Saturday, September 29, 2007

RAMSON LOMATEWAMA'S Drifting Through Ancestor Dreams

Flagstaff, Arizona is a place of high winds. Perched at the southern edge of the Colorado Plateau, this Ponderosa Pine forest country is Arizona’s northern highlands. My family has a cabin here—on the northwestern flank of Humphrey’s Peak, at 8,200’ elevation.

I’ve been living here in isolation for two weeks now—working toward finishing a book of poetry I’ve been writing since 1981. Bow hunting season for deer ended on Thursday. The leaves on the aspen trees are faintly yellow. Fall is here.

In the solitude of my nights, I listen to the notorious winds whip the treetops. I walk in and among the swaying timber. Watch the phases of the moon through the thick branches. Some nights I believe I hear the old voices. Like I always do when I sleep out in another home-away-from-home: Joshua Tree National Monument. There, I hear the Cahuilla. And I know it. But here, I’m not so sure I know who or what I hear.

When I woke up today I was determined to find some contemporary indigenous poetry—to help me understand those voices. I cleaned myself up and drove the twenty miles into town, to Starrlight Books on N. Leroux Street, near the busy railroad tracks. Starrlight is a first-rate independent bookstore. Compact and well organized. I was guided graciously to poetry written by both Navajo and Hopi poets.

I live close to the bone financially, so I appreciated the freedom I was given to read through my many choices. Finally, I decided upon Ramson Lomatewama’s Drifting Through Ancestor Dreams (Entrada Books, 1993). Mr. Lomatewama’s biography says he had previously published two books of poetry: Silent Winds: Poetry of One Hopi and Ascending the Reed. He also works with stained glass and carves kachina dolls.

I come from agrarian roots, too, so his frequent references to the weather and to the Hopi’s staple crop—corn—made me feel at home. His poem “Ants” truly won my heart, though. Its initial images could be from a T’ang Dynasty landscape poem, but he achieves an upside-down parable by the poem’s end.


Ants

Silence is reflected in the sky
for the blue haze is but a mirror.

I can feel
the subtleness of the breeze
and the silent fluttering of the moth.

A field of tall grass
sends a gentle wave of light
across the land.

It flows to eternity.

I gaze upon the ants
who toil for their children

for they do not consider
the lilies of the field.


Mr. Lomatewama successfully turns a biblical parable on its head, something I appreciate, being especially fond of Jack London’s upside-down parable: “Dig moved more mountains than faith ever dreamed of.” Amen, brother.

I struggled when choosing a second poem to include in this posting. There are many tender poems, such as “Separation I” and “Separation II,” as well as poems with compelling images. I especially enjoyed the last lines of “After the Rains.” “There is no need / for us to speak. // Silence / will speak / for us.” But the title poem is an anthology of the voices that influence Mr. Lomatewama. This poet of the “Fourth World” is truly a poet of the world.


Drifting Through Ancestor Dreams

They come from all sides, these words and songs of ancestors.
They slide out on tongues of Felipe Molina, flowers, and deer,
and from spruce trees, long houses, and Joe Bruchac.
They fly at me across deserts, from summer stars over Awatovi,
and from bottomless silver words of Mike Kabotie.
I see their words are made of bamboo, tradition, and myth,
and images of Jung and Campbell, and long ago walks in cornfields.
They find me and speak to me through memories of Chicago streets,
Lee Young Lee, Sybil Dunbar, and Ofelia Zepeda’s jagged mountains.
Their words and songs come through dreams of Rex Jim and Harold
Littlebird, whose poems, words, and drumbeats dance all around.
They whisper in flights of hummingbirds and high mesas, through
Luci Tapahanso and Shiprock, and through journeys of Simon Ortiz.
Ancestor dreams come to me from your world, from dark skies,
from unborn children, from New Delhi and from Tuuwanasavi.
I dream-travel through ancestor songs; dream over eagle feathers
dipped in honey and rain; around summer clouds and roasted corn.
I listen for ancestor songs in all people and all places.
I am drifting through ancestor dreams,
drifting
to my final breath.

Thursday, September 13, 2007

Transcendentalisticism

By James DenBoer

A friend of mine is outraged. So outraged, she's told me this same story more than once, and told it publicly at readings of her poems.

A professor at a University of California campus told her that all poems have to do with the Resurrection of Christ. I can see why she's outraged, even years later. (And so much for the myth of UC professors being atheistic communist terrorists.)

But I think I can understand why someone would say such a thing, and not only because it's exactly the approach to poetry I was taught at my own Calvinist college.

To give the professor the benefit of the doubt, I think he meant to say that all poems are about transcendence of some sort; that the Resurrection was a metaphor for that larger meaning. I'd still argue with his "all poems," but even then half-heartedly.

Many poems are about new life, rebirth, arising from the death of love or battened sensibilities or choked opportunities, breaking into something new and rewarding, meaningful, valuable, liberating. And many standard metaphors clinch that meaning: flowers blossoming, rivers crashing into the sea, the joys of sex, the changing seasons; the list is long, and often used as well in religious discourse.

But not all poems are about new life. Many are about day-by-day life, whether it's looking at the birches in your backyard or noticing the bearshit on the trail. Some are about wounds, crimes, injustice, racism, poverty, war and bad love. Or about back-breaking or mind-breaking labor, welding Hummer frames or making a line of a poem sing. About all the misfortunes and indignities and hurt we suffer. But somehow, stupid humans, we all hope it will be a little easier, and believe it will, someday. As if we might be "resurrected."

I think the professor meant to offer this kind of interpretation, too: whatever a poem is about, the satisfying beauty of nature or the despairing ugliness of much of life, the poem itself is an artifact that celebrates and ameliorates; that the poem as poem is an exemplar of rebirth. I don't so much mean that the poem says this: but that the poem dares to speak, it opens with any word at all and ends with any word at all, and the getting from that first word to the last is a story about and a story of the poem's own progress toward birth; that it moves from blank-page death to formed life, by its own nature. The poem is a living example of resurrection, perhaps, as it, word by brickish word, finds some way to make itself live.

But that can be too easily feigned; I'm also of the opinion that poems ought not to end there, telling you they are alive and you ought to be too. I'd like to write poems that don't end at all: too many poems have punch-lines, as if they were jokes, shaggy-dog stories. Why are good lines often held until last; why do poems "wrap up"? I'm fighting and so far failing to write many (or any) poems that don't "end," that stay open, that leave the reader hanging, that don't essay answers but more questions, that remain mysterious. But that's just me, and also the many poets who feel the same way, all of us struggling to keep poems from closure.

And transcendentalisticism is of course not closure; it is not a metaphysical or logical system that cranks out an answer; it is more of an opening, an opening of the eye, the circle that Emerson celebrated. And that long word isn't even a word, just my own neologism for professorial stuffiness. "Falling" is a word I like instead, much simpler, and the thought that falling is in fact rising.

But the glib shut-the-door statement of my friend's professor, even to grant him a metaphor to mean something larger, is disheartening, because constrictive, banal, too stuffed with a Big Answer, which is the death of poetry. That's what made her so mad all these years; a stupid professor, not a stupid idea.


James DenBoer's newest book is Stonework: Selected Poems, from Sandra McPherson's Swan Scythe Press. He has had grants and awards from the International Poetry Forum, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Council on the Arts, the Authors' League and other institutions. DenBoer lives in Sacramento, California.