After I had read through a sequence of fine prefaces and introductions (especially that by Brian Swann in the Niatum volume), there seemed to me to be a vacuum or missing chord. Over the years I had read the work of James Welch, Simon Ortiz, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Scott Momaday, whose wonderful novel House Made of Dawn was a ground breaker for other Native American writers. These four poets are known, but not widely, and certainly not in proportion to their talents. Of late, Louise Erdrich has achieved a measure of fame but there ought to be room for more than one, not to speak of a dozen other specific talents in the anthologies. Why are these poets so rarely reviewed or represented in “white anthologies"? I mulled over this problem for a couple of months as if it were a raw and abrasive Zen koan. Then, on a recent driving trip through Nebraska, the Dakotas, and eastern Montana, I revisited the site of the murder of Crazy Horse and the small church graveyard that overlooks the site of the Wounded Knee massacre, and a possible answer occurred to me.
First you must try to imagine a map of the United States covered with white linen as if it were a recently (true, in the sweep of history) murdered corpse. Carefully note where the blood is soaking through, from right to left, beginning with the splotches on the black slave ports of the East and South. Make a point of ignoring Civil War battle sites, as they constitute something we did to ourselves out of a mixture of necessity and vainglory. You will now notice that the rest of our linen map is riddled with the blood of over two hundred Native American civilizations we virtually destroyed, from Massachusetts to California. This is an unpleasant map and is not readily available for purchase or publication, especially not in history books or in what is blithely referred to as the “American conscience.” Our nation has a soul history, not as immediately verifiable as the artifacts of the Smithsonian, whose presence we sense in public affairs right down to the former president's use of the word “preservation,” or his cinema-tainted reference to oil-rich Indians. In any event, schoolchildren who we think need a comprehension of apartheid could be given the gist of this social disease by field trips to Indian reservations in big yellow buses.
A logical assumption, then, is that Native American writers are largely ignored by readers because they represent a ghost that is too utterly painful to be encountered. Actual readers of literature are people of conscience (I am discarding the sort of literacy that never gets beyond the Sports and Modern Living pages and is ignorant of the locations of Nicaragua and Iran), but conscience can be delayed by malice, stereotypes, a natural aversion to the unpleasant. I'm old enough to remember when Langston Hughes and Richard Wright were considered the only black writers of interest. Publishers come largely from the East and anything between our two dream coasts tends to be considered an oblique imposition. There is also the notion that the predominantly white literary establishment idealizes a misty, ruined past when life held unity and grace. The late (and great) Richard Hugo pointed out that for Native American poets the past isn't misty, that the civilization that was destroyed was a living memory for their grandparents, and thus the Indian poet is a living paradigm of the modern condition.
Oddly, when you study the anthologies, or separate volumes by individual poets, you find very little romantic preciousness and almost no self-pity (certainly the most destructive emotion). And there are none of the set pieces of current “white anthologies”: the workshop musings, campus melancholy, the old-style New Yorker poem in which the city poet sees his first seagull of summer, then nuzzles the wainscot of a clapboard cottage and reflects on the delicacy of Aunt Claudia's doilies; none of the Guggenheim or National Endowment year poems about fountains in Italy, the flowers of Provence, English weather, the buttocks of bullfighters in Madrid. There is a natural and understandable sorrow over losing a vast cathedral and being given an outhouse in return. Even the renowned Indian killer General Philip Sheridan admitted that “an Indian reservation is usually a worthless piece of land surrounded by swindlers.” Quite naturally, Native Americans don't agree with Robert Frost's drivel about the land being ours “before we were the land's.”
I suspect I am attracted to these Native American poets because there is a specific immediacy, urgency, a grittiness to the work. Of the thirty-six poets in the Harper's Anthology, fifteen are women; such a proportion is unthinkable in current, broadly based anthologies. The women are, if anything, more stridently energetic, natural and instinctive feminists, and I was reminded of the Sioux woman who drove an awl in dead Custer's ear in hopes that he would hear warnings better in the afterlife. Another oddity is that some of the best poets are also equally fine novelists: Momaday, Welch, Silko, Erdrich, and Vizenor. This is less frequently true among white poets.
An additional urgency is found in mixed-blood poets such as Erdrich, Vizenor, or Linda Hogan, an extraordinary Chickasaw writer:
Girl, I say,
it is dangerous to be a woman of two countries
You've got your hands in the dark
of two empty pockets.
Louise Erdrich's poem “A Love Medicine,” a miniature tale of doom, almost an English ballad, will bring you near to weeping or you are not human. It begins with a novelist's sense of detail, almost as if she were fitting a noose around your neck. You can find out how it ends by buying the book (in Jacklight, published by Henry Holt, or in the Harper's Anthology),
Still it is raining lightly
in Wahpeton. The pickup trucks
sizzle beneath the blue neon
bug traps of the dairy bar.
Theresa goes out in green halter and chains
that glitter at her throat.
This dragonfly, my sister,
she belongs more than I
to this night of rising water.
When the poetry is political it assumes a quiet hardness, all the more effective because of the simplicity and control. James Welch, the Blackfoot author of the striking novel Fools Crow, writes in “The Man from Washington”:
The end came easy for most of us.
Packed away in our crude beginnings
in some far corner of a flat world,
we didn't expect much more
than firewood and buffalo robes
to keep us warm. The man came down
a slouching dwarf with rainwater eyes,
and spoke to us. He promised
that life would go on as usual,
that treaties would be signed, and everyone—
man, woman, and child—would be inoculated
against a world in which we had no part,
a world of money, promise and disease.
I am drawn to the way Ray A. Young Bear and Lance Henson treat nature, as if they, in fact, were part of the natural world rather than observers shouting the presumptive “I” of post-modernism. Young Bear writes in long, powerful forms difficult to quote. In “north” Lance Henson finishes with:
in the house my daughter
has disappeared into dream
her small trembling hands
flower into a cold wind that smells
of the moon.
It is equally true of the work of Duane Niatum, Peter Blue Cloud, and Joseph Bruchac, in whose work nature is treated in terms of familiarity, love and a little fear, as if they were speaking in another mode of their parents.
Joy Harjo is an engaging wild woman of a poet. She has seen de Soto
having a drink on Bourbon Street,
mad and crazy
dancing with a woman as gold
as the river bottom.
Harjo's style is somewhat incantatory; there is an urge to hear her read aloud. Her “Anchorage” is one of the strongest single poems in the Harper's volume; it ends:
And I think of the 6th Avenue jail, of mostly Native
and Black men, where Henry told about being shot at
eight times outside a liquor store in L. A., but when
the car sped away he was surprised he was alive,
no bullet holes, man, and eight cartridges strew
n
on the sidewalk
all around him.
Everyone laughed at the impossibility of it,
but also the truth. Because who would believe
the fantastic and terrible story of all of our survival
those who were never meant
to survive.
There is a rich comic spirit, perhaps the quality that whites are most ignorant of in Native Americans. In Survival This Way there is a splendid comic poem, too long to quote here, “Hills Brothers Coffee” by Luci Tapehenso. For reasons never clear to me, the very richest core of humor is found in oppressed people, whether blacks, Jews or Native Americans. At the few powwows I've attended, I've noticed the wild, delightful humor of people to whom “dirt poor” would serve as a euphemism.
What I've offered here is a rather slight sampling in an attempt to whet some appetites, not necessarily the best material but certainly representative; this I think typifies a renaissance in Native American literature similar to that of black writers in the sixties.
I have saved the most difficult of Native American poets for last, perhaps out of aversion to entering the often painful labyrinth of his work, which I have followed carefully for over twenty years. Simon Ortiz is an Acoma Pueblo Indian and for some time now I have thought of him as a major poet; this is an unstable category but the range is there, as is the depth, volume, and grace. It is a matter of absolute emotional credibility married to craft. Among others he has written Going for the Rain, From Sand Creek, Fight Back, A Good Journey, the latter just recently reissued by the University of Arizona Press. Ortiz has said that he writes poems because writing is, finally, an “act that defies oppression.” In a curious way Ortiz reminds me of that great contemporary Russian, Vosnezensky. It is a peculiarity of genius that no concessions are made, and in Ortiz there is a quiet omniscience expressed only by talents of the first order. I understand he is a modest though difficult man, given to disappearing. I would hope that his selected or collected poems might appear so the work might reach a larger audience, whether we deserve it or not. It is the kind of poetry that reaffirms your decision to stay alive.
Almost as an afterthought, but really a cruel whim, a wish to rub our collective noses into the beauty and horror of the situation, I conclude with the rest of Louise Erdrich's poem “A Love Medicine”:
The Red River swells to take the bridge.
She laughs and leaves her man in his Dodge.
He shoves off to search her out.
He wears a long rut in the fog.
And later, at the crest of the flood,
when the pilings are jarred from their sockets
and pitch into the current,
she steps against the fistwork of a man.
She goes down in wet grass
and his boot plants its grin
among the arches of her face.
Now she feels her way home in the dark.
The white-violet bulbs of the streetlamps
are seething with insects,
and the trees lean down aching and empty.
The river slaps at the dike works, insistent.
I find her curled up in the roots of a cottonwood.
I find her stretched out in the park, where all night
the animals are turning in their cages.
I find her in a burned-over ditch, in a field
that is gagging on rain,
sheets of rain sweep up down
to the river held tight against the bridge.
We see that now the moon is leavened and the water,
as deep as it will go,
stops rising. Where we wait for the night to take us
the rain ceases. Sister, there is nothing
I would not do.
In a curious way Native American poetry is written in our language but not in our voice. Perhaps it's because the taproot of ritual poetry is closer to the surface, and the traditions of Shaman and Trickster are often right out there in the dark, looking in the window of the poem. This is partially true, but there is an even more dominant factor. Chief Seattle once told us in specific terms how his people were going to haunt us. He also said that the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. This simple notion offers a schism larger than that between Jew and Muslim, or Christian and Jew. We have always believed we owned the earth and could do what we please, and our current and frontier theocracies never hesitated in their pillage for a moment. In American Indian Holocaust, Russell Thornton points out that in 1492 there were at least 5 million Native Americans and in 1890 there were only 250,000, the decline resulting from introduced diseases and sheer firepower. It is indeed ironic that those whom we crushed could help us survive.
1990
Paul Strand
When I look at the photos of Paul Strand, as I have done since the sixties, I am invariably reminded of an old Buddhist adage “ashes don't return to wood,” which is to say as an artist one must consume one's “self” entirely in the work. Basil Davidson pointed out of Strand, “The photographs seem to have come into existence without the camera . . .” The photos have been passed on to us as facts of nature, austere and somehow in the arena beyond the artful and humane, informed as they are by an unforgiving sense of authority. We are left wondering how work that so massively bespeaks genius may arrive in so utterly fragile a form.
When I look at Susan Thompson, the wife of a Maine fisherman, she effortlessly transcends my notions of lover, mother, sister, daughter, nor is she the academic abstraction known as the Eternal Feminine. She is Susan Thompson and within the gift Strand has offered to us, she owns something of the Venus of Willendorf, Botticelli's Venus emerging from a shell, and the representations of the Brazilian goddess Imanja. But foremost she is Susan Thompson, and in this portrait a great artist has captured the immutable mystery of human personality. Susan Thompson, whoever she is otherwise, has become immortal, and while looking at her we only remember with specific effort that Paul Strand has created a photo in which he neither dominates or obtrudes, but evokes.
I have often thought that any night I may be lucky enough to have Susan Thompson enter my dream life. Within the crush of our time it is fatuous to think of what we would take along to a desert island, where we are likely to find cigarette butts or theater stubs in the sand and hypodermics on the beach. But if I were condemned to whirl alone to death in a space capsule for an unnameable crime I would take along the photo of Susan Thompson. I would look at her. I would hear from the unknown peripheries of the photograph a crow calling, a screen door slam, a distant dog's bark. I would look at Susan Thompson and think, what a fabulous memory of earth. What more can any artist give us?
1990
Dream as a Metaphor of Survival
Come to think of it, the world has taken me out of context—physically, mentally, and spiritually. There is a not quite comic schism inherent in the idea that on a daily basis The New York Times and “All Things Considered” tell us everything that is happening in the world, but neglect to include how we are to endure this information. If I had not learned to find solace in the most ordinary preoccupations—cooking, the forest and desert—my perceptions and vices by now would have driven me to madness or death. In fact, they very nearly did.
It should be understood at the outset that a poet's work (like that of an analyst) frequently parodies his or her best intentions. The following is decidedly “creationist” rather than informed, bearing up as it does under the burden of a mind that creates its living out of a perceptual overload, rather than a gift for drawing conclusions. As an instance, the memory of a mother's angry slap quite naturally suggests the flour on her hand: she was making bread and I was eight. I said I didn't eat the seven Heath candy bars in the pantry though the wrappers were under my bed and I didn't break the hen's eggs against the silo. Sent to my room I crawled out the window never to return and found Lila. We lay down on the wood bridge and tried to count fish but they kept moving in the green water. I felt my f
ace where mother slapped me. I sat up and looked at the back of Lila's knee. She said “thirty-three” when I looked up the back of her blue skirt to where her underpants drew up into the crack of her butt. Lila didn't mind my injured eye because her dad had been shot in the war and maybe he had been shot right through the eye, she said. The girl who cut my eye moved away. I got back through the window just before I was called to dinner, a pocket full of violets for my mother who asked me how I picked them in my room.
In other words, what a mess, but then a dozen years ago I couldn't remember “everything” and all the memory knots were tiny claymores that blew up on contact, or more accurately, on encounter, as the miniature explosions were frequently accidental, causing all sorts of personal havoc.
It only gradually occurred to me that our wounds are far less unique than our cures. There is a specific commonality in the nature of the spectre of anguish that arises and expands within us that makes us seek help, whether from an analyst, guru, roshi, shaman, preacher, even a bartender, those experts at symptomatic relief. In the north country of my youth mental pain was implicitly tautological; omnipresent and unaccounted for, something to be endured with quiet manliness, another hazard to test the mythical fortitude of country folk (Michael Lesy's Wisconsin Death Trip).
The bottom line, as they like to say nowadays, is that we no longer feel at home either within, or without, our skins. There are thousands of ways to adorn this fact. It is largely the content of modernist and post-modernist literature and art, not to speak of the relentless fodder of self-help books and columns in newspapers. Rilke, that grand master of dislocation (he moved virtually hundreds of times) said, “Each torpid turn of this world bears such disinherited children / to whom neither what's been, nor what is coming, belongs.” Alienation, so ubiquitous as to be banal, fuels our nights and days, our hyperactive adrenals gasping from fatigue. Where, and how, do I belong?