Category: Today’s Pillar of Poetry (Page 5 of 7)

I haven’t made a post recently on poetry I've been reading. This is because I’ve been mired in New Mexico poetry anthologies. Report coming soon!  

I visited the local CNM library in search of New Mexico poets. Didn’t find any. But I did find many Sherman Alexie works. Alexie is not a New Mexican poet but he is an American Indian poet from the Spokane tribe located in Washington state. Although Spokane is very different from the tribes of southwestern New Mexico, he does provide both profound and humorous insight into the American Indian Experience. I started with the oft recommended children’s novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. As described, it was excellent and a perfect place to start with Alexie if you’re a confused gringo. Truly, if you’re looking for Indian perspectives you have millions of alternatives. Natalie Diaz is a very hot Mohave poet right now. Joy Harjo is a perennial favorite of mine. But just check out this Wikipedia list.

I’m becoming really attached to Alexie in fact and the well-rounded way he talks about race reminds me of Richard Wright (just perused Richard Wright’s collection of haiku at the library). Like Wright, Alexie knows how to balance the complexities of race by using both good and bad characters from all sides. Good white people and bully white people. Good Indians and bully Indians.  And the badness that ensues when trying and failing to be good.

Similar Alexie stories occur in poems, short stories and the novels, like Grandma’s stolen powwow regalia which shows up in An Absolutely True Diary and in short stories from the collection Ten Little Indians. An Indian mother singing Donna Fargo’s "Happiest Girl in the USA" is another story that shows up in different fiction and poems.

The poems in One Stick Song (2000) are also a good introduction to Alexie with poems like "Unauthorized Biography of Me," "An Incomplete List of People I Wish Were Indian," "The Mice War," "Sex in Motel Rooms," "Powwow Love Songs." In his stories and poems, Alexie can describe both Rez life and city life. What I like about his poems, they’re all different in tone and format.  

The Business of Fancydancing,  (1992), contains poems that are a little rougher. But worth reading are "War All the Time," " Misdemeanors," "Missing," "The Reservation Cab Driver," and "Giving Blood." Alexi is good at setting the scene and giving you a tight kick in the pants.

I went to the library and checked How We Became Human, Selected Poems by Joy Harjo to see what she had to say about New Mexico as place. Harjo is one of my favorite poets period, definitely my on the top of my list in the category/almost-genre of American Indian poets. In her first anthology I was looking for any 1970s references to New Mexico places. Harjo does come back to New Mexico quite a bit in her writing and she seems to view New Mexico as a spiritual, if not physical, home place when she references the Sandia Mountains, Albuquerque streets and the more southern Manzano Mountains.

But Harjo is really one of the most well-traveled and cosmopolitan modern poets we have. She moves through towns all across American and abroad and digs into the concrete of it all, so to speak. This fusion of urban and outpost gives her work uniqueness. Take for example her older poem "3 A.M." about being in an airport and trying to get back to Hopiland. There are also quite a few Indian themes in how she handles alcohol and the ideas of futility and fate. Like many Indian writers she's in a struggle of locating: locating her foundation of history, locating a sense of belonging, even locating asuvivor’s-guilt sense of existing, and locating forgiveness.

Harjo feels unique to me however in the sense of how she writes eye to eye with her reader. Much of American Indian poetic tone contains a spiritual distance inherent. Harjo is much more intimate. She’s not some voice-over spirit speaking from the stars. She’s on the street and across the table from her reader.

I always love to find moments of Harjo talking about the earth’s circling revolutions. This occurs again and again: “a whirring current in the grass,” “swirling earth,” “slow spin like the spiral of events.” The swirling is often coupled with descriptions of women in crisis, turmoil, madness, and lostness.

This is a great collection of poems. All her greatest hits are in here: “She Had Some Horses,” “I Give You Back,” “I Am a Dangerous Woman,” and “Perhaps the Word Begins.”

Poetry Received

As a holiday greeting, the Academy of American Poets sent me a holiday postcard with a Larry Levis quote from the poem “Winter Stars”

The newCopper Canyon Reader catalogue also came. I sensed a shift in poems this time, many more experimental poets although still with a spiritual cast. My favorite new book samples:

• Erin Belieu – Slant Six ("humor and horror in contemporary American life—from the last saltine cracked in the sleeve, to the kitty-cat calendar in an office cubicle."); New York Times Review
• Yosa Buson – Collection Haiku of Yosa Buson translated by W.S. Merwin and Takako Lento
• Fady Joudah – Textu – a new form of 160 character long poems influenced by texting and Twitter

 My autumn issue of Poetry London also came a few months ago. When I reflect back on this subscription I want to say I haven't enjoyed it. It's a bit dry and the magazine itself is unwieldy and downright ugly. But I have to admit some of their poets and reviews have stuck with me over the last few years. I still don’t like the layout, material or covers of this magazine, with such big photos you can see the pores on the chins of poets. It’s just distracting. Where's some tabloid airbrushing when you need it?

CK Williams has a great poem in this issue about climate change called “The Sun, The Saint, The Sot,” taking on an impossible topic and making it poetic. CD Wrights is included in the issue too. I always get those two confused. I liked her “Obscurity and Winter Sun” poem which is sort of about writing.

There are always a large amount of experimental, language-y poems in the magazine and whenever I read these pieces I think of the neurosis of the Internet age and how the world is full of too much information. I wonder if these poems are depictions of our minds spiraling out.

 The issue provided me with a nice list of "new" poets to look up:

• Heather Phillipson
• Fiona Benson – Bright Travelers: A central sequence of dramatic monologues addressed to Van Gogh allows for a focused exploration of depression, violence, passion and creativity.
• Kathryn Simmonds – The Visitations:  I particularly want to read "Life Coach Variations."
• Ciaran Berry – The Dead Zoo (available on eBook)
• Bill Manhire – Selected Poems
• Nancy Gaffield – Continental Drift – a book about landscapes and borders