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135 135 CHAP TER EIGHT REINVENTING THE NATURE OF LANGUAGE The Poetics of Gerald Vizenor’s Prose David L. Moore One of the most immediate and elusive aspects of Gerald Vizenor’s writing is the distinctive originality of his style, the complex, careful, yet cavalier ways that he recasts the English language to fit, or better, to generate, his unique voice. No one else writes like Vizenor, Anishinaabe novelist, poet, and critical theorist. For me, it was a quickly acquired taste. Once I realized that the strange vocabulary and syntax opened a new door into an old land, I was hooked. For many, his playful intellectuality and polemical undertones, his rhetorical positions as compassionate trickster, the picaresque movement of his associative imagery, his startling turns of phrase, and his teasing critical insights make his prose endlessly fascinating, almost addictive, like a delightful puzzle. Yet the puzzle is not frivolous. It startles and unravels the postmodern , postindian, postcolonial self, who might be any reader. Following that disquieting pleasure, I look in this essay at how Vizenor’s “haiku hermeneutics ,” which I analyzed in an earlier study of his poetry, also constitutes the poetics, the conscious aesthetic theory, of his prose. The prolific outpouring of his publications over the past four decades matches the headlong momentum of his sentences, each diving into unexpected turns and opening new curves of thought, mapping new mental territory , yet invariably returning to the same Native ground, the same principles of re-representation. As readers we often feel in his prose that we become privy to the trick of narrative chance, to an endlessly tactile engagement with compelling indigenous realities, with lives revalidated, with energetic thoughts that embrace living bodies—that in turn disprove terminal creeds. He is an artist who creates his audience. His lines reshape his readers from the inside out, precisely as he reshapes the English language. Anishinaabe scholar and poet Kimberly Blaeser has written the definitive study that identifies Vizenor’s literary roots in haiku. I am grateful for her many gestures in “The Multiple Traditions of Gerald Vizenor’s Haiku Poetry” david l. moore 136 that I and others have taken up in later analysis of his work. She extended that reach of analysis further in her “‘Interior Dancers’: Transformations of Vizenor’s Poetic Vision.” In the process she laid out key aesthetic principles in understanding his poetry as the heart of his work. As she points out, “In fact, the haiku and free verse poems from this [early] era introduce some of the language and many of the themes that became Vizenor’s trademark” (“‘Interior Dancers,’” 3). Certainly we are all indebted as well to Vizenor himself for his unique articulations of the processes of his poetics and his hermeneutics, even while he teases—or strip-teases—the subject of survivance, another performance of presence in absence. To be sure, his self-expositions remain properly tricksterish , so that they may need unpacking (not defining) for some readers as well. Indeed, not only his neologisms, but his original reworkings of syntax and vocabulary, driven by the same creative force that would rework history for the survivance of Indian peoples, amount to the initiation of a new discourse , a reshaping, a reinvention, of the English language to a level of transformative intensity unparalleled in modern poetry and prose. In his critical and autobiographical essay, “Envoy to Haiku,” he quite directly explains the cross-cultural literary roots discovered during his military service in the 1950s and followed later in his college studies. This is the dynamic that I want to begin to discuss in this essay: how Vizenor reinvents in his poetics even the nature of the dominant language to open a linguistic door into indigenous experiences. I read these poetics in both his poetry and his prose. There are obvious features of his language, such as the multiple modes or even genres, skipping from narrative to scholarly citation to dialogue and back around within a single paragraph, that extend the poetry into his prose. Thus there emerges a pattern where paragraphs and episodes frequently include an expository introduction with a clear “thesis statement” as map of or through the outrageous language and events to come. As often as not, the thesis statement is itself imaginatively peculiar. Here, for example, is a smattering of opening lines to paragraphs from The Heirs of Columbus: The Mayan shamans and hand talkers landed unused in the Old World and declared their heritable radiance in the shadows and...

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