This correspondence between Leslie Marmon Silko and James Wright in the late seventies remains a classic in epistolary literature. Like finely crafted lace kept as a story of beauty and struggle and passed between generations, these letters possess a liquid and elegant power. We admire the knit of soul. We recognize the struggle to be artists in the midst of the daily challenges of living.
Many of us who were becoming poets in those times turned to Wright for the beautifully crafted humanity of his poetry. His immense compassion for what is American: the up and down of history, horses, and the seasons of forgetting and remembering drew us to the grasses, plains, and rivers of his expression. He was a teacher, a poetry ancestor for my generation. For those of us of struggling to create from diverse traditions in literature, Silko led the way as she brilliantly merged traditional indigenous storytelling and song language with European/American forms of written story and poetry. Silko’s visionary poetic storytelling crossed over and made a recognizable and fresh American literature. Each story has a soul and a time and place in which it is rooted. She made a template for many of us to raise up our own creations.
Though an artistic legacy may be immense, each is constructed of everyday intimacies as they play out within the ceremony of sunrise and sunset, of night sky and morning light. There’s the ornery rooster, the rainstorm climbing over a mountain and revealing a rainbow on a grey day in Italy, children, illnesses, and the many births and deaths of consciousness. This correspondence between Silko and Wright frames such legacy.
How we gather stories, songs, and poems and share them has changed since the writing and publication of these letters. Few write such missives these days. Most letters are notes quickly typed on keyboards as e-mails or by finger on cell phones as text mails. Time has speeded up. We don’t have time anymore, to be human. Gathering stories, making stories and sharing them in a dynamic back and forth defines our humanity. “We used to go visit and stay for days, sharing stories and songs with each other,” my cousin George Coser, Jr. told me last time I was home and visited him for several hours. These letters are such communication on paper. Yes, things change.
And yet, what stays the same is the searching for beautiful and wild sense in the world. Essentially, the publication of these letters passes them on to the next generation. Maybe there will be a forthcoming book of e-mail communication, or even text messages between artists who struggle in the midst of making the story of their lives. However it happens, and it will, we walk either knowingly or unknowingly in the path of our literary ancestors. We hold their legacy like exquisitely crafted lace in our hands.