual, strategies just save them from utter simplicity, and that sound like they were designed to sound like they were written by an average adolescent to please a teacher. That’s a confusing way to put it, perhaps, but this is a confusing book.

Adding to the confusion is the fact that, ironically, there are only traces here and there in Partly Cloudy of the kind of active imagination that the relatively youthful Soto was drawn to and equipped with as he wrote the poems of his first book. While Soto’s service to the wide world of poetry should be applauded, it’s awfully uncertain what exactly is laudable about this book.

The copyright of the article Hard To See the Point of Partly Cloudy in Children's Verse is owned by Douglas Nordfors. Permission to republish Hard To See the Point of Partly Cloudy in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.