By Kevin Killian

THE POETRY CENTER at San Francisco State University is celebrating its 50th anniversary with a jumbo exhibition of visual art. Curated by Poetry Center director Steve Dickison, "Poetry and Its Arts: Bay Area Interactions 1954-2004" features 90 artists and dozens upon dozens of works. The exhibit consists of three roughly devised categories. You'll see art made by poets (everyone from Stan Rice to Clarence Major to Leslie Scalapino), poet-artist collaborations ("I'll draw some pictures, and we'll turn your poem into a comic"), and the work of "artists in poets' circles." In general, the work gets better as it progresses along this scale, although there's something, which I can't put my finger on, that's infinitely pathetic about "artists in poets' circles." Poets and painters each possess a distinct, fully articulated vision of the place of art in society, and the place of language in art. Are poets who patronize painters doing them any favors? One wonders. Are the painters, like medieval burghers, dispensing largesse like gold dust to the poets in whose circles they happen to find themselves?

As it turns out, ever since 1954, poetry and art have walked hand in hand in the San Francisco Bay Area, more so perhaps than in larger, more cosmopolitan cities. We think of the New York School painters and the New York School poets as moving within the same Art News world, but they weren't precisely working on the same scale. Why, there was too much money to be made in New York. Poet James Schuyler famously compared the abstract expressionists to huge ocean liners that must be guided into port by humble tugboats (i.e., the poets slaving as art writers in the 1950s – Barbara Guest, Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery). In San Francisco a different economy prevailed as, without the motivating force of a viable art market, artists and writers slogged through fog and poverty together, neither of them selling a thing. They did it for the love of art, or perhaps some of them to test San Francisco's fabled tolerance for eccentricity. And some of them for the love of love, since, almost as emblems, many poets have married or formed romantic alliances with artists, as though to establish dynasties and achieve the comfort blanket of complete cultural capital.

In "Poetry and Its Arts," the works that might appeal most to a New York aesthetic are the oversize, masculinist oils of Tom Field and Paul Alexander, both of Fort Wayne, Ind., and, later on, the experimental North Carolina art school Black Mountain College. After hearing so much about Patroclus, the beloved of Achilles, in this summer's Troy and this winter's Alexander, you'll want to see him done in jittery spirals of near-veridicality à la de Kooning's Woman variations, in Paul Alexander's sizable Patroclus (1964). Field's Pacific Transport (1958) similarly blurs the boundaries between 1950s action painting and Buddhist, Pacific Rim figuration. They're both cornerstone paintings of a period of Bay Area art that has, puzzlingly, been ignored by both the gallery and the museum systems.

Local legend Jess, who died earlier this year, made it through both systems, but he's the remarkable exception. Those who admire Jess's painting and collage work will find some remarkable "new" pieces from the 1950s and 1960s – rarely, if ever, seen – on loan from the Jess Collins Trust. And camp? Check out Jess's tiki-flavored Moon over Mon Ami, a fan painted for composer Lou Harrison. The dark, romantic paintings of Jess and his contemporaries were throwbacks even when they were first made, and in the conceptualist 1970s they again seemed out-of-date, incomprehensibly so.

If everything really does come around again, there may be a revival of some of the other splendid, lesser-known artists at work here. Fran Herndon, for example. Her collages Opening Day (Willie Mays) and White Angel (Marilyn Monroe) were created in the early 1960s under the Svengali-ship of poet Jack Spicer (1925-65). In these cutouts from Sports Illustrated, Life, and other mass-market magazines, treated with paint and ink, the membrane between Maxfield Parrish lushness and pop art irreverence grows very thin indeed. Forty years on, Herndon's best work remains unsettling, and its inquisition of individual beauty has the resonance of late Yeats poems, or Picasso's photos and oil paintings of the Dora Maar period.

"Artists in poets' circles" have their own patron saint, the late New York pop artist Joe Brainard (1942-94). For a while (the late 1960s and 1970s) Brainard was the go-to guy who did the bidding of every poet of the New York School. (But he spent some time in Bolinas, and you'll find some of his work gone west in "Poetry and Its Arts.") In a review of a 2001 Brainard retrospective at the Berkeley Art Museum, poet Garret Caples discusses books illustrated by Brainard, triangulating poets, painters, and the cash nexus in the process:

The commercial valuelessness of poetry is endowed with value, proof of which are the extraordinary prices such volumes, their scarcity abetted by the passage of time, now demand.... Even work in the spirit of Brainard can't transcend this situation. But his practice itself indicates a way out of the dilemma, insofar as we may see through Brainard's art the conditions of affordable beauty, and learn to practice it on our own.

A third of the artists in "Poetry and Its Arts" are dead, most are alive, and a few are young. Is it significant that the two best younger artists here, Colter Jacobsen and Will Yackulic, find themselves underrepresented in the gallery system? Is there something in the art climate here in San Francisco that views the mixing of poets and painters as a form of miscegenation?

More problematic, but in some ways most fascinating, are the paintings executed by the poets. Now, we've all gone to poets' houses and cast a cold eye at the daubs flung up on their walls. Look up the term mixed bag in the dictionary and you'd see these entries. From Rexroth to Duncan to Ferlinghetti, is there a local poet of note who failed to take up the brush? Were any of them talented? It's hard to say. Spicer was dreadful. Jess spent months trying to teach him the rudiments of painting, to no avail. "It was like teaching a duck to wear a tuxedo," he recalled. And yet there's something wonderfully gauche about the "surrealist" pot of paint Spicer flings here in the public's face; so subtle in his poetry, his plastic sense seems dumb as a post.

Poet Helen Adam's collage work looks clumsy, nearly naff. She had the idea to cut out Irving Penn "Funny Face" beauty ads from Vogue and other glossies, then decorate the Lisa Fonssagrives and the Suzy Parkers in the Givenchy gowns with snakes, spiders, and other horribles from Scientific American. She really ran this idea into the ground, but a few of them at a time are pretty wonderful. In one of the best, For Love of Lilith, a fat green snake circles a sexy blond's throat like a, dare I say it, choker.

All of this raises the more interesting question, Is the art prized by poets an inferior, decorative one? Sometimes when I think of the artists I most admire, I'm stung by the realization that they're the ones whose art aspires to the condition of poetry. I haven't met many dumbstruck, inarticulate artists; it's poets who are hardest to talk to. The painters on show here are highly verbal, allusive, illustrative artists.

Don't go looking for this exhibit in any of the usual ateliers; it's in the lofty gallery space at the California Historical Society at Mission and Third Streets. Painter and poet Norma Cole will be on the premises when you visit, building one of three "rooms" for an ongoing installation she calls "Collective Memory." One will call to mind the 20th Street living room of Jess and Duncan, another will echo the cramped operating space of the Poetry Center's archives, and a third is inspired by the sandalwood "House of Hope" Bay Area museumgoers flocked to this spring at the Asian Art Museum's traveling Montien Boonma retrospective. Cole returns in a big way with this Marian Abramovic-like project. "Poetry and Its Arts" excels in illuminating unexpected connections through its sheer range of objects and events: like Madonna said, there are too many questions, there is not one solution, it's a love profusion. 'Poetry and Its Arts: Bay Area Interactions 1954-2004' runs Dec. 11-April 16, 2005. Wed.-Sat., noon-4:30 p.m., California Historical Society, 678 Mission, S.F. $3, $1 seniors and students, free for six and under and members. (415) 357-1848.