Poemsworth ‑‑looking for a fair exchange

 

Review of two books of poetry: Catawba: Omens, Prayers, &  Songs, by A. Poulin, Jr., Graywolf Press, Port Townsend, Washington, 1977, $4.00; and MU'NDU WI'GO :Mohegan Poems, by Joe Bruchac, Blue Cloud Quarterly, Blude Cloud Abbey, Marvin, South Dakota, $1.00.

 

Neither of these books is available for purchase.  Both were published in small editions and are no longer in print.  If reviews in small‑circulation periodicals sell books then this review is a contradiction that undermines its own writing.  But perhaps, if the review provides a sort of "name recognition" then it can be justified.  Or, more importantly, if the review focuses on the books an attention that can be directed toward similar books then it may be of some value.  And this is my intention.  Both books utilize American Indian materials and such use for poetry has been increasing in recent years; it is arguable that the use of American Indian materials has re‑vitalized American poetry, and, hence a critical look at how this material has been used is necessary if we are to discover what is the worth of this activity we call contemporary poetry.  Obviously such an examination move beyond a review, yet because there two books have so many similarities, their differences (Bateson: knowing is knowledge of difference) offer a beginning toward discriminating between the real thing and the counterfeit.  Both books are slight, thin volumes that do not reveal the full range of the authors, but together they help uncover several of the themes central to our poetry.

Reading Poulin's book is an exercise in discerning emptiness.  His "Prefatory Note" is titled a "Voice of a Language That is Gone."  Bruchac dedicates his poems to "my friends, who have not vanished and who have no intention of doing so."  That in itself should be enough to illustrate the different stances these two poets take to their materials.  Bruchac makes it clear that he is striving for a full poetry, one that expects the real world as it reveals itself through language to enter into the poems.  The main difference is between these qualities ‑‑emptiness and fullness, which I want to "translate," to avoid an obscuring romanticism, into the another language, the language of the marketplace, so that I get not only the "ephemeral" and the "solid" but also the revealing terms "paper currency" and "hard cash" as equivalents.  (Perhaps a better matching would be the paper dollar backed by the authority of the state ‑‑the same state that "emptied" the Indian culture of value‑‑ and the term "wampum" designating a means of transmitting value that was also a pictorial and tactile language understandable only within a viable culture).  Such a translation is justified because of the context all of our works evolve in ‑‑even if our poetry does not work well within the marketplace such non‑working does not mean it somehow escapes it.

To start with Poulin's evoking emptiness.  There are hundreds of Catawba Indians still living in South Carolina.  The last speaker of the Catawba language, Sam Blue, died in 1957; but though their specific eastern Siouan language is no longer used, the people with the language they claim as their own still live on.  I do not want to dwell on Poulin's wholesale deference to the authority of the anthropologist Frank Speck.  He needs to be criticized for it, but it is the distortion of an unnecessary romanticism that disturbs me most.  Poulin writes:  "`The language is gone' (quoting Speck) ‑‑assumes an even more stark and brutal dimension that conjurs an image of a nation without tongue, a communal spirit forever speechless, a people's exchange with creation forever silenced."  Perhaps this is a purposeful but disguised evoking of Shelley's sweet hidden music that the "true" poet reveals but the attitude is more accurately that of the cavalry charging to rescue the innocent only this time it is to save the Indians by giving voice to the speechless.  No, it is not the cavalry but the white renegade who learns from the natives and who can out‑shoot, and out‑fuck, any injun.

Poulin has assigned the Indian to extinction, neglecting the fact that they are not a vanished race.  And he has belittled them and their various poetries by speaking of their "unguarded simplicity and honesty."  Poulin presumes that he can take their words and then "stripped of culture's syntax and the exigencies of self‑conscious artistry" turn them to poetry.  But it is not possible to strip words this way, removing them from their supposed confine, except at great violence to the living language, ours, injured to serve the reactionary cause of so‑called "pure" poetry.  It becomes just another instance of the liberal approach to culture that disguises imperialism as relativism.  The imagined detachment of the anthropologist, Speck who refused to look at the social conditions the Catawbas were living in, midst the white culutre surrounding them and determining their economic dependency, is mimicked by the elevated position taken by the poet who wants to isolate the dying language for his own ends while ignoring the cultural context of that extinction.  But what results from this self‑removal from the living culture is only a mild surrealism, another European salvage of its own culture by infusing it with "savage" blood, a surrealism that may be better than the mild imagism that once passes for Indian translations but is still nothing more than a record of the passage of the material through the detached poet.  And the larger question is, is this any different from any other appropriation, and other museum piece, a thievery labelled "culture"?

Part of the answer lies in Bruchac's dedication, again:

dedicated to my friends,

who have not vanished

 

and have no intention of doing so

 

The first part of Bruchac's book is made of stories, re‑tellings of Indian tales.  Little different, in their aim, from any traditional re‑telling.  It is making visible of aspects of a shared culture.  But it is the second part that interests me the most.  Here Bruchac uses material much like that available to Poulin: "Last Speaker of the Mohegan‑Pequot Language."  And he gets it from the same anthropoligist, Frank G. Speck.  Bruchac, however, makes little claim upon the latent romanticism in us all.  Instead he keeps us always aware of his sources, the anthropologist and the woman Mrs. Fielding / Flying Bird.  And it is this awareness and the tensions generated through it that make the Bruchac poems alive to meaning.

In the first poem it is obviously Speck speaking: "She had the fancy / of applying to herself / an Indian name / Djits Budunacu, 'Flying Bird.'"  An economy of selection that reveals Speck's racism and paternalism as well as the central theme of language and its appropriateness within a community.  Here, again, is Speck's voice: "Her general style of expression / is monotonous ...."  echoing Poulin who objects to "a repetitious, awkward and staccato syntax."  Yet when Flying Bird talks it is a voice of indignation at the loss of a viable living culture, and a direct speech that poses a devastating dialectic to Speck's self‑serving criticisms: "White men think / know all things. / Half‑saying / not are so. / Poor white man. / Many want all this earth. / It cannot be / for another person / have anything to eat, / because white man / want the money."

because white man want the money.  Let's assume that Poulin's poems have value.  What of it can we find in the following?

Salamander

 

I heard a salamander

barking in the dark

I am going to die

Poems, like money, have worth only within a larger field of value.  Words that seek to appropriate a power can do so only if the community participates in the shared meaning of the words.  Solitary words have no magic, no meaning. They cannot cleanse.  Cannot heal. Even dreams are not singular. And these words, torn from their context of a living culture, cannot even function as expression, exchange, except as entertainment.  Here is Poulin's rendering of an attempt to concentrate power ‑‑value‑‑ in language:

Prayer to the Sun

 

tonight we go to bed

we've arrived another day

 

tonight we go to bed

give us good light again

tomorrow thanks

 

There is no context given in which survive makes sense except the implied one of "primitive life is hell."   This twisting of an acknowledgement of dependency to one of a pathetic helplessness is but another example of the Western liberal intellectual utilizing alienation to promote a career, a way to accumulate capital at the Indian's expense. Compare this to

Bruchac's similar poem:

IV.  January 7, 1903

Already

so I live

till another dawn

 

Sun rising clear;

cold this early morning

 

Sun falling,

already noon;

night.

 

Bruchac has chosen the words and given us a drama.  Time intimate to the relationships of the words.  It is a drama that is immediately an old person's observation of the process of the day's movement.  And within the larger context it juxtaposes Flying Bird's recognition of her very real knowing of herself in her situation in the world with that of the anthropologist's confusion of language and observation.  Bruchac takes us to the scene, sharing his involvement; Poulin gives us abstractions.

I am not saying that Poulin has not written poetry.  It has a more lyric quality than Bruchac's.  But it is a lyricism that has no recognizable value.  As pretty as it is,it is similar to a check emblazoned with scenes of the mountains rather than to anything representing hard cash.  It is this total disregard for value, ignoring that it is a community that gives value, that I object to most.  Poulin's intent is merely self‑expression.  And self‑expression denies the relevancy of a community.  And we can measure this disregard by the extent to which we can believe his prefatory poem, a poem that once had meaning, and still has meaning within very specific contexts but taken from those contexts is not a lie but something worse, the illusion of the sincerity that marks truth:

if you repeat these tales