… this post by CSID fellow David Taylor is continued from Part 1.
In 1994, Jerome Rothenberg writes, “… a poetics without a concurrent ethnopoetics is stunted, partial, therefore faulty at a time like ours that can only save itself by learning to confront its multiple identities and definitions—its contradictions, therefore, & its problematics.” I’ll come back to this.
*****
We reach the site at Sand Canyon in a half-hour. The site is self-touring and not on a main route, so it’s pretty quiet here. It’s a piňon-juniper forest and looking relatively lush after last night’s rain. Porter walks through the forest as thought he is at a Trader Joe’s on free sample day—late season wild spinach here, Mormon tea there. He pulls a few piňon needles and hands them to me. “Chew them only on the tip of your tongue,” he suggests. It tastes like piney lemon.
We all talk about what most scholars say was the reason these folk left their homes and places in this region around the same time (around 1285 AD)—drought, food shortage, and warfare. Certainly the scientific data from the various “_____ists” points to these causes. I’ve got no problem with the idea—no vested interest in my sense of scholarship, history or place. Porter might, but it seems that he is more interested in possibilities than conclusions.
For example, when he looks at the sign which shows the rooms and structure of the Sand Canyon dwellings, Porter sees lines of division between lineages and clans. “Maybe,” he says. “They just got tired of living in the same place.” Or, maybe, the drought was for them a reminder to try and remedy their lives which had deviated from their goals—to start anew, which also means returning to the old ways.
In the sand, he draws this symbol.
He says this is a Tewa symbol which could be simplified as “place.” Community is a type of “place,” but not necessarily the only kind of “place.” Another synonymous meaning is “center of.” He says when these ideas are combined with other images, the actual context comes to life.
I’m noticing in the symbol, circles which on one hand can be seen as smaller and smaller—focusing in. On the other, I can see in it circles growing out just as I saw in the pond this morning—circles growing out which must inevitably intersect with other “centers of.” Of course, then, I can’t help but apply this creative reading to Porter’s thoughts about this place, the choices of the people who were here, their loves and fears, their readings of the symbols they saw and imagined. Maybe they imagined moving outward, not inward.
I’m also thinking whether this is my line of appropriation. Am I seeing in the symbol what I want to see or am I listening? Creation and imagination are the heartbeat of what I do as a writer. I let words create; I let sounds imagine. However, these are within the English language and frankly, out of a culture which could be taxonomically classified as American with a dash of Texan. In taking the symbol Porter has offered and recreating it within my own culture, I’m doing what colonial cultures have done centuries, what Eric Cheyfitz calls “the poetics of imperialism.”i Yet Rothenberg suggests that contemporary poetry “can only save itself by learning to confront its multiple identities and definitions—its contradictions, therefore, & its problematics.” Contradictions and problematics—I’ve got those down. I want in all this in a clean idea and a clean sentence that is as tough as sinew and yet aware and pliable. But now, sitting in the back seat of the van and writing in my journal, I’m uncomfortable; perhaps this is as it should be. The words and ideas I am noting are in part mine and in part not mine at all. But I’m trying with every line to nod to its origin. Maybe even more, I’m trying to let the words I write down be words that are listening to the stories I’m hearing—Porter’s, SteveB’s, and SteveW’s. I’m giggling to myself now because my friends back home often tease about why anyone should write poetry. I often refer them to question asked of Snyder. I don’t know what poetry can do to save the world, but I know there’s the work of poetry I need to be doing. I don’t think Snyder’s laugh is a dismissal. Right now, as I’m quietly sitting with my journal while there is a shouting match in my head, I’m thinking it is an affirmation.
On the drive home, SteveW takes us to the Dolores Brew Pub for a beer and pizza. Some of the folk from Crow Canyon are there, but the whole place has a feel of a small-town, southwestern Colorado Cheers. It’s a nice contrast to what’s going on in my thoughts.
i. The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from The Tempest to Tarzan. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997.