Gerald Vizenor: Texts and Contexts

14. Praise the Ravens: A Literary Interview

14 Praise the Ravens A Literary Interview Gerald Vizenor and A. Robert Lee A. Robert Lee (ARL): Let’s step back to your earlier writing for a moment. What were the first pieces you saw into print? Gerald Vizenor (GV): My first publication, Born in the Wind, twelve pages of saddle-stitched poems, celebrated the birth of my son, Robert Thomas Vizenor, on 26 March 1960. I was a graduate student at the University of Minnesota and coerced my friends, and even some faculty, to buy at least one copy for fifty cents. Most of my friends bought two copies surely out of literary concern and uneasiness. On His Birth The beauty of three roses. And so it is in life, The spirit, the earth and man: The perpetual spirit, The moving life of the earth, And the loneliness of man. Before the end of night Another life breathes; The spirit of two and a son. That occasional poem was earnest, and the sentiments heartfelt, of course, and almost fifty years later this fatherly poem is not exactly a total embarrassment . There were many ways to announce the birth of my son, but the intentions of an effusive poem were much better at the time than a martini or a cigar. My second book, Two Wings the Butterfly: Haiku Poems in English, was published at the Minnesota State Reformatory in April 1962. I was then a social worker at the correctional institution, located in Saint Cloud, Minnesota , and paid friendly inmates in the print shop forty dollars to publish about a hundred copies. This forty-page book, with four original ink 268 Praise the Ravens 269 paintings by Judith Horns Vizenor, was a gift to my friends. The poems were collected by seasons. The old wren house On a bare broken bough Creaking in the wind. A drop of water Fell from a tall icicle Down a boy’s cheek. One early morning The old red water wheel Began to squeak. The nails leave lines On the old morning glory fence Dripping dew. I was convinced at the time, apparently, that the adjective old enhanced the perception of an imagistic poem. I wrote in the introduction that the “simplicity of the Japanese haiku poem is not learned but unlearned. In a Japanese ink painting it is not the complexity of the detail but the importance of what is not there. Space and motion are not limited.” Since then my poetic associations and sense of generations have been in motion, Native transmotion, a more subtle perception and not the mere pretensions of old age and venerability. My third book, South of the Painted Stones, a collection of longer poems, was published privately in April 1963. I asked Melvin McCosh, the late legendary owner of a bookstore in Dinkytown near the University of Minnesota, for advice on publishing and copyright. He first asked me if he had to read the poems to comment on copyright. McCosh quickly paged though the manuscript of twenty-seven poems. Yes, he said, definitely copyright these poems. I heard that as a compliment, of course, but thought he was a rather fast reader. McCosh told me, “These poems are so bad that one day you will thank me because you can protect and control them by copyright.” McCosh became a close friend, and we shared that story many times with friends. His advice was correct, of course, but there is no way to recover every copy. I must endorse, however, the photograph of the author on the back cover of South of the Painted Stones. I am pictured in the window frame of a cabin under construction. I built that cabin near Martin Lake, about forty miles north of Minneapolis, with scrap lumber, doors, and windows salvaged from razed houses near the university. I was pleased at the time that the total cost of materials, about sixty dollars, was probably much 270 PART THREE less by conversion than the twenty-eight dollars and thirteen cents that Henry David Thoreau invested in his cabin near Walden Pond on land owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson. ARL: You also set up a press of your own, did you not? GV: I founded the Nodin Press in 1964 and published three books, two collections of my haiku, Raising the Moon Vines and Seventeen Chirps, and Summer in the Spring: Lyric Poems of the Ojibway, which was published the following...