reviewed on July 25, 2024

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I am biased, admittedly, with both a Midwesterner’s idealization of the West Coast and an elitist’s affinity for Proust, but I cannot imagine how one might encounter a book called Coachella Elegy, with poems titled like MacOS updates—“Palm Canyon Drive,” “Sonoma,” “Central Valley”—and with a cover seemingly commissioned from David Hockney, and not want immediately either to devour it with a martini and a glass of cigarettes or fly to Los Angeles never to return.

 

Coachella Elegy is a pleasure, a breezy, desert-bright collection of mostly one-page poems characterized by slender, cascading lines, a Glück-like flatness of affect, and by a striking visual crispness, as if its place-studies had been observed through the scoured-clean summer air of the Mojave.  “He climbs naked / from the pool,” Gullette writes in “Desert Hymn,” “and water tries not to let go of him.”  As here, Gullette is a poet of lyric and landscape, of understatement and ennui, and his American West—in particular Palm Springs—comes rendered in all the glitz and garishness of what Baudrillard called, on the trail of the hyperreal in Southern California, “the irradiation of an objectless neutrality, immanent and solar.”

 

Coachella Elegy is also, however, an important new take on ecopoetics. 

 

In Gullette’s vision, Palm Springs stands equally for a permissive escapism from sociopolitical rancor as well as the bright core of environmental catastrophe, a place of abandon and exhaustion where “the saguaro doesn’t thrive” but “there is a resort / called The Saguaro / where we sip / bottomless mimosas.”

 

One glimpses, here, the shimmer of the Baudrillardian simulacrum, and indeed the image of Southern California in Coachella Elegy is one mediated by the perennial re-representation of the West in literary and cultural history, from Bierstadt’s luminous vistas to the westerns of Leone and Lynch to Didion’s migrainous class diagnostics: “[h]ot Santa Ana wind mopes / across clay courts,” Gullette describes in one poem, “cigarette ash drops / from the balcony.”

Against such geographic and cultural backdrops, Gullette explores the Airbnb aspirationalism of a Millennial generation which, coming of age in the wake of the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, found itself closed out of the capitalist class yet saddled with the ecological ruin which has been that class’s most conspicuous legacy.  “You can ask for anything here,” Gullette writes of Palm Springs, yet “[t]he house isn’t ours.”

 

            We nap in it

            every afternoon

 

            while the waterfall

            spills

            over the hot tub,

 

            feeds the pool

            as if from an unending

            source.

 

That “as if,” of course, is a crucial qualification, since the privilege which this speaker rents for a weekend at a time comes, like the existence of Palm Springs itself, at great ecological expense—both, Gullette suggests, have been purchased dearly.

 

As evident here, the ecological and economic critique in Coachella Elegy arises in its most effective form out of the situations of the poems themselves, less effectively when Gullette makes explicit a point that might have remained implied: “On the other side [of the country], / a court hands down a decision // and there is more suffering / reaching from there / to here.”  Such intrusions—both virtue signaling and privilege-check—belie the nuance and understatement that make Coachella Elegy’s critique otherwise so forceful.

 

In the sectioned long-poem “Sonoma,” for instance, Gullette connects ecological decline in the American West to the exhaustion of western imperialism writ large, and does so with a single word organic to the situation of the poem: “Roman pines beside the pool / and nothing but the sound of guys diving // into the deep end.”  Evocative of Tiberius’s pleasure palaces on Capri, the passage images gorgeously the faineance of a decadent civilization, one elegized with important ambivalence across Coachella Elegy.

 

Reading that collection, one appreciates why Baudrillard could have written of the Mojave that it elicits “dreams of death and murder, of suicide motels, of orgies and cannibalism.”  “This country,” he wrote, “is without hope.”

 

In Coachella Elegy, that hopelessness is itself an admirable ethic, looking forward as it does to the exhaustion of the species.  In Coachella Elegy, that hopelessness is so beautiful.