Guard the Mysteries Read online

  Once when I walked into a room

  my eyes would seek out the one or two black faces

  for contact or reassurance or a sign

  I was not alone

  now walking into rooms full of black faces

  that would destroy me for any difference

  where shall my eyes look?

  Once it was easy to know

  who were my people.

  Lorde herself would start Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press in 1980. This was a press collective founded and operated by lesbians of color, including Barbara Smith, Cherríe Moraga, Hattie Gossett, Leota Lone Dog, and others. Lorde’s essays “Apartheid U.S.A.” and “I Am Your Sister,” later included in A Burst of Light, were first published as Kitchen Table Press pamphlets.

  I did want to speak more pointedly about the list, the chant, as repetition is a common formal element in much of the poetry I have read tonight. The fantasy of a truly binding tracery of light. The poet Joy Harjo writes beautifully of both its influence and its effect:

  Incantation and chant call something into being. They make a ceremonial field of meaning. Much of world poetry is incantation and chant. The poem that first made me truly want to become a poet was sung and performed by a healer in Southeast Asia. He appeared in a documentary I found on television. As he sang and performed the poem he became what he was singing/speaking, and even as he sang and spoke, his words healed his client.

  Both Revolutionary Letters and “A Litany for Survival” are good examples of a poet becoming what she is singing/speaking. We write the world we want to live in, calling it into being, and then make that dispersal available as a book, a recording, a form to step right into. The list can become a deceptively simple entrance.

  It is often dependent on a short, recurring, breathless rhythm that feels easy to depart from and even easier to shoot right back into, with time allowed for minor excursions. It can be put to work as an invocation, a repetition pushed to the point of delirium which reads as pure freedom or free union. This is a poem titled “Complicity” by Jayne Cortez:

  Who likes to glitter

  Who likes to smell blood

  Who likes to be real imperialistic

  real corrupt

  Trade all the gold for a mercedes-benz

  Trade all the oil for a peugeot

  Trade all the uranium for a rolls royce

  Trade all the peanuts for a villa above the Riviera

  Trade all the cocoa for a ski lodge in Grenoble

  Trade all the traditional art for a case of champagne

  Trade all the cobalt for a swiss bank account

  Who will buy the outmoded mold

  Who will buy the outdated rust

  Who will make a billion dollar deal

  to store radioactive waste

  Who likes to glitter

  Who likes to smell blood

  Who likes to be real imperialistic

  real corrupt

  If you think up a good title, a filter in advance like “Complicity,” you can coax your imagination word by word or action by action as in a play. Reading a list poem aloud can help to negotiate the bare bones of narrative. It clings to and flatters those rhythms that tumble out easily. The reader is allowed to climb back down from the apex and the path is always kept clear.

  This refining through repetition reminds me of another quote I have been carrying around recently. In an interview Joy Harjo was asked what she felt was possible at this point in terms of reclamation through Native poetry. Harjo remarked that her intention is “not to reverse history but to draw out the strength.” This is the continuous, transformative duty of the poet, to find the poetic means by which we can draw out further strength.

  Diane di Prima has a great refrain throughout one of the longer, later Revolutionary Letters—#105, titled “Fire Sale”—in which she keeps repeating, “we need to look / Not at what’s wrong / But what is possible // What wd your fantasy your imagination say / if reality were no obstacle.”

  Or Audre Lorde again, repeating what is at stake: “Teaching as a survival skill, the task facing all of us.”

  In a journal entry dated December 16, 1985, Lorde writes:

  Even Our Dead Behind Us—now that it has gone to the printer—seems prophetic. Like always, it feels like I plant what I will need to harvest, without consciousness.

  That is why the work is so important. Its power doesn’t lie in the me that lives in the words so much as in the heart’s blood pumping behind the eye that is reading, the muscle behind the desire that is sparked by the word—hope as a living state that propels us, open-eyed and fearful, into all [of] the battles of our lives. And some of those battles we do not win.

  But some of them we do.

  BECOMING VISIBLE

  It’s somewhat disarming to be asked to give a lecture on how I came to poetry, especially here in Seattle, so close to the scene of the crime. In any case, I am from Suquamish, a small reservation just across the Agate Pass Bridge from Bainbridge Island. The membership runs to around 1,000 enrolled members. It takes about an hour total, including the ferry ride, to get to Suquamish from here.

  More and more, I see the poet’s work as connecting bits of language as they begin to surface out right. My dream of composition is not to convey narrative but rather to illumine the fact that scaling these gaps aloud creates intimacy. It is a revealing process. Its arrival may result in entire lines or unsettled syllabic fits of speech. The pull of a rhythm can haunt the mind to the point of destroying any notion of free verse. Every lecture I have given, every essay or blog or interview, they all end up concerned with form at some point, how to convey the passage of the language through the body and down onto paper, and then to attempt to replicate that in the reading of the poems aloud.

  POST EXTINCTION

  How could you forget me so quickly—

  But the way you are reached, touched, awakened

  by the world continues

  the same way you yourself

  pass along a freely given

  lineage of existence

  Each one, every thing, perfect “as is”

  Like the moon

  going down

  never really leaves the sky

  So “existence” never quits,

  never began, never ended

  You see in the moment

  So sorry it will never be

  like this again—

  But when has the present ever been singular?

  Everything with a language of distinction

  with sorrow, with melancholy

  with sweet appreciation

  of an extinguished future

  when water becomes

  a state of being

  September 2014

  Joanne Kyger dated every one of her poems since she began publishing in the late 1950s. It almost feels like a notarizing gesture, a cataloging of evidence. I love the immediate intimacy thrust upon us with her furious question, “How could you forget me so quickly—.” The poet proceeds to offer up her literal pathway to the reader as she also takes note of very slight changes to the atmosphere. Kyger’s work can be incredibly rewarding to those poets willing to stop and listen closely, those willing to loosen their conception of time. Are we willing to enter into these landscapes “when water becomes / a state of being?” The poem suggests that life is in fact one long deluge dressed up for us as days and nights. After any sort of immersion in Kyger’s work, the body itself threatens to become an afterthought. It’s as if any construct can be questioned should it become tangled in the warp and measure, the unfolding of her household. The poet John Wieners speaks of similar, anointed pathways in an agonized and gorgeous essay from 1972, “The Lanterns Along the Wall”:

  Poetry is the most magical of all the arts. Creating a life-style for its practitioners, that safeguards and supports them.

  Along the way to becoming an artist are many pitfalls. For those who do not write do not know what true magic is.

/>   Many today become artists by adopting their looks, and gear, or else adhering around or to those who do practice this satisfaction. I cannot imagine a single day, when I have not spent dreaming or conjuring certain habits of the poet. Fortunate the few who are forced into making things surrounding the poets come true.

  I couldn’t help but think of my parents when I read that last sentence. My father, Charles Sigo, is a photographer and for a time was the curator/archivist for the Suquamish Museum. My mother, Lynne Ferguson, is a musician, specifically a singer. Both of them have always kept to a high personal standard. As well as maintaining a depth of belief in the arts, they allowed for a romantic tradition. Being an artist seemed to be more about continuous practice and execution rather than blindly applauding every effort. In Suquamish, certain artists would hurry into assigning themselves the title of master carver, painter, singer. My parents would sometimes joke about this.

  My mother seemed obsessed with the architecture behind the singing voice. She often spoke of diction, pitch, and phrasing and pointed out when singers held too much tension in their voices. But she would also take care to point out those musicians who offered an uncanny personal style, one that can break rules and render them useless, as in the later Billie Holiday recordings of the ’50s. Is our idealized voice in fact a ruin? Wherein the knowing of the instrument eventually transcends its physical strength?

  She was always beholden to her first voice teacher, George Peckham. She kept a notebook of his sayings. I met him once or twice when I was eight or nine and played around in his house and backyard when my mother came into the city for a lesson, a tune-up. It seemed an unfastening, really, or granting of permission. I remember when he died I attended the funeral; his daughter Lucy played a solo cello piece. The hall was so crowded with singers, and no one sang a note.

  My father put together the Eyes of Chief Seattle exhibit for the Suquamish Museum in 1983. His own photographs of reservation life in the early 1980s were hung alongside prints of Edward Curtis; same location and people but without the Victorian staging. He had the archive situated behind the museum, cataloging baskets, stone artifacts, and binders of contact sheets. He and my mother both conducted interviews with the Suquamish elders when the tribe had been awarded an oral history grant in 1980. My mother edited our tribal paper for years. Despite their highlighting of Suquamish history, they never cast our struggle as belonging to the past. In fact, their message seemed to be that misfortune often arises whenever we stop struggling. My father organized our annual powwow, Chief Seattle Days, as well as an indoor art fair every spring. Chief Seattle Days has been celebrated every year since 1911. My father has always kept his hair long to his waist but he has never claimed to be the most “traditional”—to know the most songs, or dances, or rush to summarize our history. It seemed he would rather leave it open-ended. At the same time, he has also kept a black-and-white record, a family tree for the Sigo family, hand-drawn and typed and taped together, which still hangs on the long wall of his living room. I have always thought my father’s photography seemed in line with Robert Frank, maybe even Larry Clark a bit. There was a dark room at the tribal center located just off of the archives. I remember being very young, maybe five, and waiting outside until my father said I could come in, and being bathed in the red light. Let’s see how the light plays out, that seemed to be his premise. Plus, documenting our intimate and ever-evolving Suquamish history. That gesture dates well in photography, provided you have an eye. The interiors of my father’s house and mine are almost identical. We laugh about it now: LPs, flyers hand-drawn by friends and framed. Seasonal shrines. The act of assemblage breathing softly in well-appointed rooms.

  THINGS TO DO IN SUQUAMISH

  Smoke Salmon

  Call San Francisco——————“Like…Totally!”

  Get driven to the terminal,

  escape.

  Come back after dark and feed the horses:

  alfalfa

  timothy

  oats

  Pick their hooves.

  Visit the Suquamish Museum

  the eyes of Chief Seattle are shut (his spirit to himself)

  sepia tones, baskets, white-hot rocks

  cobalt trade beads

  Say “hi” to all my cousins (cul-de-sac)

  “Hi Josh!”

  “Hi Jeremy!”

  Drink Rainier beer

  a red ribbon

  out up

  and over the peak

  (I confuse it with Mount Fuji)

  Walk back to dad’s room.

  He talks when he wants and smokes, linger over his bookshelf

  Moby-Dick, Starling Street, all of Kurt Vonnegut.

  Try and write the serial killer light at night

  (see-through

  green & black)

  Give up. Try Prose.

  I wrote that poem in 2011 while teaching a poetry workshop in Columbia City. I was asking the poets to write a “Things to Do” poem, a form made popular by Gary Snyder and very soon after taken up by the poet Ted Berrigan. My favorite of Berrigan’s is probably “Things to Do in Providence,” the premise of which is his returning home as an adult and being at the mercy of his family, feeling housebound, restless, and often bored: “Sit, watch TV, draw blanks, swallow Pepsi, meatballs, give yourself the needle: ‘Shit, There’s gotta be something to do here!’” Berrigan also wrote “Things to Do in Anne’s Room,” “Things to Do on Speed,” “Things to Do in New York City,” and “Ten Things I Do Every Day.” As you can hear, my poem becomes a list as it goes on, and the asides become more necessary, illuminating. When the asides threaten to upset the balance I return to my list. I wanted to write a poem that used the landscape of the reservation as a prompt, to unlock a familiarity that allows the poet total agency. It’s a bit like driving on rails or pretending to be driving, allowing your tone and candor to do the majority of the job. But it also calls into question the difference between form and formula. The formulaic aspect is so charming and easily apprehended in a “Things to Do” poem that I must make a literal attempt to destroy the vehicle. This affords me the space to invite in huge figures and mythic structures: Chief Seattle, a blueprint of my father’s house, Rainier Beer. I sometimes wonder if the success of a “Things to Do” poem doesn’t ultimately rest on its title. You’ve got to fashion the entrance first, sometimes that alone should flip the switch.

  I would be remiss if I didn’t speak a bit more on Chief Seattle, as he is buried in Suquamish. His dates are circa 1780 to June 7, 1866. He was the chief of both the Suquamish and the Duwamish, two kingdoms separated by the Puget Sound. His famous speech was delivered in 1854 in Lushootseed, the native language of the Suquamish, and dictated on the spot by Dr. Henry Smith into Chinook Jargon, which was a composite of Native, French, and Indian words. It is said that it was delivered on the occasion of a visit by the recently appointed Governor Isaac Stevens. This is from the last part of Dr. Smith’s translation:

  And when the last red man shall have perished from the earth and his memory among the white men shall have become a myth, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe; and when your children’s children shall think themselves alone in the fields, the store, the shop, upon the highway, or in the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be alone. In all the earth there is no place dedicated to solitude.

  At night when the streets of your cities and villages will be silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with returning hosts that once filled and still love this beautiful land. The white man will never be alone. Let him be just and deal kindly with my people, for the dead are not powerless.

  Dead—did I say? There is no death, only a change of worlds.

  Its dictation was obviously haunted with the element of poetry from the start, but it sounds to me more like Baudelaire than any possible American source, maybe Edgar Allan Poe. It feels rooted in imagery as much as in rhetoric. In fact, it is the animation of his imagery that makes the t
hreat of being haunted believable.

  Native prayers have always sounded like poetry to me, even when delivered in English. We thank the elements so resoundingly, you feel the gravitational waves around the words as they are spoken. That is still the manner of address in Suquamish. It is also freely acknowledged that all art is a form of medicine. My father rarely spoke of spiritual matters, but when he did, he used the term “The Creator” as other Suquamish families often did. We believe in the creator. I think I was always taken with that term, haunted by the responsibility of making poems and drawings. I saw a like-mindedness in the poet Charles Olson’s statement, “I am a MAKER of poems.” Here is a poem of Olson’s from the last pages of his epic, The Maximus Poems:

  Wholly absorbed

  into my own conduits to

  an inner nature or subterranean lake

  the depths or bounds of which I more and more

  explore and know more

  of, in that sense that other than that all else

  closes out and I tend further to fall into

  the Beloved Lake and I am blinder from

  spending time as insistently in and on

  this personal preserve from which

  what I do do emerges more well-known than

  other ways and other outside places which

  don’t give as much and distract me from

  keeping my attentions as clear

  “Additions”, March 1968—2

  I can hear the joining in the rising of his words as the poem leaves traces of its own path outward. The content is laid in perfectly as it is questioning the types of energy available or at hand, “the depths or bounds of which I more and more explore.” Poetry itself is shown to be his “personal preserve.” I always seem to drag the act of composition into the middle of my own work, possibly to allow the passing outsider a view into its making. As spun out as this Olson poem leaves us at the end and whether or not one can even recall where it started, it certainly lifts us into its measure for the duration of our reading, and the voice must remain committed to lifting it. This poem reminds me of a quote by Lew Welch, “Guard the mysteries! Constantly reveal them!” When I could really hear that and take it in as permission, what a relief! I wish I could find my old Charles Olson imitations. I’m still proud of my willingness to try the techniques detailed in his essay “Projective Verse.” “The HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE.” There are so many forms of writing backing up The Maximus Poems, meaning Olson’s interviews, his book-length studies, Mayan Letters, his essays, etc. The surface of the poetry gets paid off royally when you throw yourself into all the forms that are eventually asked of you.