A Delicate Aggression

by David O. Dowling

  Cisneros resolved to differentiate herself from her peers by defiantly deploying a “broken-glass and tin-can” inner-city idiom from her childhood to distinguish herself “from the pretty pastel syllables of my classmates.”5 During the late 1970s, the Workshop’s “increasing prestige drew an increasingly mainstream student body often straight out of college.” Those white, middle-class males directly out of college drew material for their writing from their privileged suburban worlds. They gravitated toward what Tom Grimes calls “the standard workshop product,” several iterations of which Grimes confessed to having produced himself. These were narratives featuring “the sincere first-person narrator story about his dysfunctional family, capped by a maturation-inducing epiphany.” Such adolescent fare was indicative of the conformist tendency to “write for workshop,” calculated attempts at producing material “with the greatest chance of receiving the workshop’s approbation.” Such writing epitomized how students responded to the escalating pressure of the word’s most prestigious program.6

  Cisneros’s counterreaction to the “politically unengaged, stylistically timid, contextually narrow, bourgeois subject matter” represented how “writing is fighting,” as the African-American poet Ishmael Reed once said.7 Like a Brechtian placard interrupting the narrative flow of a scene to highlight economic inequality and social injustice, she found joy in orchestrating “rag-tag music” out of the “third-floor flats, and rears of rats, and drunk husbands sending rocks through windows, anything as far from the poetic as possible.”8 Not exactly Raymond Carver dirty realism, the exterior of the vignettes originally written as narrative poems reflected this deliberately simple quality, designed to subvert the dominant definition of poetry at the Workshop. One of the disturbing lessons she learned at Iowa “was that poetry belonged to the wealthier classes. It was an issue of privilege.” Cisneros aired her disdain: “If I have to read any more of those dreadful boring obsessed-with-your-navel poems again I’m going to die. When I’m around poets of the working class,” such as Joy Harjo, the woman at the back of the class with her, “I’m very much at home.”9

  Women’s Activism at the Workshop

  Despite Engle’s official resignation from the Workshop in 1966, his presence was felt during Cisneros and Harjo’s time at the Workshop in the late 1970s. Even though he had officially assumed the title of director of the International Writing Program, “Engle still had considerable power and influence over the program in 1980,” according to English professor Brooks Landon’s recollection.10 It is telling that John Leggett would take over directing the Workshop after the interim leadership of the poet George Starbuck. Vance Bourjaily had originally been selected as Engle’s heir apparent, but he was uninterested in carrying such a heavy administrative burden. Starbuck had no future in the position, since he fell out of favor with English department chair John Gerber almost instantly after assuming the directorship. Starbuck’s liability was that “he was a typical poet; he was someplace else, doing his work, and trouble was always landing on Gerber’s desk.” To make matters worse, Starbuck had “fallen in love with his secretary and decided to take her back to New Hampshire, where he was from.”11

  The vacancy opened, and administration, starved for Engle’s lucrative fund-raising powers, opted to draw the next director from the publishing industry itself, rather than from the ranks of creative writing or, even less desirable, academia. Then a senior editor at Harper’s, Leggett represented the ideal candidate to institutionalize the Workshop’s connection to the literary market and achieve Gerber’s directive “to have a book editor on the faculty.” Gerber favored Leggett because of his business acumen and administrative bearing; Workshop secretary Connie Brothers described him as a patrician, “a gentleman from an affluent background.”12 Leggett’s successor, Frank Conroy, was a working-class New Yorker who came to Iowa in desperate financial straits. Unlike the bohemian Starbuck and the recklessly unpredictable John Berryman, Leggett struck Gerber and the deans as “more proper and dependable than the usual drunk visiting writers” that coursed through the Workshop.13 Most important were Leggett’s extensive connections to prestigious publishing houses.

  Whereas Leggett’s privileged position in the publishing industry may have aided faculty and students in securing lucrative advance contracts with powerful publishers such as Harper’s and Random House, such advantages did not extend to Cisneros and Harjo. They received no inside track to publication of the sort Vonnegut provided for Ian MacMillan, for example, by introducing him to his agent and several influential editors at an Iowa City party the decade before. In sharp contrast to an elite Boston or New York publisher, the City of Chicago Transit Authority adopted Cisneros’s work for its Poetry-on-the-Bus series, a project dedicated to displaying contemporary poems on billboards at city train and bus depots and on the interior of the trains and buses themselves. The first mass audience for her writing was not the literary Boston and New York readership Workshop graduates typically sought. Instead of print, her exposure was through public service readings and billboards, reaching the inner-city community where she was raised. She later served that community directly by sharing her gift of poetry and activist spirit through the establishment of the Latino Youth Alternative High School.14 Bad Boys appeared in 1980 and developed into The House on Mango Street, which was relegated to the tiny and obscure Arte Publico Press, a niche house with limited reach. Harjo’s first publication under the imprint of Puerto del Sol, a chapbook of such meager production quality it appears at first glance to be a slight pamphlet, exhorts the reader to pledge financial support to the single mother struggling to return home and raise her children. The dedication is to “my children who help me continue,” and the back cover describes the author as “a native of Oklahoma,” who “now lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. If she ever gets enough money and the right work, she will go home.”15 The volume appeared the year before Harjo moved to the Workshop, which taught her to break down the art of poetry “into sterile exercises,” as part of a broader “system that had separated itself from the community, from myth, from humanhood.”16

  Devoid of such community, myth, and humanhood was “the gray concrete” cell block of the married student housing complex Harjo moved into with her two children. “The rare appearance of the sun” seemed fitting for a financial situation that left her “with no assistance from the workshop.”17 Her aid instead came from a university program dedicated to assisting minority students. The Workshop denied funding or a graduate teaching position (a Teaching/Writing Fellowship, or TWF), which would have waived tuition and paid her a stipend, leaving her to the mercy of other programs on campus that might aid her. Were it not for the fledgling American Studies unit on campus, which offered her courses to teach in American Indian culture and literature, Harjo would not have attended the Workshop. To be a woman “in that institution” presented a formidable obstacle. Selected along with Jayne Anne Phillips to perform for a group of possible funders of the program, Harjo was shocked to hear Workshop director Jack Leggett tell the audience “that the place was actually geared for male writers.” Although she credited him for his transparency on the issue—his statement was “honest; it was true”—its import sickened her. “I remember looking at Jayne Anne Phillips,” the only other female student on stage, “like, ‘can you believe this? Then why were we sitting here?’ ”18

  Strong women writers were not new to the Workshop by 1976. But few of them were comfortably situated or justly rewarded for their achievements. Flannery O’Connor, whose taciturn demeanor and nunlike bearing at the Workshop concealed a lion of creativity inside her, had to have a male classmate read for her in workshops. Phillips helped turn the tide in the next generation. She intimidated newcomers like Michael Brien in the fall of 1976, who “quickly realized my limitation for creative writing genius” when he “sat in class with writers of the caliber of Jayne Anne Phillips.”19 Such women introduced an entirely new dimension previously missing from the program th
at now threatened to realign its power structure.

  Bejou Merry remarked that “the Workshop women were like accessories, and not germane.” Socially, “the men organize the bar jumps: ‘To Mama’s,’ and there is camaraderie among them.” She recalled how women “shoppies” would often complain about their unfair treatment, but had failed to organize into a more powerful collective force. Cisneros and Harjo mainly clung to each other for emotional support while also mutually enriching each other’s creative and professional growth at this pivotal moment in their careers. Beyond the defiant partnership of these women writers, the remainder of the Workshop women fended for themselves. “No organic group among women exists,” the presence of whom was “unnecessary: decorative, not functional.” Frustrated, Merry saw how “we are spineless because no organizational move toward insisting women writers appear exists,” which she felt was a necessary measure to counter the fact that “not one outside speaker has been female.” Silenced, “we complain of discrimination at the hands of our workshop instructors but we do not get together to do anything.”20

  Given this lack of organization, the most potent activism came through the radical literary experimentation of Cisneros and Harjo. Their alternative collaborative approach to writing tapped into externalized, horizontal planes of sociocultural context, rather than the narrow psychological introspection of confessional male poetry. Men, like David Romtvedt, also chafed against the program’s tendency “to be competitive rather than cooperative, cruel rather than welcoming.”21 But even the more conscientious of the male Workshop students were at a loss for how to articulate their dissent in any productive or impactful way that might radically subvert the program’s ethos at its core. The larger spirit of protest, moreover, seemed to have run its course. The Workshop’s old Cold War conservatism had given way to the antiwar sentiment of the 1960s. During the late 1960s, students signed “their first anti-war petition on the steps outside the newly opened EPB,” the English-Philosophy Building—constructed with riot-proof reinforced windows inspired by the University of California, Berkeley, student riots—that now housed the Workshop after decades in the Quonset huts under Engle’s directorship. By the late 1970s, tales of quiet, unassuming graduate students like Fred McTaggert becoming an instant celebrity on campus in 1968, because he “got maced and billy-clubbed by the police for trying to stop the way,” had become a thing of the past. Gone were the days when one “could walk down the street in Iowa City and hear ‘Let it Be’ floating out from every storefront.”22 By 1976, “drugs and politics had already passed out of fashion. Vietnam was over. Johnnie, the junkie, has already died in the bathroom of Hamburg Inn,” a famous no-frills café east of campus. The most this generation could muster in the way of activism was “an occasional drunken pants-off streak across the Pentacrest.”23

  The energy of the nascent feminist movement at Iowa reached its most powerful and enduring articulation in the writings of Cisneros and Harjo. The first Women’s Reading, held at Shambaugh auditorium in the late 1960s, “was packed with energy that would burst forth in the Seventies and Eighties,” as Marcella Taylor idealistically recalled.24 The reality was closer to Merry’s assessment of sporadic expressions of resistance without the coherence to effect real change. That real change, however, came when Harjo, who “struggled with a chasm of loneliness” at Iowa, found a kindred spirit in Cisneros, who shared her sense that “the workshop culture was a foreign culture to me.” As an “outsider,” Harjo “perceived most of the students as from the East Coast with advanced degrees in literature.” Cisneros had an undergraduate degree from Loyola University in Chicago; Harjo was a member of the University of New Mexico’s first graduating class in creative writing. “There were a small circle of students” who appeared conspicuous to Harjo “in tight relationships with the faculty, who always had pat approval no matter what they wrote or said.” The ethnic voice of her Native American roots clashed with the language of power wielded by these privileged students, who “knew the intimate language of the workshop” because they had “come up through the same literary worlds.” The method of instruction did not treat language organically or spiritually. Instead she found herself in “a workshop climate bent on criticism and language surgery.” Harjo “felt pressure to mimic the style.”25 (Not coincidentally, Rita Dove, the subject of the next chapter, also found herself conforming against her better judgment to the accepted standard of what she called “the Workshop poem.”)26 During her first semester, Harjo “locked [her] spirit away and wrote copy.” With the inspiration and encouragement of Cisneros, “then I began to break free.”27

  Breaking Free

  Discovering her artistic voice and vocational identity in opposition to received tradition was nothing new to Joy Harjo. Her future as a painter had been all but scripted for her, as her grandmother Naomi Harjo Foster and aunt Lois Harjo Ball were active artists whose pieces from their collections adorned her home. From the age of four, she “aspired to be like them.” Then, years later as a college student, she announced to her graphic arts instructor, Nick Abdullah, her plans to withdraw from the studio art major to pursue creative writing. The decision came not out of spite for Abdullah or his methods, but out of a need to find the best medium through which to grapple with the demons of her familial past. Spousal violence traces back to Harjo’s maternal grandmother, Leona May Baker (of equal parts Irish and Cherokee ancestry), whom she despised as a youth because of her insistence on telling painful stories of death and disaster from her own life.

  The most traumatizing event Leona retold in excruciating detail centered on her tumultuous marriage to Desmond Baker. Desmond accepted employment with the railroad company, requiring him to move away for extended periods while Leona was left alone to raise their daughter and six sons. During his absence, she had an affair, which Harjo later deemed acceptable as a method of discovering “the lightness she needed to stay alive.”28 Harjo’s view appears all the more defiant in light of the events that ensued when Desmond made an unannounced homecoming, whereupon he discovered Leona pregnant with another man’s child. The beating he delivered was so severe that it sent Leona into premature labor. Bloodied from his attack, she summoned help, only to discover that it was too late—the baby arrived stillborn. Distraught, Desmond began ranting a suicidal litany of frustration, vowing to await his death on the railroad tracks, the site of his work that began their woes. Leona, refusing to be left alone to carry the burden of what would be a crushing double loss of her child and her husband, demanded to join him on the rails. With their children watching, the two clung to each other as the train approached, its hulking steel roaring toward them. But seconds before the train delivered its deadly blow, the couple jumped to safety. Suicide presented itself momentarily as a method of breaking free from a life of misery, “weighted down with seven children and no opportunities,” as Harjo in adulthood compassionately described her grandmother’s plight. Despite such harrowing circumstances, survival prevailed, as it had in Harjo’s own life when she was forced to grapple with the trauma of near fatal domestic violence in her own immediate family. Discovering the language of poetry was integral to her own survival.

  Harjo’s father, a full-blooded Creek Indian, “drank off the sting” of his abusive treatment by his employers while working as a mechanic for United Airlines in the late 1960s. They taunted him with racial slurs and regularly called him “chief.” He unleashed his anger on his wife in the presence of the five-year-old Joy. She recalled: “One of my earliest memories is my father hitting my mother, throwing her against the tiled walls in the bathroom. He’s hitting, then choking her. I am pounding at the back of his jeans. I can only reach as far as the pockets.”29 After his death at the age of fifty-four, her mother married a man who “hated Indians and anything Indian,” threatening to murder her children if she were to divorce him. On several occasions, “he forced Harjo’s mother to play Russian roulette in front of the children.”30 The future world-famous poet—and a key figure
in the Native American literary renaissance, recognized with writers like Leslie Marmon Silko—fell silent. Due to the cumulative trauma she witnessed at home, the young Harjo struggled to speak, a condition echoed years later in a line from her most famous poem: “She had horses who whispered in the dark, who were afraid to speak.”31 Her silence when called upon in the classroom angered her teachers, who issued threats and punishments in response.

  Drawing and painting offered outlets for expression that words could not. But as she developed artistically, so did her desire to trust what her poetry workshop instructor David Johnson at UNM called “our instinctual mythic sense.” Poetry taught her to speak again after being silenced as a child. “Poetry basically told me: You don’t know how to listen, you need to learn how to speak, you need to learn grace, and you’re coming with me.”32 She quickly learned that “the debris of historical and family trauma that can kill your spirit is actually raw material to make things with and to build a bridge . . . over that which would destroy you,” as she beautifully articulated the process of healing through writing in her life.33 From then on, she immersed herself in the art, which became integral to her refusal to surrender to suicide as her grandmother had nearly done. In addition to this aesthetic imperative that prompted her calling as a poet, as a single mother of two young children, Harjo was forced out of economic necessity to specialize. The market for artists was nearly as barren as the market for musicians. She abandoned both out of a sense of responsibility to her children’s future, and promptly applied to a handful of graduate creative writing programs, including the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop.