BAY AREA POETS REVIEW
2008 Reviews & poems
by California Native American poets, Jack Hirschman, Judy Wells
Spring Salmon, Hurry to Me!
Edited by Margaret Dubin and Kim Hogeland (Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, California, and Heyday Books, Berkeley: 2008), $16.95, cover art by Frank La Pena and designed by Rebecca LeGates: www.heydaybooks.com.
Time passes
I can manage no poem
though I’ve filled many pages
with notes about sorrel
wood violets
and the sound of creek bottoms
hissing the name of this storm
(from “In the Mountains” by Stephen Meadows, in Spring Salmon, Hurry to Me!)
Years ago, as a typesetter for the once venerable graphic arts company, Archetype, I had the privilege of helping produce News from Native California. The publication made it clear that the indigenous people of this state had not disappeared; they were active on many social and political fronts, including the most important one: preserving what remained of traditional culture. Each issue featured articles on the arts and crafts of natives, stories, language (California’s indigenous population had over 50 distinct languages), and information on native plants, medicinal arts, and community. News from Native California is still being published, but this past year, Heyday Books, in partnership with Santa Clara University, published a charming collection of tribal fables and stories, reminiscences, and of special delight to our readers—poems.
Spring Salmon, Hurry to Me! is an anthology edited by News from Native California’s managing editor, Margaret Dubin, and columnist Kim Hogeland, an Oakland freelance writer. They provide a layering of poems and prose grouped into their seasonal settings.
Native American poetry is rooted in a strong oral/aural culture. It relies on strong images, appealing sounds, and compelling rhythms. The first selection in the book is a poem from the Karuk tribe:
Young brodiaea plant,
you must come up quickly,
hurry to me!
Spring salmon,
shine upriver quickly,
hurry to me!
My back has become like a mountain ridge,
so thin,
so hungry.
This short apostrophe to nature illustrates the seeming simplicity of Native poetry. It is direct, it is clear in what it names and asks, yet the simplicity is, as I said, a “seeming” one. How many of us know a broadiaea plant from a cow’s parsnip, or a salmon from a rainbow trout for that matter? What is it for someone’s back to become a mountain ridge, thin and hungry? In the context of the sparest season, it makes complete sense. The imaginative leap is a well prepared ground.
Engagement with the natural world is anything but simple when there are many distractions and obstacles to our awareness or access to it. In traditional cultures—ones relatively intact and untouched by industrial economy—the shaman is not a magician but someone who has cultivated his or her innate sensitivities to the enveloping world. (For a fascinating study of this, read David Abrams’ The Spell of the Sensuous about Indonesian indigenous cultures.) The poetry from these other worlds—delivered orally and only later recorded into script—can return us to the natural world but it must be attended to in quiet, with our minds available to the varied biophonies at play in our physical surroundings. Georgiana Voloyce-Sanchez invites us into her vision of winter:
Winter comes
The sun is low across
the sky gray days
daily struggles
and discord weigh
heavy
like fallen snow
on tree limbs
bent near to breaking
but we do not break
Here’s another example by the same poet, a member of the Chumash and Tohono-O’odham tribes:
An old man holds a polished stone
up to the sun
turning it
to catch the light
High above the earth
a ribbon of geese drifts south
the call of a long journey
echoing
across the endless sky
In this literature, the internal world, our concerns, wishes, ruminations, are sculpted by the outer world.
Spring Salmon showcases poems by six poets in particular, with single poems by two or three others.
Stephen Meadows (Ohlone) attended the University of California Santa Cruz and San Francisco State University. His poem “The Burial,” delivers a quick punch to the heart. Here is an image of an open grave:
A scene one remembers
from a night full of dreams
The wet pit disguised
by a square of green cloth
Here and there small birds
forage in the grass
pecking to and fro
for each sad urgent seed
Soon “small fists of relatives” will gather softly in remembrance. Even after reading the title, I was not prepared for the startling last image of the poem (which I won’t reveal here). This is a gem, the work of a craftsman with an eye for the most evocative detail.
Janice Gould (Konkow) proves a master of the sestina (a form I usually find too Byzantine to completely enjoy). Her “U.C. Mascot, 1959” is riveting, using repetition to transport us into all too familiar territory—the racism that often accompanies sports teams’ logos and symbols. In this poem, Gould gives it to us through a child’s awakening eyes:
. . . Around U.C. campus mock
lynchings go on. Beneath porches we see hung
the scarecrow Natives with fake long braids, dead
from merry-making. On Bancroft Way one has fallen
undecorously to a lawn, a symbol of the debacle
that happened a generation ago in California’s hills, where
Indians were strung up. . . .
Gould has devoted her life to the literature of native people, producing a dissertation on the work of Joy Harjo, and an anthology entitled Speak to Me Words: Essays on American Indian Poetry (2003), coedited with Dean Rader.
Deborah Miranda (Esselen) contributes a quartet of sharply imagined lyrics that immediately place you in a world ready to reward anyone in touch with her senses:
Snow falls that night,
spreads heavy and smooth
like stone, like white granite.
It takes the sharp cut of deer tracks.
In nightgown and bare feet,
she follows a string
of cloven hearts wandering from the woods,
past the barn with its scents of straw,
cats, cobwebs; lapping the length
of the skinny tin trailer . . . .
(from “Petroglyph”)
Miranda’s work is stunningly beautiful, a pleasure to read.
Georgiana Valoyce-Sanchez, mentioned above, is a storyteller active in the preservation of California Indian languages, sacred sites, and traditional arts. Her unique way of witnessing the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II and the dropping of the atomic bomb deeply moved me:
Summer 1945
rural East L.A.
the hills a gathering
golden quail waiting
uncut fields of hay swaying
in the wind around
my Japanese schoolhouse
home
abandoned they said
the wood-frame schoolhouse
As the poem unfolds, the stark reality of what has happened to the local Japanese, and what happens later to their distant kin in Hiroshima and Nagasaki break open the poet’s heart and our own.
Dorothy Ramon (Serrano) is published here posthumously, having passed away in 2002 after nearly a century of living. Her poems preserve her native tongue and are also transcribed into English; they convey a vital cultural experience of nature, alive with plants and critters. The first poem is about picking and eating yucca flowers; the second teaches us “Why People Did Not Kill Tarantulas.” In Spring Salmon, the English lines follow her native language:
‘Aam tecqwam ‘ip kiikam waha’ wuuwerham.
There are a lot of tarantulas living here.
‘Aam ways’ pavay’pa’ te-er’ cu’ow.
They come out after thunder showers (in the summer).
‘Apya’vu’hiit te-eer’c, ‘apya’m wangatk peekinu’.
After it thunders, they come out of their holes.
Weerr, Weerr nemey ‘ip tengek. Tecqwam keym ‘aam.
A great many of them walk around here. They call them tecqwam ‘tarantulas’.
Native poetry can take on a matter-of-factness in its tone, a flatness that simulates informality; lines are unembellished, direct, and convey the feeling of having been repeated many times and for many generations. Because of this, I often imagine the taste the words in my mouth, the flavor of red earth or yellow sand, sage or coastal mist. The poems are teaching tools, asking us to pay attention, to be clear that the information contained in them may be vital to survival. We receive it as a gift; the teller has an obligation to share. Ramon’s work captures the timelessness of the voice that has fully lived its story.
Shaunna Oteka McCovey (Yurok/Karuk), on the other hand, has a much more acculturated voice with the syntax and naturalness that is recognizable to those read contemporary free verse; McCovey’s poems focus on the relationships, the links between generations. In “Conception” a mother takes her child back to the place where a seed was first planted:
It isn’t hard to imagine
you were conceived here
in this beautiful place of
canyon walls covered thick
with maidenhair fern,
a stream carving its way
to the enormity of the Pacific.
What a story to tell, that
spring when you became
more than a wish, more
than a dream that
lovers dream.
There are only three short “Haiku/Senryu” from Roberta Cordero (Chumash) but the first one is a wake-up call about Native perceptions of America’s birthday celebrations:
4th of July
Independence day
occupation made holy
glares red and bloody
In her other two brief poems, she offers delicate homages to a water-strider and a heron. I look forward to reading more of her work in future publications.
In addition to a few anonymous poems from oral tradition, including a transcription of a story from Ishi, Spring Salmon concludes with a poem by Darryl Wilson (Sul’ma’ejote) from northeastern California. It recounts an atrocity committed by the United States military. The poem is entitled “Splashes of Red Autumn 1867, Tawutlamit Wusci,” a reference to Infernal Caverns, where the poet’s grandmother was born and where the violence occurred:
They did not think
about the Paiute woman
who slept with the soldiers
. . . And they told her of the gathering at tuwutlamit wusci
. . . And they came on sweating horses
with their rifles in their hands
Frightened
young mother ran towards the safety of tuwutlamit wusci
. . . Too late
These are things we do not wish to read about, to be reminded of, so painful the American story can be. Yet, poetry is obligated to bring us this news, these alternative views of reality. And we are obliged to listen and learn.
California’s indigenous population is alive and well as represented by this anthology. Spring Salmon reminds me—through the People’s own words—what they see, hear, feel and know about all of us. I feel privileged to have been invited in to hear their words.
—Reviewed by Jannie M. Dresser
Jack Hirschman
One of the most difficult things to do in our language is to write a jazz poem. . . if I have presented some of the aspects of that form, I will have scratched the surface of its mystery.—Jack Hirschman
Look A Hear
Jack Hirschman (San Francisco)
Look A Hear by Jack Hirschman (Sore Dove Chapbook Series, No. 16, limited edition, San Francisco, 2008), 32 pages, 26 poems, $10, cover art by Soheyl Dahi. www.soredove.com.
October 25, 2008 was a smashing poetry night to remember! Bird & Beckett Books (in San Francisco) did it again: Jack Hirschman hurled out his new book of jazz poems, Look A Hear, accompanied by Liam Furey on a weathered saxophone with infinite powers of expression. If that wasn’t enough, Italian poet, Igor Costanzo, opened with impassioned lines.
Hirschman opens his book with a substantial and heartfelt introduction: all the poems were written 1972-73 during the crucible of a marriage breakup. The poet listened to Thelonious Monk for four hours: “. . . I was infused with a verbo-tonality, in the sense of jazz rhythm. What I discovered in that continuum was that, in the ‘jazz mode,’ I could receive different sounds and word-combinations, even words I didn’t know the meaning of and which couldn’t be found in a dictionary, but which ‘fit’ the rhythm perfectly. In short, the rush of jazz idiom into my sensibility made it possible for verbal never-to-have-been-befores to find their way to the page/score.”
“Rifficals,” the first section, sings out ten poems. This is the conclusion of “2”:
And the whirling
light, every chitterling-bangle-bell of
every gilded noon
and dime say new,
clear, no fifty-six hung-
aryan. This is Deedee
in a white-leather instant face
clear of the bars again, cheek
by jewel, luminously, standing under the sun,
the lamp, yo high
me Dot,
and the terror raining true
from bridge to bride.
If you read the above aloud, rhythms and worlds will fall in place.
“Quimps,” section two, taps out twelve poems. First part of “9” hits inside the bone:
Lipperdapped and swan’s news. Them green
brewsirs. Them wino
facts. What ails and what ales.
The causeaways of the jippo
dark goyls, them what’s red and blackamoor most.
Who shin noise. The lockout
chastetitties, the pink cheeked demonas.
Up and out on the street
hiking up the hooks, hoeing down the facks.
Jipplin the zeppelins for the air of the art’s sake
uppermoist.
“Uprussian,” section three, struts out four poems. Here’s all of “2” with red attitude:
Nibs on tap,
eleemosonary found-funk among the punk and
Zen in the Cauzovs. Like on a wall, the sickle
and 4
comsah
like in a comment
on a comma rat,
a come of red-stained tea-
bag bugged with kids, religious
fango, the old gypsy Django
maries.
And you do something two
mees,
Where the telephone
fritzes.
“Chaingang Fanglefingers Low,” section four, is last with fourteen sets, but not least, and fingers bounce around the globe. “4” is especially frisky:
Sweetest of dark, O god-yo,
O god dough
stymies. The night we called a day,
Makeshift, shift the makers.
Who stops? No one.
Everybody jammed by time.
Only this lives with flesh, is
sweet subliminal
music, makes the rhyme.
fool: come
on up,
slow and even onto the keyboard, spilling
willy-nilly
blimes,
Japanese chin make good love, oh,
Mahoney.
Mahagonny
ways.
How much?
True jazz presents enlightened sounds/ thoughts/ digressions surrounding the implied melodic line: in that bright light Look A Hear as true jazz poetry is a master-piece. Buy this book: read aloud the poems one each day and thrive on the beat.
—Reviewed by Marvin R. Hiemstra
Little Lulu Talks with
Vincent Van Gogh
Judy Wells (Berkeley)
Little Lulu Talks with Vincent Van Gogh by Judy Wells (Malthus Press, Berkeley, 2007), 29 pages, 10 poems, $5. To order: Malthus Press, 1342 Curtis St., Berkeley, CA 94702.
Can you handle total delight? In Little Lulu Talks with Vincent Van Gogh total delight is what you get. Judy Wells nails nine illustrious personages with tremendous understanding, not a hint of malice, and total fun. What more you want?
“Little Lulu in the 21st Century” explains Lulu’s burning desire to put some excitement in her life and become a poet. “Little Lulu Talks with St. Augustine in His Clubhouse” is the first enchanting communication: honest rhetoric with no agenda. Here’s the poem’s conclusion:
“Possible heresy,” says St. Augustine.
“Don’t you believe in Jesus Christ?”
Little Lulu smoothes down
her bright red dress,
twists one of her auburn ringlets
around her index finger.
“I did when I was little,” says Little Lulu,
“but I lost him in the maze of time.
“I did admire his hair
and his message:
‘Suffer the little children to come unto me,’
But now I’m a great big Little Lulu.
I’ve got no time for divine men
and twelve guys at supper.
They’d only have me doing dishes!”
St. Augustine laughs.
“Be my concubine, Little Lulu.”
“But I’ll break your vows of abstinence
you took so long to come to,” says Little Lulu.
“Hmm,” says Gus. “You’re right.
We’ll just have a spiritual relationship.
A Platonic relationship.
A meeting of our minds.”
“I can offer you a soul
in turmoil,” says Little Lulu.
“My specialty,” says St. Augustine.
“I can offer you the female
perspective,” says Little Lulu.
“I’ve been prepared by Monica,
my mom,” says St. Augustine.
“You’re on,” says Little Lulu,
“but remember this—
I can leave your clubhouse
any time I want.
I won’t be your sex slave,
and I don’t have to read
everything you write.”
“You’re on,” says St. Augustine.
Two minds are joined now—
Little Lulu and Saint.
“Little Lulu Talks with Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz” and wonders “. . . do you think if I stopped eating cheese I could be a genius like you?” “Little Lulu Talks with Vincent Van Gogh” in a profound collision of spirits and finally proposes to him:
“Will you not drink
23 cups of coffee
in a scant four days
when I’m around,
refrain from absinthe,
and cutting off body parts?
I’ve no heart for madness,
but I’d live inside
your paintings—
your church at Auvers
with its cobalt blue sky,
or in a hotel on your river
that starry night.”
“Gracious child of the 20th century,”
said Vincent,
“Caricature of womanhood
much worse than my
potato eater peasants!
What a couple
we could have been
if I hadn’t blasted myself
in that cornfield.
“I am shattered, Little Lulu.
Your outline is still intact.
Walk back into your
American comic book world
and play with your friends
in your clubhouse.
Make love with Tubby
while you still have time.
I’m heading for eternity.”
“Little Lulu Talks with Carl Jung” and asks him, “Can’t I be an archetype?” “Little Lulu Talks with Plato” and asks him how to get out of the cave. “Little Lulu Talks with Virginia Woolf.” “Little Lulu Talks with Rilke” and wants a blind date with Mr. Kappus. Finding that is not possible: “Mr. Rilke, are you still available? My second choice was always you!” “Little Lulu Talks with Sylvia Plath,” nailing Sylvia and her legions of Plathites.
Little Lulu Talks with Vincent Van Gogh is a perfect gift book for any friend with something good between the ears and don’t forget a copy for yourself.
—Reviewed by Marvin R. Hiemstra
This blasted life of art is shattering.
—Vincent Van Gogh
