Transatlantic Voices: Interpretations of Native North American Literatures

14. Oklahoma International: Jim Barnes, Poetry, and the Sites of Imagination

a. robert lee Oklahoma International Jim Barnes, Poetry, and the Sites of Imagination Bones beneath my feet, I make a song for all of them. jim barnes, “A Song for All of Them” In another country, I push aside the leaves, and my own loss begins to fade. jim barnes, “In Another Country” Wherever I go, it seems I never get too far away from home but what I am reminded of it. jim barnes, On Native Ground: Memoirs and Impressions Issish ibakana, a Choctaw phrase Jim Barnes himself glosses as “mixedblood from Oklahoma” in his fine-grained prose and verse autobiography On Native Ground: Memoirs and Impressions (169), offers a point of departure. For if he has dwelt fondly upon his American family plait of Native, Welsh, and English origins, at the same time, and likely not a little in consequence, it has been accompanied by the insistence on not being bound to any single categorization. To his often self-acknowledged consternation this includes Native American writer. Rather, with Native America but one realm of lineage—however wholly and without doubt important—Barnes has given his now considerable range of poetry , fiction, life writing, and discursive work to an unfolding variorum of sites both in and beyond America. 14 a. robert lee 269 These different geographies of his life, moreover, provide a double seam, physically lived-in sight and sound yet always the figural landscape of feeling or memory. They begin for Barnes with the Great Southwest , as he calls it, the eastern Oklahoma Somerville of his birth in 1933 and hard-scrub upbringing in LeFlore County’s Fourche Maline and Holson Creek. It was there, during a Depression-era and World War II boyhood with parents pressed to find ranch and herding work and obliged, albeit within a limited perimeter, to move the family from one house to another (he speaks of them as “gray” in On Native Ground), that he acquired his poet’s abiding sense of the importance of site as at once exterior but intricately, and always, inward landscape. A brief poem such as “Surveying near Ellsworth, Kansas” in the collection La Plata Cantata (1989) succinctly, and dramatically, gives emphasis to the point: All that’s left is hard, the bone-dry creek, the knife shade of a single tree, the prairie burned brown by a screaming summer sun, and a lone marker, stone, belonging god-knows-where: scalped 1853.1 Oklahoma’s tierra of smallholding, farm, pasture, bluff, ridge, pond, tree, river, orchard, wind, bird and animal life, season and skyline, not to mention the small-town life of high street and school, sheriff’s office and jail, church and store, and each residual Choctaw burial mound and arrowhead, has long featured for him as a first archive. Of all the sites in Barnes’s poetry none quite matches in weight of association, a timeline of mind as much as place, and whether literal topography or the layers of Native and settler history or his own arriving consciousness. Even so, he has resisted any temptation to romanticize Oklahoma, however beguiling its Choctaw, Anglo, and Celtic fashioning along with the human métissage to which it has given rise. In this respect, if no other, he invites comparison with a range of contemporary Native authorship taken up 270 Oklahoma International with mixed dynasty and the migrations and sitings that has entailed, as notably as anywhere, the writings of Gerald Vizenor, Diane Glancy, Louis Owens, and Betty Bell. Restless, chafed, stir-hungry, in 1951 he would step westward from Summerfield, Oklahoma, to Eugene, Oregon, where he had family, and to employment in logging through the years 1954–59 in the Cascades and Willamette Valley. The Pacific Northwest’s mountain forestry, nature and commerce, again has stayed with him, a vital next source of place in his writing. It was in Oregon that the same call to writing, long nascent,becameyetmoreemphatic:theemergingfirststoriesandverse, the early imitations of Faulkner and Hemingway. A liberal arts degree from Oklahoma State in 1964 and then a master’s degree and doctorate from the University of Arkansas in 1965 and 1970, with a brief teaching stint at Northeastern Oklahoma State University, have led to more than three decades (1970–2003) as professor of English and Comparative Literature at Truman State University, Kirksville, Missouri, and editorship of the literary and translation journal, the Chariton Review. In 2004 he...