by Cedar Sigo
Moments of awareness of perfection and of inspiration are alike
except that inspirations are often directives to action.
Many people think that if they are attuned to fate, all their inspirations will lead them toward what they want and need.
But inspiration is really just the guide to the next thing
and may be what we call success or failure.
The bad paintings have to be painted
and to the artist these are more valuable than those paintings later brought before the public.
A work of art is successful when there is a hint of perfection present—
at the slightest hint…the work is alive.
The life of the work depends upon the observer, according to his own awareness of perfection and inspiration.
The responsibility of the response to art is not with the artist.
To feel confident and successful is not natural to the artist.
To feel insufficient,
to experience disappointment and defeat in waiting for inspiration
is the natural state of mind of an artist.
As a result praise to most artists is a little embarrassing.
They cannot take credit for inspiration,
for we can see perfectly, but we cannot do perfectly.
Many artists live socially without disturbance to mind,
but others must live the inner experiences of mind, a solitary way of living.
Or Andy Warhol, who says basically the same thing, but with his own workhorse, assembly line, cut-to-the-quick tonality:
Don’t think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it’s good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.
Marcel Duchamp offered his own paranoid descriptions of making, but with a more material slant. Here he is in 1966 speaking with Pierre Cabanne on the making of a painting from 1911, Sad Young Man on a Train:
First, there’s the idea of the movement of the train, and then that of the sad young man who is in a corridor and who is moving about; thus there are two parallel movements corresponding to each other. Then, there is the distortion of the young man—I had called this elementary parallelism. It was a formal decomposition; that is, linear elements following each other like parallels and distorting the object. The object is completely stretched out, as if elastic. The lines follow each other in parallels, while changing subtly to form the movement, or the form of the young man in question. I also used this procedure in the Nude Descending a Staircase.
Why do I link my many styles of writing with reading the writings of artists? I think of their writings as being based in solution, accepting restlessness and self-critique as a natural state. I seem to want to constantly shift at least one aspect of my relationship to language.
I think artist writings are often poetry in tonal disguise, and conversely that my favorite poetry often sounds like the most incisive and stirring manifesto on art-making. I am thinking of these lines from Diane di Prima’s “Revolutionary Letter #75: Rant”:
the ground of imagination is fearlessness
discourse is video tape of a movie of a shadow play
but the puppets are in yr hand
your counters in a multidimensional chess
which is divination
& strategy
the war that matters is the war against the imagination
all other wars are subsumed in it.
■ ■ ■
We’ve been basically disappeared in the culture. My guitar player, wonderful, incredible musician Larry Mitchell grew up in Bed-Stuy, and he said when he was growing up there that they were told all through school that there were no more Indians. And that’s the state of the country. Most people think of Disney’s Pocahontas or Dances with Wolves, those images, and those are the only images. They don’t have the images of my grandmother Naomi Harjo blowing saxophone in Indian Territory, or my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather. I’m seven generations from Monahwee, who was like César Chávez or Martin Luther King. He was a freedom fighter, a healer, knew horses, and stood up against Andrew Jackson in the move to Indian Territory. And, you know, we’re regular people. You know we’re mothers, fathers—you know, we fail, we succeed, we’re artists—we’re human beings. And I’ve always said that if my work does nothing else, I want people to know us as human beings, not as figures that they can manipulate because we’re dead. I think one of the most powerful things that ever happened performing once is, I performed—I’d just been to the Battle of Horseshoe Bend grounds, and I went to Auburn University and stood up and said, “I am Monahwee’s granddaughter.” And everybody looked at me with their mouths open. And I realized that to them I was essentially a ghost. Because history had written us as defeated, disappeared. And that hasn’t really changed that much.
That is our current poet laureate, Joy Harjo, a member of the Muskogee Creek Nation speaking in 2010 on the necessity of sharing our history in order to move past typical and corroded narratives of Native extinction.
I feel an immediate, internal division when speaking in terms of things past. I can trace the genocide and poverty back too quickly, and then often as a Native artist you are thought of as being locked in the past, “traditional,” harmless, even extinct, when in fact you have always felt like proof that the job was in fact not carried out completely.
For the past year or so I have been editing a collection with Joy Harjo and a team of fifteen other Native poets. It is titled When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry. As editors, we offered our living expertise by working specifically on the sections that corresponded with our tribal identities. I was invited to take part in the editing of what came to be the largest physical landmass of all the sections: the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, and the Pacific Islands.
In terms of varied landscapes and traditions we may as well have been conjoining three countries from opposite ends of the earth. We solved this disjunction by providing three different introductions for our section. Brandi Naˉlani McDougall wrote on poets from the Pacific Islands; Diane Benson wrote of Inuit approaches to verse-making; and my own introduction, “The Arc of the Edifice,” attempts to cover the tribes of Washington State, Oregon, and Idaho. In spite of the fact that we wrote separate introductions, we did edit the entire section together. Here is the opening paragraph from my introduction:
Native people of the Northwest had no choice but to live in relation to poetry from the very outset of creation. We had to learn to identify and convert the individual elements of earth into forms of protection and sustenance, a so-called lifestyle. This would involve courtship, and gathering of every necessary berry, moss, bark, and wood. I remember stories of Suquamish women leaving for several days on summer journeys over the Cascade Mountains into eastern Washington to gather luminous bear grass, those pieces that would sometimes tell stories along the outer surface of our baskets. This draping of my history within the landscape has become an available arc that we tap into at will.
I first met Joy Harjo in 2012. We were both taking part in a conference on twenty-first-century Native poetics hosted by Poets House in Manhattan. This was a hugely significant event in my life, as I had been asked to take part in only one other conference devoted to Native poetry, and that conference had taken place almost ten years earlier. By the year 2012, I had published three full-length collections and numerous self-published chapbooks. I was thirty-four years old.
During the early 2000s, when I was living in the San Francisco Bay Area, I would hear from fellow writers of color that they could only seem to get published in anthology situations, in which their most explicit, identity-themed pieces would be corralled into one big book. It was said to be very hit-and-run. A friend of mine once described these anthologies as a kind of ghetto, a place that is built to isolate your writing rather than popularize it. Meanwhile, I was having almost the opposite exp
erience. I felt invisible to whatever circle of contemporary Native poetry did exist. Or was there even one definitive circle? I had read and liked Sherwin Bitsui’s work, but, other than that, I had no idea what was happening and, to be fair, I wasn’t necessarily reaching out to anyone either. It was emotionally akin to my almost twenty-year experience of being what tribes like to call “an off-reservation Indian,” though that term always felt so clinical, especially as it was often one Native person talking about another. At that point, I worried that my unapologetic queerness almost overrode the fact that I was a Native writer. My fidgeting and experimental style had formed an artificial gate around my body.
Since that conference at Poets House, I have found myself included among a new generation of Native poets. A handful of anthologies have been compiled over the past few years, notably, New Poets of Native Nations, edited by Heid E. Erdrich, and the June 2018 issue of Poetry magazine, which was entirely devoted to Native poetics. What does it mean to finally feel acknowledged as a Native poet? It means that my preferred reality would be one in which I am constantly in collaboration with other Native poets. I am beginning to see how the fight to keep this collaboration going becomes part of the overall vision, the struggle itself. I have now had the pleasure of working alongside Julian Talamantez Brolaski, Layli Long Soldier, Sasha LaPointe, Celeste Adame, dg okpik, Casandra López, Reid Gómez, Natalie Diaz, Jennifer Foerster, Laura Da’, James Thomas Stevens, Chip Livingston, and many others. The fact that Joy offered me an opportunity to both learn and reshape our literary history still feels unreal. This invitation has enabled me to begin to speak for more than myself. In fact, when the time came for Joy to edit my introduction, the one major change she made was to turn every “I” into the word “we.”
Here is one of my favorite poems of Joy’s dealing with a common occurrence among Native people, probably all people of color, all survivors actually, when the residual history of genocide must reinvade our bodies. This is from her 2015 collection, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings. The poem is titled “In Mystic”:
My path is a cross of burning trees,
Lit by crows carrying fire in their beaks.
I ask the guardians of these lands for permission to enter.
I am a visitor to this history.
No one remembers to ask anymore, they answer.
What do I expect in this New England seaport town, near the birthplace of democracy,
Where I am a ghost?
Even a casino can’t make an Indian real.
Or should I say “native,” or “savage,” or “demon”?
And with what trade language?
I am trading a backwards look for jeopardy.
I agree with the ancient European maps.
There are monsters beyond imagination that troll the waters.
The Puritan’s determined ships did fall off the edge of the world…
I am happy to smell the sea,
Walk the narrow winding streets of shops and restaurants, and delight in the company of friends, trees, and small winds.
I would rather not speak with history but history came to me.
It was dark before daybreak when the fire sparked.
The men left on a hunt from the Pequot village here where I stand.
The women and children left behind were set afire.
I do not want to know this, but my gut knows the language of bloodshed.
Over six hundred were killed, to establish a home for God’s people, crowed the Puritan leaders in their Sunday sermons.
And then history was gone in a betrayal of smoke.
There is still burning though we live in a democracy erected over the burial ground.
This was given to me to speak.
Every poem is an effort at ceremony.
I asked for a way in.
(For Pam Uschuk) October 31, 2009
“I would rather not speak with history but history came to me.” Finally, a single line I can use to answer all those tone-deaf questions about how it “feels” to be a Native of this country. Joy’s poem also lays bare our ability to dip in between the realms of past and present in order to catch the song thrown out by someone’s ancestors. They may not even be members of your tribe but they still need a vessel through which to speak: “We live in a democracy erected over the burial ground.” Why are children told that ghosts do not exist, when, in fact, we have to learn to take on these ghosts? When they feel so inherent to our landscape anyway? Why not draw upon each other’s histories within the classroom in order to chase this darkness down?
The poet and activist John Trudell of the Santee Dakota Nation often spoke of such darkness using the useful term “predatory energy.” This is an excerpt from his book of interviews and poetry titled, Stickman, published in 1994:
Sometimes they have to kill us. They have to kill us, because they can’t break our spirit. We choose the right to be who we are. We know the difference between the reality of freedom and the illusion of freedom. There is a way to live with the earth and a way not to live with the earth. We choose the way of the earth.
Universally, the earth was regarded as the mother—historically speaking, another idea appeared and the other idea said that God was number one and God was a male and God was removed from the earth—God was somewhere else, and this is when all the predatory energy began, and its evolution has been continuing since then. Once the dominant energy became a god removed from the earth, then it became OK to attack and exploit the earth. As that attack began, fear became one of its main, main instruments.
In order to combat this fear, our new collective anxiety, I find myself attempting to answer questions posed by revolutionary poets. Audre Lorde begins her autobiography, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, by asking herself a series of questions, the second of which is, “To whom do I owe the symbols of my survival?” The question is pitched in such a way as to allow all poets access to a new kind of threshold, an invitation to acknowledge a wounded space as one of value. Master poets and teachers can manipulate tonality in this way. The condensed musicality of her question offers dignity to each one of our histories. It is a question offered in the spirit of leaving the door to composition propped open, where we are left to face our favored strains of music, blurring of the image, and the jacket that is history coming off.
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—�
�—. Words. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1967.
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Guest, Barbara. Defensive Rapture. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1993.
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———. The Red Gaze. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005.
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———. A God in the House: Poets Talk About Faith. Edited by Ilya Kaminsky and Katherine Towler. North Adams, MA: Tupelo Press, 2012.
Harjo, Joy, Jennifer Elise Foerster, Leanne Howe, and contributing editors. When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2020.
