N. Scott Momaday, The Bear -- A Review of Beauty

N. Scott Momaday: Words from a Bear

Sometimes something absolutely beautiful comes on TV when you most need to see it. Last night PBS's American Masters series was N. Scott Momaday: Words From a Bear. You can stream it online at https://www.pbs.org/video/n-scott-momaday-word-from-a-bear-odljy7/. If you do, please watch it on the largest screen you have available. The views of Scott's world are the American West and his imagination. 

Momaday is Kiowa. He was born in Oklahoma's red earth country and raised in the red rock canyons of Arizona and the Jemez Pueblo in mesa country of New Mexico.  Momaday grew up immersed in his father’s Kiowa traditions and those of the Navajo, Apache, and Pueblo. His was a world of vast spaces and timelessness.

PBS describes Scott as a "Pulitzer Prize-winning author and poet, best known for House Made of Dawn and a formative voice of the Native American Renaissance in art and literature." (You can read my review of the book at https://bit.ly/37kI3UM.)

House Made of Dawn was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction fifty years ago and I had the great good fortune of meeting him almost that long ago.

I was a single mom working full time and taking night classes at Central State University in Edmond, Oklahoma. I took two and, some semesters, three classes to meet a degree requirement. But always one night a week I spent a bit of time outside my daily pressure cooker life -- in Dr. Norman Russell's poetry class. He very kindly arranged for me to continue taking his class after I took it that first semester, changing its title and number to side-step academia's practical order.

In his class we talked poetry. We read poetry. We shared the poetry we had written during the week. We discussed and argued, though always civilly, what made poetry speak to us. Rhymed, free verse, traditional, experimental. How to say what we meant to say. Which words were strong enough to touch our reader, strong enough to touch the universe. The universe both inside and outside of ourselves.

Dr. Russell was an eminent scientist in the world of botany. His day job was teaching science classes to college students. Don't get me wrong. He enjoyed teaching. He loved botany. And he loved our night class of would-be poets. We were not all working toward a degree. We were a mix of generations and professions and life experiences and goals.

He was a Native American, a Cherokee. And, most-importantly to me, Dr. Russell was a poet. A kind and generous poet. Red Shuttleworth (a much awarded Western Poet in his own right) said of Dr. Russell in a 2011 tribute, "Norman H. Russell bushwhacked a trail for many Native American poets.  He was the first Indian to publish poetry widely."

Sometimes Dr. Russell had a poet friend come and read to us. One of those poet friends was N. Scott Momaday. I doubt Momaday remembers me at all, but I remember him. I remember him as a big guy with a wonderful reading voice. I don't think I realized that he was famous. That wasn't important anyway. I just liked that he talked poetry to us as one of us.

Now I'm really glad he was famous, because that got us this beautiful film, N. Scott Momaday: Words From a Bear. This film gives us Momaday's world in his own voice. 

Again, here's the link https://www.pbs.org/video/n-scott-momaday-word-from-a-bear-odljy7/ 

Enjoy.

Introduction to Poetry or Why I Am Not an English Teacher

No! Wait! Oh, my goodness. I don't know where to start.

I know you think you don't like poetry.

It's too foo-foo -- a fuzzy poodle clipped into topiary.

It's too obscure, too much naval-gazing. No one, besides the poet who wrote it, can understand it. Or, for that matter, gives a frak.

And even people who like poetry, don't like this modern stuff. Half the time it doesn't even rhyme.

Beginning in elementary school, I wrote poetry. Even got some of it published. Had to give up the getting published part though. Too expensive.

That was in the days before cell phones when you had to pay long distance to call any prefix outside your area code and even most inside it. The phone prefix in the U.S. is the three numbers immediately following the area code. (For those of you too young to remember, prefixes once had names like Windsor which was dialed 946 and Melrose 635, etc. In old movies phone numbers began with the prefix 555, because there was no prefix 555 and that just gave one less reason to get sued. Some things don't change.)

Also, if your poem were published, payment generally consisted of two free copies of the issue your poem appeared in.

All this meant that if my poem was published, I had to pay long distance to call all my friends and relatives to tell them the good news. AND buy extra copies of the issue my poem appeared in, because I had friends and relatives who wanted to see it themselves. Then there was the expense of snail mail because not all my friends and relatives lived within easy driving distance.

But I digress.

You notice I said I gave up the getting published part. The writing of poetry I continued for a very long time. It was my way of understanding myself and the chaotic world I lived in. I read other people's poetry for the same reason.

A good poet pays attention to each word, asking if that word is the right word. A good poem, while it uses the exact word, also leaves room for the reader to bring to it their own experience. Room to understand the poem in their own way.

When I went to college, I thought I wanted to be an English teacher. I loved poetry and prose in all their forms, rhymed, free verse, form poems, fiction, nonfiction, plays. I would be surrounded by literature. I would spend my days sharing what I loved with my students. Lunch conversations would expand my own reading opportunities by exploring the literature my fellow teachers read and loved. What better way for me to make my living? And I would have time to write.

Life and reality changed everything. I eventually got to within something like four credit hours of a teaching degree in English. And I couldn't face the possibility of a lifetime of lunches with English teachers.

That said, let me share with you a poem by Billy Collins, who was an English teacher. Probably the kind of English teacher I would enjoy having lunch with. He is described by Wikipedia as "a Distinguished Professor of English." Among many prizes, awards, and honors, he was Poet Laureate of the United States 2001 - 2003.

Introduction to Poetry 

by Billy Collins

                                     I ask them to take a poem
                                     and hold it up to the light
                                     like a color slide

                                     or press an ear against its hive.

                                     I say drop a mouse into a poem
                                     and watch him probe his way out,

                                     or walk inside the poem’s room
                                     and feel the walls for a light switch.

                                     I want them to waterski
                                     across the surface of a poem
                                     waving at the author’s name on the shore.

                                     But all they want to do
                                     is tie the poem to a chair with rope
                                     and torture a confession out of it.

                                     They begin beating it with a hose
                                     to find out what it really means.


And that, dear friends, is why I am not an English teacher.

Almost Seven -- Poetry

Something about David Bowie's death got to me. Maybe it's because he never seemed old to me. And only old people die. Right? Here I go waxing nostalgic. Here's a poem from Three Part Harmony, a chatbook I published many years ago with two poet friends.

From when my son was    

Almost Seven

legs growin'

Momma raised seat on bike

lowered hem on pants

come to shoulder on 

Great Grandmother she

makes things in clay

plays dominoes

likes me

knows I'm almost seven.

arms gettin' strong

Father takes me fishin'

fish with bow

catch gar some in

Cimarron

get brown like berry

look like I'm almost seven.

school startin'

go second grade

ride bus to Grandfather's he

let me dig potatoes

milk goats

drive tractor

cause I'm almost seven.

soon September

come birthday

then be

goin' on eight.

Cities of the Plain -- A Review

Image from  thisismoney.co.uk

   Cormac McCarthy writes like I would like to write. Spare and strong. And this from the person who always says she doesn’t like Hemingway. By-the-bye, I do like Hemingway’s short fiction. And I can’t read McCarthy one after the other without the respite of other books. Even if you know nothing about the books before you start them, you soon get a sense of the despair and desolation that reviewers talk about. The sense that these people and their way of life are passing away.

   The first book of McCarthy’s Border Trilogy is All the Pretty Horses which introduces us to 16-year-old John Grady Cole who’s lost his grandfather and the ranch home he’s grown up on. It begins in 1949. Rather than move into town he crosses the border into Mexico and comes of age.

   In The Crossing we meet Billy Parham, the son of a rancher, at the beginning of and during World War II. Again we have a young man losing his family and his way of life. He can’t even get into the military and go off to war, the standard border between the way life was and the way it will be for most Americans during that time.

   In Cities of the Plain we’ve come to the last of the three books. Here John Grady and Billy are working on Mac McGovern’s ranch in the early 1950’s. A ranch destined to be bought by the government.

   McCarthy’s Border Trilogy is magnificent just as is the country where it takes place. Great distances filled with sky and earth, hot or cold sunshine and vast night. There aren’t that many people and the people who are there are as spare and hard as the country, as are their language and their relationships.

   This is a conversation between John Grady and Mac McGovern, the rancher he works for.

   John Grady listened to him going down the hall to his room. When he came back he sat down and placed a gold ring on the table.

   That’s been in my dresser drawer for three years. It aint doin nobody any good there and it never will. We talked about everthing and we talked about that ring. She didnt want it put in the ground. I want you to take it.

   Sir I dont think I can do that.

   Yes you can. I’ve already thought of everthing you could possibly say on the subject so rather than go over it item by item let’s just save the aggravation and you put it in your pocket and come Tuesday you put it on that girl’s finger.

   McCarthy is a poet when he describes this country.

The stars in flood above her. The lower edges of the firmament sawed out into the black shapes of the mountains and the lights of the cities burning on the plain like stars pooled in a lake. She sang to herself softly as she went a song from long ago. The dawn was two hours away. The town one.

   McCarthy knows his people and he loves them. He recognizes the philosophers among the poor and resilient. John Grady comes to a blind musician to ask him to act as godfather for the woman he wants to wed. The old man tells him a story explaining why a dying man in great wisdom, chose his most hated enemy to be his son’s godfather. The story begins this way.

He knew that our enemies by contrast seem always with us. The greater our hatred the more persistent the memory of them so that a truly terrible enemy becomes deathless. So that a man who has done you great injury or injustice makes himself a guest in your house forever. Perhaps only forgiveness can dislodge him.

   The enemy who became godfather to the man’s son found that he must dedicate his entire life to the son. Because there could never be forgiveness, the enemy could not ‘dislodge’ the man. A friend who had loved him could more easily have thought of his dead friend in comfort and sadness and eased himself under the burden of such a responsibility.

   The Border Trilogy are not comfortable books to read. Like the country, they are beautiful and threaten death. The people who inhabit these books are tough. Their lives are broken and battered by sudden and unforgiving violence. They do not so much survive as endure.

   Do not let your obs-comp grammar ways get between you and these books. There are still people like these – unassuming but not subservient, under-educated but not unknowing, not especially civilized but enlightened. And some are still cowboys.

Portrait of a Writer

 

 

 

 



Spoiler alert! I tell how my novel Murder on Ceres ends.
  
   It's been a long time coming, but I am a writer. What did it take? A novel.

   I've been writing since the Third Grade. In those days it was short fiction and poetry. I didn't know I was writing short fiction. It was just stories. But I knew when I wrote poetry because it rhymed. My teachers were always supportive. When the weather outside was too cold or too rainy we stayed indoors during recess and the teacher read my stories. My status among my peers was guaranteed--writing and tether ball.

   There was never a suggestion that I should submit my work for publication. I don't think anyone I knew had any personal experience with the publishing world. In fact, I was a Senior in High School before I met anyone who'd been published. I don't remember his name, but I remember listening to him talk about a story he'd had accepted by a major magazine. Playboy, actually. Such an exotic publication. Not available over the counter in my small Oklahoma town. And then he said that of the national magazines that published fiction, they paid the most money. Money? How cool was that! Of course not even he envisioned quiting his day job. He was the editor of the local newspaper. Journalism, however, did not qualify as writing as far as I was concerned. After all I wrote for our school newspaper and later for that same small-town, twice a week newspaper.

   But I came to understand there were writers actually living and working in the real world, right then.

   College expanded my world exponentially. I went to poetry readings. They read famous long dead poets like William Shakespeare and Emily Dickenson. They read recently dead poets like e. e. cummings. Antiwar poets like Amy Lowell from my grandfathers' war. And their own antiwar poetry from our own war. And sometimes it rhymed, but more often not. Somehow poets did not qualify in my mind as writers. After all I could and did write poetry.

   My resume became an amalgam of the American working life--office worker, newspaper reporter/photographer/editor, welfare caseworker,  fast-food store manager, oil field hand, etc., etc., ad infinitum. I took up saying I was preparing for a career as a writer or a stand-up comedian.
  
   Well now I've done it. I completed the first draft of a novel.

   Murder on Ceres  takes place in the future when the center of civilization is located on the many colonies off Mars. Humans continue their exploration and exploitation of the universe. They choose their own evolution. They live longer, healthier lives. Nations and wars of nationalism are things of the past. But, for all their progress, humans are still humans and murder happens.
   
   My hero, Rafe Sirocco, a newly-minted police detective investigates his first murder. Dedication to his job endangers his marriage, the lives of his young wife and their unborn child, and, in the end, his own life.
 
   And how does this who-done-it come out? I typed these final words.

"The   End"

 

   And became a writer.