Almost Ashore: Selected Poems (review)

The epigraph to Sherman Alexie’s “Nature Poem” poses the hypothetical question “If you’re an Indian, why don’t you write nature poetry?” Alexie proceeds to satirize such expectations in this dark poem in which Indian firefighters are treated less than kindly by good, revered “Mother Nature.” But the literary fact remains that much contemporary Native poetry is still more concertedly inflected by a positive regard for the natural world than mainstream Anglo-American verse ( pace Gary Snyder and Mary Oliver). Moreover, the Native poet’s characteristic passion for the land is inevitably intertwined with an earnest exploration of his or her own human nature and identity: in other words, the question of what it is to be an “Indian” always involves what nature and place “out there” has to do in defining such an identity.

I just lied to you. The preceding paragraph would have been a fitting segue to many a recent collection of Native American verse, by poets unaware that neither this identity or this interconnection with “nature” is transparently unproblematic—or worse yet, by poets more than willing to strike the pose. More so than any other Native writer, Gerald Vizenor has fought against such stereotypes of the literary “Indian,” including the seemingly irresistible conflation of “Native” & “Nature” (see especially his essay, “The Tragic Wisdom of Salamanders”). And so if one expects to find breezy descriptions of “real nature” in Vizenor’s recent collection of selected poems (Almost Ashore, 2006), one might initially feel vastly disappointed. If these poems are “stories of wild / seasons” (“Bear Walkers”), they are not Wordsworth cavorting with the daffodils, or scaling the peaks of the Lake District in the fever of youth; nor are they some mystic indigene rattling the gourd or waving the eagle feather over the (reservation) homeland. Instead, Vizenor’s poetic modus operandi has long been one of haiku-esque suggestiveness, or (in terms of Euro-American literature) of literary impressionism—a style which rather disallows, for one thing, any such overt disingenuous poses.

Vizenor’s favorite words in these poems (by sheer frequency of occurrence) are characteristically cryptic, including “tease,” “trace(s),” “shadows,” and even “silence”; and the reader unfamiliar with the poet’s post-structuralist theoretical prose may well feel “teased” beyond all rightful measure. This is indeed a poetry of evanescence, in which “every shadow” is “an eternal tease” (“Natural Duty”); the writings herein are mere “rumors of silence,” mere “trace[s] of poetry” (“Paul Celan”). But one doesn’t have to be initiated into Vizenor’s notion of the “postindian” trickster who would deconstruct all essentialisms or be familiar with his Baudrillardian critique of “reality” as simulation to intuit that this is a poetry of severe epistemological skepticism (think traces)—a corpus in which the problems of representation are intensified even more in a postmodern era wherein nature has become a discursive (and recursive) artifact, in which “the trees / endure / on postcards” (“Camp Grounds”). Admittedly, though a fervent acolyte, I feel that Vizenor the intellectualizing theorist at times overrides Vizenor the poet here, in, for instance, his various uses of crucial neologisms from his expository prose (e.g., “survivance” and “manifest moteliers”). (Moreover, a poet is usually better off being ironic rather than invoking the word “irony,” as he does several times in this collection.) At last, one scarce has a chance in approaching a passage like the following with any acumen, without having some background in Vizenor’s theoretical pyrotechnics: “native storiers / by chance / and ruse / untrace / my seasons / certainties / curses / run thin / as shadows / and silence / in early light” (“Window Ice”).

But I lied to you again (or played the postindian trickster). Among the tenuous “shadows” that are these lines, “nature” does erupt into the text, in intermittent flashes of brilliance, “lights” of the real against the discursive darkness, as it were. Very much real in these poems is the Anishinaabe “totem” species, the Sandhill Crane, whose “great dance” the poet evokes as a Native act of survival well worth noting; and rampant throughout are the ravens and crows who serve...