Life-enhancing mini-media springing up gloriously as
anti-bodies to this massive mushification of the American psyche. Alternative
weeklies. Syndicated radio series like those from Jim Hightower or Erwin Knoll.
Fanzines for every conceivable itch to be scratched. And small presses—for
poetry and prose.
Some even grow to be continentally overspreading O.K.’s like
the Algonquin Press of Chapel Hill, the serious hobby of Louis D. Rubin, an
American literature professor who could create as well as critique. Sometimes
they’re the offspring of activist poets like Robert Bly. Whatever they are, or
from wherever they come, they are perennially green affirmations to the gloom
that media doomsters are too ready to lay on us.
Take two contemporary writers who would be blooming to blush
almost unseen were it not for the clarion calls of our small presses: that Canadian
Maritimes Whitman, Alden Nowlan (1933-83), and the Ojibway guru, Jim Northrup
(1943- ). The best way to start possessing Alden is to quote his “right to
life” poem:
“It’s Good to Be Here”
I’m in trouble, she said
to him. That was the first
time in history that anyone
had ever spoken of me.
It was 1932 when she
was just fourteen years old
and men like him
worked all day for
one stinking dollar.
There’s quinine, she said.
That’s bullshit, he told her.
Then she cried and then
for a long time neither of them
said anything at all and then
their voices kept rising until
they were screaming at each other
and then there was another long
silence and then
they began to talk very quietly and
at last he said,
well, I guess we’ll just have to
make the best of it.
While I lay curled up,
my heart beating,
in the darkness inside her.
From What Happened When He Went to the Store for
Bread, Nineties
Press, Ally Press Center, 524 Orleans St., St. Paul, MN 55107, $10.
Nowlan’s muse stick for the most part to the hard-scrabble
life he knew best, blue collar and bruised, but gradually expanding to include
his experiences as a provincial journalist, finally a writer in residence at
the University of New Brunswick in Frederickton, where, alas, he died at the
height of his powers at age 50.
One reason adduced for the decline of poetry reading since
the rise of Modernism has been the elusiveness of the allusions that the T.S.
Eliots and Ezra Pounds brought to bear on the median imagination. No such
excuse to bear on the median imagination. No such excuse to avoid Nowlan. Alden
was a big and bulky man who favored “ugly” beasts like the Bull Moose for his
muse. His paean to that animal concludes:
How
good it is to share
the
earth with such creatures
and
how unthinkable it would have been
to
have missed all this
by
not being born:
a
happy thought, that,
for
not being born is
the
only tragedy
that
we can imagine
but
need never fear.
What a delectable cheer for the curious dilemma of being
alive. William Blake would have loved it.
Jim Northrup is an entirely different feast, although there
are similarities of theme: dispirited people living short, brutish lives of
violence and abuse. The Vietnam War looms large in Walking the Rez Road, (Voyageur Press, Inc., 123 N.
Second St., Stillwater, MN 55082, $15.95. 1-800-888-9653.) The road to and from
his reservation is marked by nightmares from that war, as in “walking point,”
which begins:
With
his asshole puckered up tight
the
marine was walking point.
He
was hunting men
who
were hunting him.
Then ends:
The
shooting is over in five seconds
the
shakes are over in a half hour
the
memories are over never.
Nor, it seems, is our divided consciousness ever over it,
with Ollie North running to great acclaim for Senate, and Tom Marr (WWDB-FM,
Saturdays, 8-11 p.m.) repeating himself obsessively about Clinton’s “consorting
with deserters in Norway,” marching with the Viet Cong flag in London, and
staying at KGB-infested hotels in Moscow. In these United States of Amnesia,
Northrup reminds his fellow Americans that the ambiguities of his people
fighting their wars didn’t begin at Da Nang. “Ogichidag” (Ojibway for
“warrior”) pursues that theme:
“Ogichidag”
I was born in war, WW Two.
Listened
as the old men told stories
Of
getting gassed in the trenches, WW One.
Saw
my uncles come back from
Guadalcanal,
North Africa,
And
the Battle of the Bulge
Memorized
the war stories
My
cousins told of Korea.
Felt
the fear in their voices.
it
was my turn,
my
brothers too.
Joined
the marines in time
for
the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Heard
the crack of rifles
in
the rice paddies south of Da Nang.
Watched
my friends die there
then
tasted the bitterness of
the
only war America ever lost.
My
son is now a warrior.
Will
I listen to his war stories
or
cry into his open grave?
But I don’t want to leave the impression there is only one
arrow in his quiver. He is very shrewd in his comments on the dominant society:
“brown
and white peek”
What’s it like living on the rez?
I’m
always asked.
It’s
living near a lot of relatives
ready
to help or gossip about our need for help.
The
word reservation is a misnomer
reserved
for who?
The
white man owns 80 percent of my rez, Fonjalack.
Living
there means finding something good in something grim.
Glad
for our chronic unemployment
when
the white guys get lung cancer
from
breathing asbestos at the mill.
70
percent unemployment on the rez
go
down the road a few miles, it’s 5 percent.
We
have TV, that window to America
we
see you, you don’t see us.
Except when you plug into a small press circuit, and then
have a red Virgil lead you through his circles of an American hell.
I didn’t understand why his tribe’s annual ritual of
spearing fish (this really bugs the non-Indians) or harvesting wild rice were
such big things. Reading his book clues me in: Such spiritual resources keep him
from giving in to despair—or cynicism.
The last time I saw such a mechanism at work was in
Lithuania, where cherishing their language and repertory of folk arts gave the
people strength to endure 50 years of Soviet imperialism. And at a film
festival at Fontenoy-sous-Bois, recently, I interviewed a Georgian film
director whose feature pivoted around the felt particularities of national
anthems and Tbilisi folklore. She saw those traits in the same way: armor
against psychological invasion or entrapment.
Ultimately that’s why I’m suspicious of the “harmless”
blandnesses of Disney culture. It subverts the particular, erodes the local.
Small presses in particular, mini-media in general, support the life-insuring
options. Small really is beautiful, bountiful. Keep those circuits open, and
massive blah-blah falls of its own fatuities.
From Welcomat, June
15, 1994
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