with my red hair / And I eat men like air." Ted Roethke’s lost-son, lyric blues:
"Thrum-thrum, who can be equal to ease? / I’ve seen my father’s face before / Deep in
the belly of a thing to be." John Berryman’s brilliant mad comic pain: "These
songs were not meant to be understood, you understand, / They were meant to terrify
& comfort. / Lilac was found in his hand."
A kind of Indian antipoetry breaks form at the millennial end. Alexie pushes against
formalist assumptions of what poetry ought to be, knocks down aesthetic barriers set up in
xenophobic academic corridors, and rebounds as cultural performance. He can play technique
with mock sonnet, breezy villanelle, unheroic couplet, tinkling tercet, quaky quatrain in
any-beat lines. The rhymer trades on surreal images and throwaway metaphors in a drunken
villanelle: Trail of Tears . . . trail of beers. The rush of his poems is an energy
released, stampeding horses, raging fires, stomping shoes: the poet as fast & loose
sharpster in accretive repetition. Alexie likes catalogues, anaphoral first-word
repetitions, the accumulative power of oral traditions. There is something freeing about
all this—free to imagine, to improvise, to make things up, to wonder, to rage on.
Sharpening wits on quick wit, his poetry runs free of restrictive ideas about Indians,
poems, ponies, movies, shoes, dreams, dumpsters, reservations, angers, losses. His lines
break free of precious art . . . but free for what, that matters? Do we care? the
hard questions come tumbling. Do we remember, or listen closely, or think carefully, or
wonder fully, or regard deeply enough?
Readers certainly learn about New Rez Indi’ns who shoot hoop, stroke pool, fancy dance,
drink beer, snag girls, hustle, hitch, rap, joke, cry, rhyme, dream, write everything
down. These Computer Rad ‘Skins write verse that does not stay contained in formal
repose: does not pull away, or shimmer in the night sky, or intimidate the common reader,
but comes on full as a poetry that begs visceral response. Often cartoonish, a gag, a
point-of-view gimmick, more "like" Virtual lndian. "There is no
possible way to sell your soul" for poetry, Alexie said in LA (December 17, 1996),
"because nobody’s offering. The devil doesn’t care about poetry. No one wants to make
a movie out of a poem." This trickster has made one movie, as mentioned, and cast
another from Indian Killer.
Call it a reactive aesthetics, kinetic pop art, protest poetics to involve and
challenge late-century readers—cajoled, battered, insulted, entertained, humored,
angered to respond. A poetry that gets us up off our easy chairs. Tribal jive, that is,
streetsmart, populist, ethnocentric, edged, opinionated, disturbed, fired up as
reservation graffiti, a la John Trudell’s Venice, California, rock lyrics, a
Cherokee-breed Elvis as "Baby Boom Che." Alexie joins the brash, frontier
braggadocio of westering America, already out west a long time, ironically, a tradition in
itself, shared with Whitman, Lawrence, Stein, Mailer, Kesey, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Vonnegut,
Bellow, Heinemann, Mamet. Huckster, con man, carny barker, stand-up comedian, Will Rogers
to Jonathan Winters, Cheech & Chong to Charlie Hill. The impudence of the anti-poetic
Red Rapster, daring us not to call this poetry. "I’m not a rapper," Russell
Means crows of his punk album, Electric Warrior, "I’m a Rapaho!"
"You’ll almost / believe every Indian is an Indian," Alexie carries on.
Frybread . . . Snakes . . . Forgiveness
Excerpted from a longer essay, "Futuristic Hip Indian: Alexie." From Sing
With the Heart of a Bear: Fusions of Native and American Poetry, 1890-1999. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2000. Copyright ? 2000 by The Board of Regents of the
University of California.