In a burst of creative energy, the poet Jon Anderson published three books in rapid succession with the University of Pittsburgh Press: Looking for Jonathan [1968], Death & Friends [1970], and In Sepia [1974]. Anderson, who had preceded me at the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop, graduating in 1968, had belonged to a generation of poets, which included James Tate, among others, whose predominant qualities weren't particularly lyrical in the traditional sense, but more prosaic, confessionalist and self-sufficiently accessible. I.e., the "workshop" poem--clear, sane, serious, committed, balanced and sensible. But Anderson's poems were a little different. There was a fatalism, a more mature cynicism about them, which made their personal poses seem more honest, or daring.
I think now I was probably misreading him in my youth, that what I was seeing was cynicism--but I now think, a deliberately strategized cynicism designed to create a mood against which conviction might be implied. A sort of updated Dover Beach, if you will.
Anderson died in October 2007, at age 67, not really young, but somewhat prematurely. After those first three Pittsburgh volumes, his output had slowed considerably, and between about 1980 and 2000, he apparently stopped writing altogether for a while. This wouldn't have surprised anyone familiar with his work. It often seemed as if Anderson were pulling his own guts out in his poems: "These refusals begin to look like courage./You're trying hard not to give in." The trying hard not to give in was the pressure under which he insisted serious writing must occur, a high calling which lent all his poems an aura of inconsolable isolation and disappointment. People, and circumstances, usually didn't live up to their potential.
I never met Anderson, but he did come to read at Iowa in (I think) 1970. A thin, serious guy with long hair (most everyone had long hair in those days). I think Anderson must have been a difficult man to know. Two failed marriages. An exiled New Englander spending his last years down in the Arizona desert. Hard on himself. Hard on other people. But this is mostly speculation. Unlike a lot of other pretty good poet-teachers, he inspired a lot of students who went on to produce work made possible by the challenge of possibility and commitment he presented to them.
One of the poems Anderson read that night in Iowa City has stayed with me over the years. Picking up a copy of In Sepia [1974], I reread it for the first time in many years, and was struck by the different way I remembered it, and how it spoke to me now. Good poems will often change over time, speaking to you in different voices, telling (revealing) new things as your own experience of the world grows, and changes you inside. The poem is about the experience of visiting the Little Big Horn, in Montana, and thinking about the relationship between the white man's stewardship of the earth, and the facts of our own lives in the present.
Here is the poem in full--
Rosebud
There is a place in Montana where the grass stands up two feet,
Yellow grass, white grass, the wind
On it like locust wings & the same shine.
Facing what I think was south, I could see a broad valley
& river, miles into the valley, that looked black & then trees.
To the west was more prairie, darker
Than where we stood, because the clouds
Covered it; a long shadow, like the edge of rain, racing towards us.
We had been driving all day, & the day before through South Dakota
Along the Rosebud, where the Sioux
Are now farmers, & go to school, & look like everyone.
In the reservation town there was a Sioux museum
& 'trading post', some implements inside: a longbow
Of shined wood that lay in its glass case, reflecting light.
The walls were covered with framed photographs.
The Oglala posed in fine dress in front of a few huts,
Some horses nearby: a feeling, even in those photographs
The size of a book, of spaciousness.
I wanted to ask about a Sioux holy man, whose life
I had recently read, & whose vision had gone on hopelessly
Past its time: I believed then that only a great loss
Could make us feel small enough to begin again.
The woman behind the counter
Talked endlessly on; there was no difference I could see
Between us, so I never asked.
The place in Montana
Was the Greasy Grass where Custer & the Seventh Cavalry fell,
A last important victory for the tribes. We had been driving
All day, hypnotized, & when we got out to enter
The small, flat American tourist center we began to argue.
And later, walking between the dry grass & reading plaques,
My wife made an ironic comment: I believe it hurt the land, not
Intentionally; it was only meant to hold us apart.
Later I read of Benteen & Ross & those who escaped,
But what I felt then was final: lying down, face
Against the warm side of a horse & feeling the lulls endlessly,
The silences just before death. The place might stand for death,
Every loss rejoined in a wide place;
Or it is rest, as it was after the long drive,
Nothing for miles but grass, a long valley to the south
& living in history. Or it is just a way of living
Gone, like our own, every moment.
Because what I have to do daily & what is done to me
Are a number of small indignities, I have to trust that
Many things we say to each other are not intentional,
That every indirect word will accumulate
Over the earth, & now, when we may be approaching
Something final, it seems important not to hurt the land.
The first thing to note is the relaxed, easy language, the meditative calm, recollected in a tranquillity which is deceptively smug on the surface. But no Anderson poem is ever quite as simple as this. Thinking about the place, the event, the poet's memory is overshadowed by the static interference of his marital incompatibility.
"I believed than that only a great loss/Could make us feel small enough to begin again." This appears to refer both to the loss of the Seventh Cavalry on that fateful day in June, 1876, as well as to the speaker's deteriorating marriage.
"A last important victory for the tribes" sounds glib, except that it's a simple statement of fact. Walking among the gravestones on the little rise where Custer's Last Stand occurred, the couple argues. The poet senses a violation, not perhaps to some symbolically stale sentiment--some mawkish respect for the dead--but for our commitment to the fruits of our empty victory over "the tribes." The wife's ironic remark "hurts" the land. Is this an absurdly empty response, a cranky, bitchy jab in the midst of trivial bitterness?
The remark "was only meant to hold us apart."
The place might stand for death,
Every loss rejoined in a wide place;
Or it is rest, as it was after the long drive,
Nothing for miles but grass, a long valley to the south
& living in history. Or it is just a way of living
Gone, like our own, every moment.
The elegaic tone is subsumed within the larger principle of our passage through time. The defeat at Little Big Horn didn't take place within some remote, inaccessible locus, under the glass of fictionalized fantasy. It was a real event, and the issues and causes which accompanied it are as real, and present, to us, as the report of a battle in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Because what I have to do daily & what is done to me
Are a number of small indignities, I have to trust that
Many things we say to each other are not intentional,
That every indirect word will accumulate
Over the earth, & now, when we may be approaching
Something final, it seems important not to hurt the land.
Every action we take, every word we utter, every deed we do "accumulates" and does not go away, leaves its mark, is "final" and cannot be expunged or excused. "Hurting the land" may mean hurting ourselves, our inheritance, our responsibility to the legacy of our own culture, and that of those we have displaced in our mindless greed to exploit everything, as if it were our birthright to do so.
There have been many books, and many good books, written about Custer, and the Indian Wars, and about The Great Sioux War. But this poem presents the case of the specific event, in the most common of terms, not as a panoramic historical tapestry, replete with documentation of creed and strategic complexity, but in concrete terms, human terms. Superficially, it might read like a failed late Sixties poem about wanting to heal the wounds of conflict, or sewing the rent earth back up after a century of scarring. But step back a little and see how the poem itself is a drama complete unto itself, in which the participants are no more, and no less culpable and trapped within the net of their fate than the original combatants. It "seemed" important not to hurt the land. That seemed puts us at a distinct remove from the feelings of the moment, and throws the whole account into an ironic light. It seemed important that, beyond the ephemeral cares of the moment, the meaning of our history on this sacred ground might transcend the merely careless traffic of our daily lives. Or, conversely, how we act towards one another is just as important as an obscure battle on a windy hill that took place a century or more ago.
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