Poetry as Survival

There have been quite enough exquisite apologias for poetry written over the centuries, from Aristotle to Catullus and Vergil, Wang Wei, Dante, Shakespeare and Dryden, down to Whitman, Yeats, Pound and García Lorca. But then, unlike the sciences, such knowledge is not easily transmittable or cumulative, and an art so seemingly fragile to the masses has its value in continual question by even apparently educated men.

Frankly, this is not my fault, and I have long since given up concerning myself with the matter. As a poet I am the bird, not the ornithologist, and I am not going to spend my increasingly precious days stuffing leaks in an educational system as perverse and sodden as the mercantile society for which it supplies faithful and ignorant fodder. If you wished to draw attention to poetry in a country where anything not at least peripherally attached to greed is considered nonsense, you would have to immolate a volunteer poet in a 751 BMW. In a Giorgio Armani suit. Wearing a gold Rolex. With the first infant porpoise to wear eye shadow on his lap. That sort of thing.

In other words, if you have to ask what poetry is good for, it's never going to be any good for you. Poetry came into being before the first club was swapped for an attractive antler, and about the same time Orc traded a lady a wild melon for raising her otter-skin skirt. Poetry, like the grizzly bear, is good for its own magnificent selfness and is not a utilitarian cog to improve someone's life-style. Poetry may very well help you get behind. Your legs might grow downward into the ground in certain locations. You will also turn inside out without warning.

The most ubiquitous misunderstanding of poetry is that it is heightened and energized daily speech. Martin Heidegger said, “Poetry proper is never merely a higher mode of everyday language. It is rather the reverse: every-day language is a forgotten and therefore used-up poem, from which there hardly resounds a call any longer.” Poetry at its best is the language your soul would speak if you could teach your soul to speak. Poets are folks who know they are going to die someday and feel called upon to make up songs about this death and the indefinite reprieve they are traveling through. Rarely a philosopher, the poet hopes to celebrate life on life's terms, even though he works within the skeleton of a myth to which there is no longer a public celebration. As Gerald Vizenor (the astounding Native American author of Griever: An American Monkey King in China) would have it, “He holds cold reason on a lunge line while he imagines the world.”

Of course, such temperaments are capable of grand absurdities, and the presumption of the comic is a more graceful modus operandi than a longish face, or waving your heart around by its bloody strings; like the ministry, poetry is thought to be a calling, but unlike specifically religious vocations, poetry can't cut off the horse's legs to get him into a stall. In order for Shakespeare to create the character of Hamlet he must also be capable of creating Falstaff, and A Midsummer Night's Dream.

But to return to earth: Americans seem to wish to live within situation comedies and unquestionably elect their officials on this basis. Yet there is a wild spiritual longing in the landscape that surfaces in dozens of odd forms: Jimmy Swaggart, est, channeling and other New Age nostrums, body-Nazi fitness mystics, drug obsessives, music goofies, even the nether forms of the ecological movement where Smokey the Bear seems to want to mate Saint Teresa.

You particularly notice this on long first-class, expense-account flights when your seatmate invariably asks, “What do you do?” When you say “Poet” you get either a quiet ride or the sort of weirdly fascinating conversation I imagine you might receive if you admitted you were a psychiatrist. What emerges, à la those fictive Russian train rides of the nineteenth century, is the secret life, the unlived life, the immense weight of longing, the puzzlement of mortality, the concealed idiosyncratic religion everyone carries around like a bulletproof (one hopes) vest. It is important to keep the conversation visceral, so you insist that a poet is only “the pulse of a wound that probes to the opposite side” (García Lorca). You tell your seatmate that when he looks in the mirror he might say, “Jeezo-peezo, I'm getting old,” while Shakespeare said, “Devouring time, blunt thou thy lion's paws,” and the latter scans better. You tell him that when he sees a lovely naked woman on a bed he might say “Wow,” while García Lorca said:

Your belly is a battle of roots,

your lips a blurred dawn,

under the tepid roses of the bed

the dead moan, waiting their turn.

If my fellow passenger is involved with computers or becomes irritable, I like to use Vizenor to remind him that “we remember dreams, not data, at the wild end.” Of course it is important to remain light, loose and friendly through all of this. The average highly placed executive is more macho than a Mexican assassin, what with the executive's insistence on playing hardball around the clock. In return for my modest bon mots I receive insider stock tips, although I am too mistrustful to indulge myself in these.

 

Who shall revoke jubilance?” Rilke asked, rather innocently, to which we could answer, “Everyone and everything.” Joseph Campbell pointed out that in mythological terms the “rejection of the call” walls the Hero up in boredom and dread. A poet is supposed to be a hero of consciousness, and the most destructive force in his or her life is liable to be the unwritten poem. There is a touch of the schizoid to the practice of any art, and the poet becomes an outsider to maintain the integrity of what he writes. During not infrequent depressions (an occupational hazard) I wonder how black and Native American poets survive at all, for they are enveloped in a double schizoid bind, the Indians perhaps more than the blacks because they are our most thoroughly ignored minority.

 

Perhaps I've rejected too loudly certain utilitarian aspects of poetry, if only because we are capable of turning everything—from a simple rock to a guitar to violent death—into a nostrum, another of those self-help missions we use to hammer ourselves as if we were tract houses. D.H. Lawrence insisted that the only aristocracy was consciousness, if we consider all the other limitations within and without our lives. If this notion is valid, and I suspect it is, then poetry could be the primary aid if you wish to be more conscious, a somewhat singular ambition when you take a sideward glance at popular culture.

The flip side comes from that grandiose, rather romantic philosopher Fricdnch Nietzsche, who once said, “I'd rather be a satyr than a saint,” when he, in fact, was a tertiary-syphilitic hunchback. But he also said, “Stare into the abyss long enough, and it will stare back into thee.” It has become apparent to many that the ultimate disease, the abyss of post-modernism in art and literature, is subjectivity, and that the disease is both sociopathic and terminal. In other words, if the poet or aficionado of consciousness does not own a coequal passion for life herself, the social contract, he better be wary about the abyss he chooses. The obvious traps are the two halves of the brain in incestuous embrace, neurotic noodling, and ordinary spiritual adventurism of the most claustrophobic sort.

I remember that in my weakest moments I have regretted the problems I've caused my family and myself for refusing to be a poet-teacher: the shuddering economic elevator of the self-employed to whom the words boom and bust are euphemisms; the writer as farm laborer, block layer, journalist, novelist, screenwriter, but still thinking of himself as a poet. At times when I actually needed a battery of psychiatrists the alternatives were fishing, bird hunting, and drinking. I suspect this intimacy with the natural world has been a substitute for religion, or a religion of another sort. I remember as a young bohemian discovering garlic in New York City in 1957 when a Barnard girl made me listen to Richard Tucker sing something from Jewish liturgy. I was swept away by beauty, also jealousy, as the music was so powerful and unlike the sodden Protestant hymns of my youth. I felt the same thing years later in St. Basil's Cathedral in Leningrad, where I was told that in the Russian Orthodox Church one does not talk to God, one sings.

I am reaching toward something here by a circuitous route. At the very least the life I have chosen, although it always lacked a safety net, made up for the lack with pure oxygen. I remember a single year when I went to Europe, the Soviet Union, Africa and South America. I kept recalling Allen Ginsberg's line about “the incredible music of the streets.” Cultures less economically sophisticated than our own began to fascinate me. Gabriel García Márquez's “magical realism” doesn't seem unrealistic in South America, but you don't have to go that far to discover a different way of looking at things.

Up until half a dozen years ago I had collected a large library on the Native American, but was unremarkably short on firsthand knowledge—unremarkably and typically, as it is far easier to read about a people than to encounter them. I had been to the Blackfeet Reservation in Browning, Montana, on a prolonged drunk with Tom McGuane; we were actually kicked out of a local bar, and that takes some doing in Browning. I had also attended the Crow Fair, a massive gathering and celebration in Crow Agency, Montana, with five to seven thousand Native Americans in attendance. This was more than a decade ago, and there were only a few whites present. I watched the dancing for two days and nights, sleeping sporadically on the Custer Battlefield. It was a spellbinding experience, one of the few of my life, and there was a deep sense of melancholy that there was nothing in my life that owned this cultural validity except, in a minimal sense, my poetry. Thousands of people in traditional costumes dancing together! What the hell's going on here? My bubble of reality had temporarily burst; it was as if I were stoked on peyote on the planet Jupiter.

The power of the experience passed, although it nagged until a few years ago when I worked on an abortive film project about Edward Curtis, the photographer of Indians. There was research money so I left my books at home and wandered around Indian reservations for several months. I was a quiet observer, quite shy in fact, because I didn't want to be confused with the anthropologists and spiritual shoppers who drive these people crazy.

On the Navajo reservation up Canyon de Chelly, on the branch called Canyon del Muerto, two very disturbing things happened. A man, ragged and plainly insane, rushed out of a thicket, skipping across the shallow river, and began beating our truck with a club. His head appeared to turn nearly all the way around in the manner of an owl's head. Our Navajo guide, who was Christian, yelled, “Get out of here, you demon, in the name of Jesus,” explaining as the lunatic fled back into the thicket that what he yelled was the only thing that “worked.” A little later I spent hours helping get a truck loaded with crab apples unstuck from the river. There was a young Navajo man, his wife, and two children, and the children were terribly frightened of me. I found this embarrassing and sorrowful as I worked away half under the truck, glancing up at the Anasazi petroglyphs. If you're from northern Michigan you know how to get a pickup unstuck. I tried everything to charm the children, and the parents attempted to help, but I was plainly a “demon” to them. Later I was told that the terror might have come from my blind left eye, which is foggy and wobbles around with a life of its own.

What actually began that day was an obsession, fueled less by guilt than by a curiosity that was imperceptibly connected to my poetry. Charles Olson said that a poet “must not traffick in any but his own sign,” but I thought these people might clarify why I had spent over forty years wandering around in the natural world. I hoped the two cultures had more to offer each other than their respective demons.

This little essay, in fact, was occasioned by absolute exhaustion after a book tour, a retreat to my cabin in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, and the reading of the novel Love Medicine by the Native American Louise Erdrich, and then A Yellow Raft in Blue Water by her husband, Michael Dorris, somehow equal and absolutely first-rate books that restored my equilibrium and energies and an intense and nagging curiosity. Then I reread Survival This Way, a series of interviews with American Indian poets by Joseph Bruchac, published by the University of Arizona Press (whose Sun Tracks series seems to lead in the publishing of American Indian writers); Songs from This Earth on Turtle's Back, an anthology edited by Bruchac and published by Greenfield Review Press; and the new and comprehensive Harper's Anthology of 20th Century Native American Poetry edited by Duane Niatum.

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 strewn

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