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80 CHAP TER FIVE VIZENOR’S LIFE STUDIES Revisioning Survivance in Almost Ashore Linda Lizut Helstern Almost Ashore: Selected Poems owes a great deal to Gerald Vizenor’s lifelong devotion to haiku, the evanescent moment of being held briefly in fullness. Even the short poetic line he uses throughout the volume, seldom seven syllables in length, bespeaks a kinship to haiku, but Vizenor’s first volume of nonhaiku poetry has been shaped for a cultural moment when haiku has ceased to be a part of America’s general knowledge base, yet Columbus in all of his ideological trappings endures, intertwined with victimry and survivance in Native communities across America. Native survivance, according to Vizenor, “is more than survival, more than endurance or mere response”; it is “an active repudiation of dominance, tragedy, and victimry” that cannot be separated from its practice (Fugitive Poses, 15). In his prose Vizenor has honored such exemplars of survivance as Ishi, Keeshkemun, Charles Aubid, and Luther Standing Bear. In Almost Ashore, twelve poems focus on specific individuals, and each tells a survivance story. Six of these, previously published in one or more versions, offer special insight into Vizenor’s revisioning of survivance in this volume. That his theoretical appropriation of the term “survivance” came two decades after the first publication of such poems as “Guthrie Theater” and “Raising the Flag” suggests how central practice is to Vizenor’s theory, while reminding us that Vizenor has been “reinventing the enemy’s language” from the beginning of his career. Even as this collection gives us a new lens on Vizenor’s poetic oeuvre, heavily dependent as it is on his early work, Almost Ashore stands as the antithesis of the typical collected works. The volume showcases process while refusing finality as adamantly as the ending of any Vizenor novel. Its very title defers conclusion, constructs agency, and suggests exertion while refusing to specify the degree of effort necessary to continue on. It suggests precisely the “active presence” that Vizenor claims for stories of survivance (Fugitive Poses, 15). Below this surface, however, lies vizenor’s life studies 81 a tragic wisdom akin to the understanding of the beauty and shortness of life at the heart of haiku, a wisdom gleaned from deeply felt loss. This, for Vizenor, is the very heart of survivance. In the Euramerican tradition, poems focusing on individuals are traditionally called “portraits,” but this term freezes its subject in an attitude and a moment. The term “life studies” seems decidedly more appropriate to Vizenor’s use of the genre, even when he speaks about suicides, as he does in three of these poems. My focus on the individuals in Vizenor’s landscape is not meant to suggest the paramount importance of human life in this world. Their relative rarity in Almost Ashore speaks to this fact, and so does the placement of the life studies within the text. Vizenor contextualizes them carefully. The first—“Family Photograph,” a poem about his father—is preceded by two poems that reveal a world peopled both by nonhuman and human persons, consistent with the traditional Native understanding . It is the rush of ocean waves, no valiant swimmer, that Vizenor celebrates in “Almost Ashore,” and the power through song to call into being the multiplicity of life that he honors in “Crane Dance.” The title of this ritual honoring refers to the complex mating ritual of the sandhill crane, its human connection veiled and dependent on the reader’s knowledge that Vizenor is an Anishinaabe Crane Clan descendent. Only in the context of this larger vision of life does Vizenor go on to speak of his young father’s life and death in “Family Photograph.”1 In addition to “Family Portrait,” two life studies, “Guthrie Theater” and “Raising the Flag,” are included in the book’s first section, in which virtually all of the poems touch on identifiably Native experiences. These are Vizenor’s three mostpublished poems, with the earliest versions anthologized in the mid-1970s. The remaining nine life studies fall within the volume’s third and longest section, a seemingly chance blend of Native and non-Native, urban and rural experience. Here he extends the idea of survivance beyond Native survivance to honor the human will to resist cultural dominance. In these poems, Vizenor focuses principally on poets and women. Three touch, at least implicitly, on suicide, including “Paul Celan,” which honors the Holocaust survivor recognized as the greatest German-language poet of the late twentieth century. This...

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