To engage the world together: Diaz, Lundy, and Momaday
by Frank G. Karioris, Regular Contributor

 

Writing during these times of pandemic – writing even the shortest emails – is a difficulty, and comes packed with issues that are hard to put into words. Our affects are wrapped and compacted. Reading has also become a difficulty, as it takes mental capacity that is being taken with quotidian matters.

Tough times are exactly the moments that we most are in need of poetry that will bear us; that will bear our weight, that will hold us, that will open us. We have all long found words both provide that comforting sense of a world which makes sense, as well as making sense of the worlds that we are all responsible for (in both tenses of the term). We are all witnessing a trend on the page with writing revolved heavily around the ways violence is rooted so deeply in our system; a violence that is global in scale, and is destroying our relations, cultures, and the earth itself.

The past few months have seen the publication of some of the most exciting and impactful books addressing these topics. One of them, Work Want Work, addressing capitalism and our selves, I have previously reviewed here. Another one, much more surprising, and not quite as new, is the encyclical by Pope Francis addressing the destruction of our common home and inequality. The other three books are poetry volumes that have come out in the past few months.

 

The first is N. Scott Momaday’s The Death of Sitting Bear: New and Selected Poems. A senior leader in letters, this volume contains the multitude of much of their previous work. Frequently putting them in conversation with new ideas, the book opens new grounds between the past and present (and the selves that were part of those moments). In doing this, they also acknowledge the challenge of words (& voice) themselves:

I could tell of the splintered sun. I could
Articulate the night sky, had I words. (Momaday 32)

The connection here is not only between selves, but between the earth around us that makes these peoples, makes them who and where they are. Quoting form the Chippewa oral tradition, Momaday puts much of what these books are about in two short lines:

As my eyes search the prairie
I feel the summer in the spring. (Momaday xvi)

This takes this connectivity beyond simple temporality and outwards into the community, addressing itself to the interlinkages between all. The book, in total, is an expression of the challenges and heart of continuity that does not require consistency.

This book find a companion in Randy Lundy’s new volume Field Notes for the Self. The title stemming from Elena Johnson’s Field Notes for the Alpine Tundra gets to the core of the volume. Beyond a polite homage, this connection annunciates for us a sense of place that the book will address. Lundy takes this place and moves it from space outside the self to one that is intimately part of the self.

Roots have forgotten the sky, and bears in their dens cannot even dream
it into being. This is the season when all dreaming must cease. (Lundy 20)

Here the other becomes our self as well as those outside of our self, in that to look backwards at a past is to begin to understand reflexively how we come into contact – and that this contact is not singular (even if the moment itself is), but carries with us throughout each ripple of our life’s tides.

In a poem titled ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ (trans: ‘Work Makes You Free’), Lundy transports us both to the specific place/event of the Holocaust in Germany from the 1930s through the end of WWII, while inflecting this phrase as a comment about other genocides. The second verse goes:

I will ask you to remember
the rotting corpses of bison,
the rotting corpses of
my missing and murdered sisters,
and aunties and kohkums and lovers,
and the rotting teeth of the children
fed fat on McDonald’s. (Lundy 51)

Here, the past is touching the present in a direct link; linked as well with those who are intimate with the speaker (lovers), family, and community. They link the violence of wonton killing of bison (&, thusly, settler colonialism) to the violence of capitalistic deprivation, linking both to the horrors of the Jewish genocide.

Lundy, even at their most intimate and quiet, always pulls still at the strings holding the curtains open on the theatre of the world. There is an ability to find one’s selves within its pages in a way that is bracing like the first winter wind. In these times where we are so scattered physically from each other, this book provides an access-point for us to conjoin ourselves.

It is at this crossroads where Natalie Diaz’s newest book Postcolonial Love Poem enters. There are few other recent volumes that braid together the intimacy of love and the ramifications & realities (in the present & past) of colonialism. The poems, individually & collectively, abound in the joys & pains of living in the 21st century, living as part of communities – of resistance, of oppression, of love. Bringing us into specifics while finding a communalness:

At 2 a.m. everyone in New York City
is empty and asking for someone. (Diaz 15)

This has never been truer! It also speaks to the collectivity of waiting, of life in pause. As part of the beauty of the lines themselves, there is a decadent loneliness or waiting coming through each work.

This love – romance, passion, eroticism – is paired with a troubling torpor of the coloniality of our lives.

I learned Drink in a country of drought. (Diaz 1)

Diaz gives a wonderful play on language while forcefully inducing tones of severity and the slow death of alcoholism. Throughout the volume their brothers are interlocutors, who add to the cohort of peoples who find themselves at the mercy of a system that does not see individuals but simply numbers. Countering this deindividualizing, Diaz refuses it without giving in to the singular of person.

In more than one sense, these three books are just the tip of the iceberg. It is one of the wonderful joys that we – though just beginning to – have a wide array of amazing books – both topically addressing issues of indigeneity, colonialism, and our sense of self & community. Here one could create an expansive list, but I will simply not a couple. Jake Skeets’ Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers (2019) is a striking collection (“He bodies into me / half cosmos, half coyote.”). And the US Poet Laureate is an indigenous woman, Joy Harjo, whose new book An American Sunrise should most be on everyone’s reading list.

These books are, at their core, dialogic. They refuse singularity, pushing back against the individual as the category of analysis in favor of understanding selves in relation to each other, to systems & structures, and to effects that we might connect with each other through.

Books Reviewed:
Natalie Diaz (2020) Postcolonial Love Poems. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press
Randy Lundy (2020) Field Notes for the Self. Regina, Canada: University of Regina Press
N. Scott Momaday (2020) The Death of Sitting Bear: New and Selected Poems. New York: Harper.