WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO READ

I well remember what it felt like when, after a lot of flickering while someone read to me, the lights went on and I was actually reading all by myself.  It was like walking into a new space, something like liminal space and something like the cave the twelve dancing princesses entered at night so they could wear out their shoes to music.  

The ultimate intimacy is to read what someone else wrote: vivid and strange, jeweled fruit.  One enters the writer’s head and shares their life.  This is why I am so reluctant to read contemporary run-of-the-mill print.  I hesitate to say genre since it is not even distinct enough to associate with any kind of people outside the advertising world.  From where I’m sitting, genre and literary writing are not different now, simply because there is no true literary writing, just self-conscious compliance with what a publisher will accept.  Publishers are low-brow and competitive.  They like the sensational, sentimental, and salable.  

I like what I must struggle to understand and so appreciate the features of the computer that let me look up background without getting up to visit shelves.  Someone, a friend of mine, just accessed my blog from a place I don’t know.  I looked to find where and see they may be at a music festival.  Once in a while there’s an animal I don’t know, but if there’s a name for it, I can look at photos.  That’s nice, but not what I mean.

An aye-eye

What I mean is the kind of writing that disappears into more than meaning, a shift of understanding, a deepening of life-awareness -- something that I hadn’t known was there.  Not stuff about the cosmos and the meaning of life, but the kind of stuff that must come from adding new neurons to my own brain, like installing some kind of radar or fMRI neurons.  The better TED talks get it, but the Edge often misses. 

And yet I despise the new operating systems in this computer that force configurations and anticipate something that would never happen if I were in control.  Clearly they are devised by young smart aleck boys who think accumulation, competition, and graphs are what life is about.  Our culture created these guys and now these guys are force-feeding it all back to us.  I clench my teeth.  Sometimes I throw up.

In good writing the sound of the words, the lilt, the beat, are silently there.  Alliteration was discouraged in the Fifties but I love it, and rhyme as well.  Sometimes I really enjoy a mixed metaphor.  The point of establishing a norm and a standard seems to me only a way of creating a trampoline surface for REAL writing.  Not necessarily extreme or profane -- sometimes just subtly changing the emphasis.  That’s why I like reading the writing of autodidacts with their malapropisms and slightly distorted words, sometimes moving them from one tense to another or using an unaccustomed preposition.

 

Thyme and poppies

I enjoy reading Aad de Gid’s poetry out loud, but maybe it’s a mistake to do that because there’s a bit of loss when just one pronunciation system, one interpretation, prevails.  In print, the eye can go back over and over to add a new way of interpreting the words.  Try this phrase:   "sulphurous hypnotic perfume boudoiriste effusion in situ;  the bridges of thyme reverberate with those microshubes".  I picked it at random from his flood of words.  He’s a perfume-lover so one never wonders about smell.

I love to read what leaves me sore and wet from participating, so that when I go to stand up (only if I must) I feel a little sprained and bruised.  Or I’m surprised that I have hands instead of paws.

Here’s a bit of writing about books that’s not the same old thing:

http://lithub.com/the-pleasures-of-destroying-a-good-book/

JFK and Frost

“As a reader, I want to inhabit a book as a form of communion.”  (Nick Ripatrazone)  I assume he was the one who devised this title for another essay:  “IN DEFENSE OF THE POET LAUREATE:  ON POLITICS, ART, AND INAUGURAL DOGGEREL.”  I haven’t read the essay yet.  I just like the idea of defending the poor old (rarely young) poet laureate (though I’m not in favor of the phenomenon) and esp. the phrase “inaugural doggerel” which is only slant rhyme, but what’s wrong with that?  It doesn’t hurt that the illustrating photo shows the romanticized JFK blowing his nose.

I enjoy the incongruous outrageous as much as the obscene.  They are often topographical:  in, out, ob.  (Now I’ve read the article which is just informative, a discussion of what a poet laureate should be and do.  Are they a kind of librarian and guide, or are they supposed to be “the best poet in the country,” an impossible standard in a multiply-cultured nation.)   How does a poet laureate become “a kind of communion” in a secular country?  I have an answer: write like Gerard Manley Hopkins.

In the past I’ve talked about going to the Portland, OR, Multnomah County library and trying to read about ballet in books written in French. I almost could, I thought.  But writing about ballet in English also requires concentration, even when the dances were all white except for Firebird, which was -- of course -- red.  These days gymnastic dance requires gymnastic language.  

U of Chicago Div School

Reading about reading seems far too precious and incestuous to a lot of people, but “The Sense of an Ending” or “The Mirror and the Lamp” shifted everything.  Stephen Toulmin, who was nearly as unintelligible as some French-speaking Algerian with a sharp blade trying to eviscerate domination, finally opened up the Div School world for me with his explanation of argument.  

I listen to NPR classical music programs partly for the music, but also because the commentary (spoken, not written) is often that kind of unfolding origami.  I wouldn’t know what book to buy to get that quality of “look at this and then consider that detail and comparison.”  (At the moment a woman is discussing the different tastes of the cello versus the viola de gamba (the latter sweeter than the other), though I’m quite sure she’s never licked either one.  I had to look up the second instrument:  “de gamba” means “between the legs.”) I still need to hear the music.

Viola de gamba

I was thrilled to discover that on the Internet I could find one of my most beloved paragraphs, the beginning of Steinbeck’s “The Red Pony,” because it was my brother’s book and in late middle age he still remembered it was his and demanded it back.  I had almost memorized the paragraph but now and then want to check a word.  I don’t care about Hemingway very much.  Faulkner not at all.  

“At day break Billy Buck emerged from the bunkhouse and stood for a moment on the porch looking up at the sky. He was a broad, bandy-legged little man with a walrus mustache, with square hands, puffed and muscled on the palms. His eyes were a contemplative, watery gray and the hair which protruded from under his Stetson hat was spiky and weathered. Billy was still stuffing his shirt into his blue jeans as he stood on the porch. He unbuckled his belt and tightened it again. The belt showed, by the worn shiny places opposite each hole, the gradual increase of Billy's middle over a period of years. When he had seen to the weather, Billy cleared each nostril by holding its mate closed with his forefinger and blowing fiercely. Then he walked down to the barn, rubbing his hands together. He curried and brushed two saddle horses in the stalls, talking quietly to them all the time; and he had hardly finished when the iron triangle started ringing at the ranch house.”

Mitchum as Billy Buck

I’m here because there are people here like Billy Buck.  I suspect he was Metis, maybe Cree/Swede.  But what happened to the walrus mustache?  I want to see Mitchum with a walrus mustache.

TOTAL POETRY

Farsi poem about sadness

A wealth of research and finely written essays testifies to the unique value of poetry though it may be quite different from one culture to another.  Our own experience tells us that poetry is at least different from rationality, reasoning, or purely informational writing and at best is quite transcendent, almost religious, sweeping us into feeling.  But what IS the difference?  

In some cultures and individuals, it is the cadence of the words, the patterning for rhyme, sometimes specific subjects, its relationship to oral culture or music.  In some places it is assigned time and location: at night or on rising, some turn of the day/night.  It might be soft words of love, vigorous epithets of condemnation, or pledges of faith.

Just the same, it’s words.  I’ve been trying to push words off to the side, take wind out of their sails, reduce them and their grip on us in law, governance, required texts, fancy rhetoric that is NOT poetic, church.  And I relate this to neuron studies, particularly those that make explicit the evolution of the brain, whether reptile, mammal or human. Strangely, sometimes a wee simple worm is enlightening.

One of the most under-considered strategies of evolution is doubling back to use old structures in new ways, to link new and old structures, always to conserve.  Bells and whistles are accidents.  If the structure and function of the whole finds a way to use them -- “soooo, the larynx is in a slightly different place now -- what can it do there that it couldn’t in the old place?”  Like, TALK.  Make words by interrupting the flow of breath with sibilance and clicks and bitten-off air.  But that’s the tongue, the teeth, the palate and -- oh, the vocal chords.

The red chairs of the poets.

This is from a website (and book) called www.babelsdawn.com:

“It got me thinking about the FOXP2 gene (discussed here) that fine tuned control over the  lower jaw. One of the things we can do with that lower mouth is cough and clear our throat more easily than people without the mutation. It seems a trivial task compared with speaking precisely, but one peculiarity of human anatomy is the way our windpipe (trachea) and esophagus are available to  each other. The system allows us to speak, but at the risk of choking to death . . .

“The larynx works like a valve, opening and closing to let air pass. When it is shut, food can pass into the esophagus at no risk to the lungs. The best place for such a seal is right at the top of the trachea so that no food or drink accidentally goes even a little ways down it, but humans have a second use for the valve. We work it like a musical instrument shaping the sounds made by passing air as we speak. The musical valve works best if we pull it a bit down into the trachea so that the air wave shaped by the larynx can resonate before leaving the mouth.”

This is the entrancing stuff that babies discover by babbling.  We sing before we speak, making vowels, fricatives and plosives for the pure pleasure of the sounds.  We aren’t born speaking because anatomy recapitulates evolution -- at first the larynx is in the animal position so the baby won’t choke.  It takes four years for the larynx to have moved into the standard adult human position.  And boys who are becoming men will experience a second descent of the larynx and their voices.  Then they get guitars and are filled with emotion, potency, and new sound.  It is thought that this sexual voice change evolved earlier than baby larynx migration because deep sexy voices mean big dominant animals that make lots of babies.  Drums and brass.  Maybe.

“The fossil evidence seems to put the decline of body dimorphism based at about 2 million years ago, with the appearance of Homo in the fossil record. Is that when the male larynx began to descend?

“So far no conclusive evidence that the adolescent’s larynx descent preceded the descent of the infant larynx. Fossils might provide some ambiguous answers, but a more likely source will probably have to await understanding of the genetic control of these two processes. Then we can, perhaps, determine which genes are older.”  

Do I need to name Jane Goodall?

http://journals.lww.com/psychgenetics/pages/articleviewer.aspx?year=2006&issue=04000&article=00007&type=abstract

“Objective: A mutation in the FOXP2 gene has been the first genetic association with a language disorder. Language disorder is considered as a core symptom of schizophrenia. Therefore, the FOXP2 gene could be considered a good candidate gene for the vulnerability to schizophrenia.

“Conclusions: These results suggested that the FOXP2 gene may confer vulnerability to schizophrenic patients with auditory hallucinations.”

There are two other things FOXP2 genes can do.  They are related to “embedded recursions” which is a grammatical structure in which lists of description are attached to an object.  I taught it as “parallel structure.”  All the descriptors must be in a sequence of the same grammatical type: adjectives, or prepositional phrases, or participles.

The other thing is the FOX2P does is allow coughing to clear jams in the esophagus/windpipe crossover.  Before FOX2P, the people whose larynxes best allowed them to sing and chant poetry may have risked choking to death.

So oral poetry is made possible by anatomy, genes that control brain function (coughing is controlled by the brain and so are voices), allure in the time of human dimorphism, and a desire to share information -- but also emotion.  Writing it down is derived from the oral form.

Except that reasoning -- in the most extreme form mathematical formulas -- really needs to be written to be kept track of.  Bookkeeping is mathematical records.  But it’s embedded recursion: you have to keep the numbers in columns, parallel structures.  Maybe there’s a bit of crossover when poetry is meant to form a structure on the page as well as in speaking or even in thinking.

Adolescence is the “feeling” age which now is closely entwined with music again -- I mean, music with words, courtship music to keep the species surviving.  It’s not just physical creation of babies, but also the emotional support of lullabies and rhythm games.

The point is that we keep trying to make speech into a competition where some words are forbidden and others are imposed to show one is civilized or elite or gifted, but we neglect the older dark unconscious brain parts that are still there, still involved.  Poetry is a way to bring all the brain parts back into the game of communication: the laughter, the shivering, the capacity to trampoline to transcendence.  It must involve the sensorium, which is the only way to poke apertures through our boundaries against the world.  And that means that a poem might be memorably evocative through an object:  an old red wheelbarrow in the rain.

SUPPLICE MEANS TORTURE

Take a look at this announcement of the publication of a poetry book called “Supplice” By T. Zachary Cotler, Published by the Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University.  Winner of the 2014 Colorado Prize for Poetry

T. Zachary Cotler

“In T. Zachary Cotler’s Supplice, humanism’s dialectic is itself a primary form of torture. Working inside the circuitry of thesis-antithesis, self-other, the poems collected here answer ‘no’ to Keats’s questions in ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn,’ confessing ‘that truth / is beauty isn’t true.’ In a world become word, ‘the eternal present eternally fails / to be trapped,’ and our poet-pilgrim is bound by dueling via negativa that chart the passage of d’ailleurs or elsewhere, where he finds history has located meaning’s trajectory. A not-ready-for-remnant-sonnet sequence as chilling as it is tutelary.”   —Claudia Keelan, final judge

Keelan has also served as a judge for two of the most prestigious poetry prizes, the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize (2009, winner Laura McKee) and the T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize (2010, winner Dean Rader)

“The city on a hill is at war again, and this time not only with love. Cotler’s terse lyrics of desire — ‘the anatomies of elsewhere’ — enact a baroque masque against backdrops of conflagrating violence. This is a difficult, encrusting lyricism, as of looted jewels.”
—G. C. Waldrep

“Supplice is the second installment in T. Zachary Cotler’s sonnet sequence that began with Sonnets to the Humans. “Supplice,” the systematic infliction of physical and/or mental torture, is both the subject and the main character of this sequence. These are amatory sonnets, but with love and rhyme tortured into broken and boneset textures. Supplice herself, the dark lady of these sonnets, is difficult to pin down with an epithet. Is she the angel of reality, banality, popular culture, pornography, uncertainty, or economic and environmental crisis? She has something to do with the history of cruelty and pain, with the devaluation of traditional ideas of beauty, and with the silence and science that have replaced divinity. A moving love triangle is to be found in these pages, the vertices of which appear to be Supplice, the reader/writer, and one’s unobtainable ideal.”

If you can’t decipher the cover image, it is two bloody wings evidently torn off an angel. Supplice means torture and suffering.

www.theredchairpoems.tumblr.com

Now tell me, what is the difference between the Red Chair Poems, which are online, written by boys-at-risk, and include videos alongside print (THAT’s a difference), and this publication? Here’s a poem by Cotler to help you. The “prytaneum” was the city’s hearth, the location of the town hall.

Behind the Prytaneum

BY T. Zachary Cotler

Tragedy began with a dance in the guise of goats, said Aristotle.

Tragedy began with a sacrifice of goats, said Eratosthenes.

They came to a circle of columns or great white trees.

They drank red resveratrol wine from the bottle.

A classicist shouts, those are not differing accounts!

One must kill a goat to dress as a satyr.

Way of necessity, way of the wine, a fluid ounce —

in Galilee, where he has turned, said John, the water into rhyme,

a god’s son or a vintner dies, not differing accounts

when laser diode udometers measure, millennia later,

the rainfall on fields that yield grapes for wine —

a miracle’s a narrative with time

condensed. An ounce for the gorgeous man in the gutter,

the beggar-poet cries, and some crab legs with clarified butter!

The difference is NOT in the subject matter. It is in the skillful manipulation of words by a young man with degrees and prizes who is dealing with the same nasty subject matter of sex and death — and the stigmatized — by invoking a lot of classical references.

Why aren’t a collection of street boys with their own thesis/antithesis and self/other issues just as legitimate? Aren’t survival/morality or trick/whore issues that turn kids into half-human satyrs just as legitimate? Resveratrol wine results from damaged grapes and is supposed to be healing for humans but only the herbalists say so. Aren’t the professors and honored poets of the writing workshops merely herbalists, recommending their amber bottles of exotic leaves and roots for whatever ails you? And clearly something ails everyone.

So the boys’ water doesn’t turn into wine but rather into piss, but isn’t that human enough for you?

G.C. Waldrep (born 1968 South Boston, Virginia as George Calvin Waldrep III) is an American poet and historian. His blurb for “Supplice” (above) is thus: “The city on a hill is at war again, and this time not only with love. Cotler’s terse lyrics of desire — ‘the anatomies of elsewhere’ — enact a baroque masque against backdrops of conflagrating violence. This is a difficult, encrusting lyricism, as of looted jewels.” G.C. Waldrep”

You remember, of course, that the “City on a Hill” is a biblical reference to an exemplary community as an example, sometimes meant to call up Boston or the US as examples. In this case, the city on the hill might be the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, since Cotler, Keelan, and Waldrep all have ties there. It’s what in chemistry might be called a “ring molecule.”

Without such credentials and circling dances, could you tell the difference between the poems in “Supplice” and the following? The “anatomies of elsewhere” and the “conflagrating violence” are there. Maybe not the “difficult, encrusting lyricism” because these are not looted jewels — they are the scars and bruises of abused boys. They are in the City on the Hill, all right, but reduced to living to the sewers beneath the streets.

invisible until the wind goes still

no one much believes that they exist/

like mongrels in a cave/

think twice about exploring this cave/

the rabbit hole swallows up the best of us/

the real struggle is to turn that intransigence — we do not believe they can be real — into an asset, and not a liability/

if they don’t exist, then why are you so afraid they might/

if they don’t exist, then why not just move on/

if they don’t exist, then why all the fanning of the flames of animosity/

all the le drama/

what is it to you/

revenge and in skin and bones we will take our time to die/

the scars versus the hate and fear of any virus/

there are enough accidents to pick at; if they don’t exist, then you have nothing to worry about/

if they don’t exist, then how exactly does that affect your life/

if they don’t exist, perhaps they are just a chorus of the ghosts/ . . .

—Tim Barrus

For some with torn tongues the only language can be bleating. So they are given video cameras, the kind strapped to animals to see what they do and where they go, and we are astounded to find them on our block, the children of our neighbors. Not just in Iowa. Isn’t that a red chair on your back porch? Is a boy sitting in it?

THE POEMS OF "GENOCIDE" by Tim Barrus

The management of consciousness is what it means to be human altogether.  When considering poetry, this is the angle of approach that I take:  how is the poet managing his consciousness and how is the reader or hearer’s consciousness affected?  Mrs. Othus, our grade school library teacher who wore a ugly wig but somehow had a husband who was rumored to love her very much, told us our brains were like a field and that thinking wore paths across it where the feet went to and fro.

Many years later when I attended college, the school wanted to pave the muddiest of their campus paths.  There were already paved paths where the students were supposed to go, but they were goat-footed and would not stay on the pre-existing sidewalks.  So the administration simply waited until mud or snow made the student paths obvious and then paved those.   They didn’t like mud.

Poets go on both kinds of paths but there is a kind that tries always to walk on grass, stone, air, to wade in the waterways, to swing from the trees.  Their consciousness wants something new because that’s often where the power is.  And they discover that the forbidden is the most powerful poetry of all, whether it is religious taboo, fenced propriety, or simply deadly.

If one lives a forbidden life, let’s say on a beach somewhere remote, or squatting in a ruined building (there are so many now, esp. in Detroit), or a small town where everyone knows what’s happening and no one wants to rock the boat so they are silent, then true poetry will reflect that.  But who will read it?  How does one get the writing to the reader or listener?  Today we know an answer is electronics, but that does not solve the problem.

Mrs. Othus was a liberal who believed in protocol:  “This is how to take a book off the shelf,” she taught us.  “Slip your fingers in between books -- do not pull from the top of the back of the binding.”  It’s like grabbing a poet by the back of his collar, though these days they tend to wear t-shirts and their books are all paperbacks, maybe hand-sewn.  Mrs. Othus was a BBC type before there was television.  She was strict, almost clerical.  Some students hated her.  She saw something in me and urged me to read “Pilgrim’s Progress,” so I did.  It was the path to destruction, paved with good intentions.  I had lots of those.  Destruction turned out to simply be deconstruction.

In high school Mrs. Tyler was our teacher of American Literature.  We read Whitman and she taught us to admire F.O. Matthiessen.  The high school had a primrose festival in the spring but I never competed so never found the path.  As an adult, I was friends with Mrs. Tyler, retired now, frail as a sparrow and all big eyes, so she bought tickets for theatre and I drove her car.  We saw “Chorus Line,” and a ballet about being gay, which I only thought I understood but she really did.  We didn’t talk about it.  What would have happened if we had?

Now I walk direct across the prairie to the horizon and pass the piled or scattered bones of many ideas.  I never take my books off the shelf by their backs because they stack up beside my chair.

I have friends who have lived obscene lives:  Ob (outside) and scene (the stage defined by the pro-scenium) which divides the actors from the audience in the days when every play was a passionate attempt to make the gods stop punishing us, to discover our crimes, to offer sacrificial bribes.  It was a search for justice.

The hydraulics of human bodies is managed by blood which is what supplies the fuel for everything -- including sex -- by providing the molecules of joy and relief, engorging the membranes, carrying the toxics left from former lovers.  The poetry of “Genocide” is the tracing of these trajectories as they plummet through lives of nonconformists, escapees from both school and teachers.  “Schooling” in some contexts is a painful forcing of obedience, using violence.

Education happens all the time on its own terms because it is the way that consciousness manages itself.  It is the way brains grow through time, but one of the things a person learns is that looking over the shoulder does not kill Eurydice, but rather one’s younger self.

i am old

tired now

i want to die

my genocide visions are humble

even squalid i laugh

not bitterly but with

ruinous soul

as honest as the stoic sun.

Those who dare adventures out there on the edge of the world where there are dragons, have not wasted their time, have not been “ordinary.”  (Nothing is worse than being “ordinary.”  Both Mrs. Othus and Mrs. Tyler knew that, but danger kept them quiet.)

“Fucksweet Turbulence”

sunrise somewhere off the venezuelan coast

our boat is old and it leaks

my latino lover this so-called revolutionary. . .

any books just books can get you shot

drug smugglers are fed to sharks in a place where

everyone smuggles something the revolutionaries here

are mainly children when all of your brothers are murdered

you become a revolutionary.

Recently this period in history has been keeping books on atrocity:  how many killed, how much destroyed, where are they, what is their DNA, who claims them, where is the art that used to hang on their walls?

. . . i know slashing

twilight and I want an accounting

of what has been done

a full accounting of every small

insignificant horror because there

is nothing insignificant about

horror the books must be put in perfect

economic shape being mellow and all

There is only one respite, as these stories record.

tears

are interludes the stage

the bed the mystery

you slept on my

chest.

but

genocide

boys

melt

slipping 

away

while

you

hold

them

tightly

genocide

boys reach

with 

tender strength

chests

flared 

into 

manhood 

reaching.

beyond

the 

realm

Water seems to have no paths, but in truth they do.  Differences in temperature, gradients of saline, deep variation in the terrain below the flow, and always the wind -- that metaphor for spirit -- taking one’s boat by its blushing sails.

What possible way can an old woman much more like Mrs. Othus or Mrs. Tyler (except that they ended in lovely apartments in retirement towers where no cats were allowed) ever relate to a renegade guerrilla who shepherds boys across the abyss piled with skulls?  

Yin and Yang can be closer to each other than same to same.  

. . . we 

will never be retired from passion

my cats and I sit in rockers on the 

front porch stoned my cats drink too

much rum we are so alike believing 

that there has to be some deep enigmatic

significance to a collection of sea shells

gathered by boys drunk on sunset

. . .  we are not retired from kisses

Don’t get too excited.  It’s all metaphor.  It’s all words.  We’re merely managing our consciousnesses.  We’re human beings.

(All poetry quotes from "Genocide" by Tim Barrus.)

"SAVAGE SUNSETS" by Adrian C. Louis

My favorite Potawatomi grandfather, who writes poetry and sometimes runs a trap-line and even possibly plays the grand piano, has been a friend since the Nineties when we were on the same listserv and had such a heated exchange that Carter Revard cautioned us.  The other day he sent an exasperated email to this funky old white woman noting that traffic had nearly stopped on the last remaining Native American literature listserv.  NATIVELIT-L@LISTSERV.ILLINOIS.EDU   Either there haven’t been any messages for a long time or else I’ve been taken off the list in one of the periodic blood-quantum purges.  (Since I’m zero quantum.)   Or maybe the tech support has collapsed.

My friend wanted to stir things up.  Indeed, everyone is so busy making money or pursuing the finer points of French post-modern philosophy (those French loooove Indians) or hooking up with eager little Ph.D. scholars, that there’s not much interest in speculating about what’s happened to all those great writers we used to know and argue about and with.  I got down my cherished copy of “Smoke Rising: The Native North American Literary Companion” (1995, Visible Ink Press)   While I was at it, I looked to see what that press was publishing now.  Sure enough, the NA writers at Visible Ink have been made invisible by Blacks and vampires.

It gets worse:  Adrian C. Louis was not listed in “Smoke Rising.”  He was not the romantic gentle-but-sad Jim Welch, nor an indignant Red Feminist, nor the crowd-pleasing Sherman Alexie (now writing YA novels about masturbation -- very funny, they tell me) nor was he one of the suicides,   But he is closer to the Red Heart of Truth than many of those others.  More than anything else, he is a survivor and that’s a good a definition of what it means to be indigenous.  

There are many strategies for survival, so naturally not all of them conform to expectations.  But those of us who live on or near the big prairie reservations will recognize Adrian’s work.  He’s been able to move around in the disciplines of newspaper editing and university teaching.  Twelve books of poetry, two novels, one of them (“Skins”) made into one of few truly authentic Indian big-screen Hollywood movies.  http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0284494/  His fellow poet, Lee Ann Roripaugh, blurbs:  “A mournful howl and raw elegy, sliced through with the razor-flecked wit of an acerbically world weary jester, Adrian C. Louis’ Savage Sunsets veers between the sacred and the profane, the terrible and the mundane, the lewd and the transcendent in tautly-welded lines that are both searingly elegant and fiercely plainspoken.”  That about covers it.

No need to market Louis as an “Indian."  Anyway, he’s not a bare-chested guy on a horse waving a spear at some buffalo, which is the way people want to see Indians.  Take a look at the reality.  http://www.adrian-c-louis.com/  Other blurbs from James Tate and Sam Hamill.  A vid at http://vimeo.com/45367747  

The people I know best who write like this are white but not among the anointed.  That means nothing.  This is human.  Labels don’t stick.  Except one:  love/grief.  This last collection includes poems of mourning because of the death of Louis’ wife after a decade of Alzheimer’s.  The sound of these poems is not the drum -- it’s the whip.  Also traditional.

When I reviewed an earlier book of poems on this blog  Dec 8, 2006.  (“Adrian Louis’ Strong Brown Wings.”)  and sent him my usual courtesy copy of the post, his response was more or less “I’ll be over to do the honors.  You don’t live that far away.”  A little startling, but that direct response turns up in the poems.  The consequence is a jolting return to rude and preposterous reality.  

Here’s a demo from “Senor Skull’s Parade”:

“Today at work a white girl,

a secretary I like too much

said (half in jest, I hope),

“Do a rain dance.  It’s been

so dry & my tomatoes --”

Yes, do a “rain dance.”

As if . . . As (fucking) if . . 

my blood contained all

azimuths of red arcana

& I could produce such

utilitarian wetness at will;

“I wish I could,” I said, but,

jack-in-the-box Senor Skull

snorted out a snide aside:

Darling, tonight I’m going to 

sneak into your pale garden

&cornhole your tomatoes,

make them wet & juicy

one moaning globe at a time.”

Tomatoes are indigenous, once considered dangerously toxic “love apples.”  But many female readers consider Indian men to be “safe” to romance because they aren’t quite real and there are too many manifestos about frontier white women preferring the red warriors who captured them.  But Adrian is as real as any human in a tractor hat ever gets.  All the politicians are worrying about the “middle class” with never a care for the “working class” -- often indigenous of one sort or another -- that never quite gets ahead.  And yet . . . is never entirely crushed.  Louis is enrolled with the Lovelock [sic] Paiute Tribe which is federally recognized.  It’s in Nevada, but he’s spent most of his working life in South Dakota, sometimes as a teacher of English.

HORSEHIDE

At my martini limit,

I come face to face

with a typically lame

Freshman essay holding

a plenitude of platitudes

in drippy, run-on sentences

that feature tense changes

& ampersands plus a lexicon

of abused or misspelled words.

The kid, mostly silent in class

is rambling about his lifelong

love of baseball & it must be

the ghost of horsehide on

my fingertips that glides,

warps the breaking curve

of a C into an A & then I

slide into bed, safe at home.

If the Dakotas and Nevada don’t teach you survival, teaching freshman English surely will.  The epigraph of Louis’ “Wild Indians & Other Creatures” is from Thomas Merton.  (The Seven Story Mountain.)  

“Therefore all the things around you will be armed against you, to deny you, to hurt you, to give you pain, and therefore to reduce you to solitude.

“And when you have been praised a little and loved a little I will take away all your gifts and all your love and all your praise and you will be utterly forgotten and abandoned and you will be nothing, a dead thing, a rejection.  And in that day you will begin to possess the solitude you have so long desired.  And your solitude will bear immense fruit in the souls of men you will never see on earth.”

Rain on tomatoes is nothing.  Do you agree, Potawatomi grandpa?  (He did.)