MyQuest | my thoughts on life's journey

Spring Song

Spring Song
by Sherwood Anderson

In the forest, amid old trees and wet dead leaves,
  a shrine.
Men on the wet leaves kneeling.
The spirit of God in the air above a shrine.  

Now, America, you press your lips to mine,
Feel on your lips the throbbing of my blood.
Christ, come to life and life calling,
Sweet and strong. 

Spring. God in the air above old fields.
Farmers marking fields for the planting of the corn.
Fields marked for corn to stand in long
straight aisles.  

In the spring I press your body down on wet cold
   new-plowed ground.
Men, give your souls to me.
I would have my sacred way with you. 

In the forest, amid old trees and wet dead leaves,
  a shrine.
Men rising from the kneeling place to sing.
Everywhere in the fields now the orderly planting
  of corn. 

 

Well, that was (homo)erotic.

A Cycle of the West

A Cycle of the West: The Song of Three Friends, The Song of Hugh Glass, The Song of Jed Smith, The Song of the Indian Wars, The Song of the Messiah by John G. Neihardt
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Growing up in the northern plains, John Neihardt was convinced that the period from the first exploration of fur trappers through the close of the Indian wars was one of humankind's heroic ages, on a par with the ancient Greece of Homer, the era of Beowulf, etc. So, he set about to write a saga of the west in this collection of five songs published between 1915 and 1941 which were always intended to be combined into one work. It is an incredible achievement.

Which left me wondering why it is not an established part of the American literary canon. These are stories I should have had read to me as a child. Images from these songs should be familiar in the national psyche. Lines and phrases should be memorized and quoted in conversation.

The cycle opens with The Song of Three Friends about an early fur trading party that explores the upper Missouri. There they encounter an indigenous tribe and a love triangle develops. Things do not go well from there. In fact, this opening song reminded me of a Cormac McCarthy novel. The end is harrowing (Neihardt really knows how to end something, which is a skill many authors lack).

Next is The Song of Hugh Glass. I had heard the basic elements of this story before, but Neihardt has turned it into a work of art. I was surprised to encounter a gay love story (Neihardt wrote this in 1915, long before Annie Proulx wrote Brokeback Mountain). Hugh Glass was a real man who endured a horrific episode. Left for dead by friends when he came to, he was unable to walk and crawled his way back to civilization. Neihardt's description of the crawl is also McCarthy-like.

I didn't care much for the third song, The Song of Jed Smith, which Neihardt wrote last. I found the language too dense and the structure of it was unnecessarily complicated, I thought. A group of guys is sitting around a campfire years later recalling their stories of exploring routes to and from California, encountering the Great Salt Lake, the Colorado, the Sierras, the deserts. In setting this is more McCarthy-like, but I found the story mostly dull.

The Song of the Indian Wars is fourth, recounting stories of Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, Custer, Fetterman, and more. This material was most familiar to me and some of it simply read like history. Some of the chapters were nice works of art that could stand on their own, though I found the account of the Battle of the Little Big Horn to be quite confusing. I enjoyed his portrayals of the Native Americans. Neihardt did his research interviewing people who were still alive or the friends and family of his characters, both Caucasian and Native.

Finally is The Song of the Messiah which recounts the coming of the ghost dance, the death of Sitting Bull, and the massacre at Wounded Knee. Also familiar material, but here mesmerizingly well told. I think Neihardt is at his best when writing about spiritual visions (e. g. Black Elk Speaks). Two of my favourite passages of this entire cycle came near the end of this song. The death of Sitting Bull is powerfully told (I blogged some favourite lines last night) and then shifts tenderly to the perspective of his horse, who sits down beside his dead master.

But no account you've read of the massacre at Wounded Knee prepares you for Neihardt's retelling. If you were horrified reading about it in Dee Brown, you will be more so here.

I look forward to reading these stories to my children, so that these great characters and stories can permeate their imaginations.

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"A roar of wrath"

Close to completing John G. Neihardt's A Cycle of the West.  In the final song, The Song of the Messiah, he is writing about the moment when Sitting Bull is being taken by soldiers and just moments before he is fatally shot.  Sitting Bull cries out that he will not go, and Neihardt writes:

The great voice fled
Among the people, leaving in its path
An inward surging and a roar of wrath.

Those are great lines.  Remind me of Tennyson.  I should try to memorize them.

The rest of this chapter is poignant as he narrates the death scene from the perspective of Sitting Bull's horse. 

Selected Poems

Selected Poems by Rita Dove
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Dove's poems simply didn't resonate with me. They weren't dense or difficult, on the contrary. But I just didn't find myself in them nor did I discover great beauty. I'm sure others have a different experience, which is a reminder that sometimes poetry is very personal.

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Whom You Love

Whom You Love

by Joseph O. Legaspi

 

 

"Tell me whom you love, and I'll tell you 

who you are." -- Creole Proverb

The man whose throat blossoms with spicy chocolates 
Tempers my ways of flurrying 
Is my inner recesses surfacing 
Paints the bedroom blue because he wants to carry me to the skies 
Pear eater in the orchard 
Possesses Whitmanesque urge & urgency 
Boo Bear, the room turns orchestral 
Crooked grin of ice cream persuasion 
When I speak he bursts into seeds & religion 
Poetry housed in a harmonica 
Line dances with his awkward flair 
Rare steaks, onion rings, Maker's on the rocks 
Once-a-boy pilfering grenadine 
Nebraska, Nebraska, Nebraska 
Wicked at the door of happiness 
At a longed-for distance remains sharply crystalline 
Fragments, but by day's end assembled into joint narrative 
Does not make me who I am, entirely 
Heart like a fig, sliced 
Peonies in a clear round vase, singing 
A wisp, a gasp, sonorous stutter 
Tuning fork deep in my belly, which is also a bell 
Evening where there is no church but fire 
Sparks, particles, chrysalis into memory 
Moth, pod of enormous pleasure, fluttering about on a train 
He knows I don't need saving & rescues me anyhow 
Our often-misunderstood kind of love is dangerous 
Darling, fill my cup; the bird has come to roost

The Daffodils

The Daffodils

by William Wordsworth

I wandered lonely as a cloud

   That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
   A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
   And twinkle on the Milky Way,
They stretched in never-ending line
   Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced, but they
   Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A Poet could not but be gay,
   In such a jocund company:
I gazed--and gazed--but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
   In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
   Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

Life

Life

by Joe Brainard

 

       When I stop and think about what it's all about I do come up with some answers, but they don't help very much.

        I think it is safe to say that life is pretty mysterious. And hard.

        Life is short. I know that much. That life is short. And that it's important to keep reminding oneself of it. That life is short. Just because it is. I suspect that each of us is going to wake up some morning to suddenly find ourselves old men (or women) without knowing how we got that way. Wondering where it all went. Regretting all the things we didn't do. So I think that the sooner we realize that life is short the better off we are.

        Now, to get down to the basics. There are 24 hours a day. There is you and there are other people. The idea is to fill these 24 hours as best one can. With love and fun. Or things that are interesting. Or what have you. Other people are most important. Art is rewarding. Books and movies are good fillers, and the most reliable.

        Now you know that life is not so simple as I am making it sound. We are all a bit fucked up, and here lies the problem. To try and get rid of the fucked up parts, so we can just relax and be ourselves. For what time we have left.

The Wolf Reader

The Wolf Reader

by George Szirtes

 for Marilyn Hacker

There were the books, and wolves were in the books.
They roamed between words. They snarled and loped
through stories with bedraggled wolfish looks

at which the hackles rose and the world stopped
in horror, and she read them because she knew
the pleasures of reading, the page being rapt

with the magic of the fierce, and she could do
the talk of such creatures. So one day
when teacher asked if there were any who

could read, she rose as if the task were play,
to claim the story where she felt at home.
The tale was Riding Hood, the wolf was grey.

The fierceness was the wood where grey wolves roam.
She read it round, she read it through and through
It was as if the wolf were hers to comb,

like those bedraggled creatures in the zoo
that, trapped behind the bars, would snarl and stride
as you'd expect a page or wolf to do.

A Strange Place to Call Home

A Strange Place to Call Home: The World's Most Dangerous Habitats & the Animals That Call Them Home by Marilyn Singer
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Another beautiful children's book I picked up at the museum store. This one combines poetry, biology, and beautiful collage to talk about animals which live in strange and dangerous habitats. The scientific details about the animals are at the back of the book, but each page is a beautiful work of art with a poem. The poems are also in various forms, which the poet discusses at the close of the book. So it is also a way to teach about poetry. Science, poetry, art, all together. Very nice.

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Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry

Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry by Jim Harrison
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A short, simple book of aphorisms and small poems that Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser wrote to one another when Kooser was ill. They don't attribute specific lines to one another.

Some lines made me laugh out loud, some were sentimental, some reminded you of the joys and burdens of the mundane, and a handful were on aging. Very little was inspiring or awed me with beauty, but I don't think those were the purpose of this book.

A quick, easy, enjoyable read.

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