The Post National Poetry Month Posts: Bold Projects, James Thomas Stevens, A BRIDGE DEAD IN THE WATER

I'VE NEVER READ A book like James Thomas Stevens' A Bridge Dead in the Water.

And, I mean that as a compliment.













It's really not like anything out there.  Part of the fabulous Salt Earthworks Series, Stevens' experiments with form and epistemology are both refreshing and radical.

Stevens is Mohawk and his book takes on a number of pseudo-sacred ideas such as the Bering Strait theory, the ease of Eastern/Western relations, and the notion that learning English is both ethical and value-free.

The first part of the book explores the odd connections between the Jesuits and the Chinese, which becomes a larger metaphor for the contested spaces in which missionaries of all religions clashed with American Indians.  These poems are smart, energetic, probing arrows that puncture the inflated sense of self (and mission) we tend to cling to in the West.

From a poetic perspective, though, the most interesting segment of the book is the crazy cool "Alphabet of Letters." In a gesture that both waves at and gives the bird to such methods of Western knowledge and classification, “Alphabet of Letters” converts the traditional American school book into a veritable collage of signifiers. Subtitled “A New Primer for the Use of Native or Confused Americans,” this 20+ page “poem” collates phonics, classical rhetoric, a 1766 inventory list, false and real headlines, instructions on diphthongs, snatches of correspondence, a short Mohawk/English dictionary, and even heroic couplets as an alphabet lesson (K When KING Phillip, dead did lay, / the Puritans did Make their Way” (Bridge 97).  

Part time-capsule, part linguistic experiment, part experimental poetics, part historical bricolage, and part pedagogical sketchbook, Stevens’ bizarre anti-poem takes Belin’s and Woody’s fragmentation one step further.  Suggesting the cornucopia of sources that have shaped Indian identity (both within and outside Native communities), Stevens utilizes the genres of knowledge-making to assert the impossibility of compressing Indian and Mohawk identity into lessons, lists, and libraries.  

“Alphabet of Letters” divests the Western project of “Letters” of its privilege of seeing Indians as its subjects.  The forms of teaching and learning, the forms of identity arrangement, the forms of blood catalog—these are the forms that poetic genres, though their ontology of exclusion, Stevens contravenes.  It's angry. It's funny. It's inventive.  And, oh yes, it's funny. Unlike, I realize, this blog post.

Therein likes the minefield of earnestness.

Readers interested in ways in which Native American poets take on the ideology of mainstream America and the poetic conventions of mainstream academic poetry will love this book.  I highly recommend it.

Essay Review of the Salt Earthworks Series

HOW IS IT THAT laziness sidles up to TWR yet again? We apologize for substituing a rather boring link for the standard Tuesday post, but we also want to drive traffic to the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review--an excellent review edited by Oscar Villalon--that has had to cut back the number of pages devoted to books reviews.

Today's link is an essay penned by one of the staff members here at TWR. It is a short review of the fabulous Earthworks series, put out by Salt Publishing. This series, edited by Janet McAdams at Kenyon College, is the first series of books of poems written by contemporary American Indian poets. In my mind, it is one of the most important poetry projects in the United States.

The essay was also picked up by Poetry Daily (thanks to Brian Clements for that head's up).

Finally, here is a link to the Earthworks site itself.

The Final Day of National Poetry Month Post: The Salt Earthworks Series

SINCE I BEGAN NATIONAL Poetry Month with a post on poetry and race, it seemed fitting to end with that topic as well. This time, though, the subject is a series of books, rather than a single collection. Salt Publishing, a great press whose main office is located in the U.K., recently launched a poetry series devoted to contemporary American Indian poetry. Edited by poet and scholar Janet McAdams and featuring books by LeAnne Howe, A. A. Hedge Coke, Heid Erdrich, Diane Glancy, Deborah Miranda, Gordon Henry, and Carter Revard, the Earthworks Series has emerged as the most important poetry series in the United States this century--maybe the most significant since the Pitt Poetry Series began three decades ago.

There are many things to celebrate about this series.

First, it establishes contemporary American Indian poetry as a canon-making genre. A potential criticism of the series might be that it further segregates poetry by Anglo writers and writers of color, but I would argue that this series, when taken as a whole, offers a panoramic view of recent Native poetry, enabling readers not familiar with such work to better see how it may fit in to the larger sweep of "American Poetry." Stumbling across a random book of poems by an author here or there may not tell you much, but this series allows Native poets to paint in broad strokes on the canvas that is Native discourse.

Second, Salt keeps its books in print and never charges reprint fees for other publications and anthologies. This last point is, in some ways, the most important. As someone who has to reprint a lot of poems for various publications, paying copyright and reprint fees can be prohibitive. Since Salt allows those publishing anthologies and criticism to publish Salt works free of charge, I predict more and more poems from this series will find readers.

Additionally, the series is just cool. The covers are artistic, evocative, and metaphorical without stereotyping or sentimentalizing. Several of the books have won or been shortlisted for awards. LeAnne Howe's hilarious Evidence of Red, won the 2006 Oklahoma Book Award for poetry. (Bonus: a trip to the website, (click above) takes you to the Salt page where you can view a photo of Howe receiving her award while doing her best impersonation of her stoned undergraduates). Heid Erdrich's book, a meditation on love, family, and maternity, was a finalist for the Minnesota Book Awards. Most importantly, the series introduces new writers by publishing young poets whose names are not yet well known, like James Thomas Stevens, Cat Ruiz, and Phillip Carroll Morgan, whose collection, The Fork-in-the Road Indian Poetry Store won the Native Writers Circle of the Americas First Book Award.

Down the road, it will be important for someone to write about why this collection exits, what, exactly, its contribution is to American Letters, what, if anything, the totality of the books argue about American poetry and Native American realities, and why a series of Native American poetry is published by a British Press. But, for now, with the ghost of National Poetry Month settling in for a long nap, we should just celebrate that this fine collection is out there working this earth.