Christopher Buckley

I was born in California and grew up in Santa Barbara/Montecito in the 1950s and 60s. As a child, I could walk out my door and find “nature”—creeks, woods, hills, long and empty beaches. My father was not a generous man, but the one thing he gave me was Santa Barbara—he could have taken a job with CBS radio in New York, but instead chose a small station in southern California in a small town that was then largely unknown.  

A substantial portion of my writing hopes to celebrate that. It centers itself then, necessarily, along the foothills, sea and beaches of Santa Barbara where I spent so much glorious, unconscious time observing nature shining all about me. This was when Southern California had more trees than cars. 

The older I become, the more my work turns toward that transcendent time and place, but like all Edens, it is lost. Looking about these days, it is hard to have hope with governments and billionaires having replaced ethics and a social consciousness with greed for most of the last century. My metaphysics is sourced in the natural and everyday world. Over the last 40 years, I have tried to work out day to day struggles and formulate arguments for my poetry that deal with the rush of experience, confront our mortality and the loss of our natural world.  

More and more, I want my work to be accessible in its complaint or in its praise. Poetry, it has always seemed to me, must have meaning, must make it, must earn it. The poets I have come to admire most seem to have worked in that direction: Milosz, Hikmet, Szymborska, Herbert, Levine, the great Spanish and South American poets, Gerald Stern, Mary Oliver, James Wright, Charles Wright, Bill Matthews, and Larry Levis, to name those previous to my generation that first come to mind. I am long past worrying about style, current trends and the attendant celebrity. I am simply trying to work out what, to my mind, our place here on the earth might mean. We don’t have long left to figure it out.