letters & leaves - mcgrath's indian culture vs. whitman's poetic tradition - 1985
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8/7/2019 Letters & Leaves - McGrath's Indian Culture vs. Whitman's Poetic Tradition - 1985
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North Dakota Quarterly
Volume 53, Number 1 Winter 1985
Contents
Jay Meek
Thomas Matchie
The Librettist (poem)
5 Letter and Leaves: McGrath's Indian
Culture vs. Whitman's Poetic
Tradition
Thomas McGrath 26 Seven Poems
James H. Rogers 29 Vision and Feeling: An Interview
with Thomas McGrath
Harvey Lillywhite 45 Five Poems
Peter Wild 49 Rescuing James Ohio Pattie,
Litterateur
Ken McCullough 60 Two Poems
Mary Tookey 62 Christians, Pagans, and Patriarchs:
Malamud's System of Symbols
Dan Campion 81 Handful of Stars (poem)
Marcia Tager 82 Adoration (story)
Hillel Schwartz 87 Fair (poem)
Bill Christophersen 89 Between Two Houses: Architecture
as Metaphor in The Professor's
House
R Bartkowech 97 Two Poems
Malcolm South 102 The Lion as a Guardian Symbol and
Figure
Norbert Krapf 112 A Swabian Scene (poem)
John D. Nesbitt 114 Cain Hammet's Bighorn Sheep and
Lije Evans' Dog
Hugh Ogden 120 I Remember Thinking They Would
Save Him (poem)
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Roger Handberg 121 Know Thy Enemy: Changing Images
of the Enemy in Popular Literature
P. H. Liotta 128 Two Poems
Sea Changes: Books That Mattered
Elinor Grumet 130 On Reinventing Womanhood
Reviews
Michael Anderegg 133 Four Books on British Cinema
Michael Beard 137 Samuel Weber, The Legend of Freud
Joan Eades 142 Nadine Gordimer, Something Out
There
Michael Jaksa 144 Hiram Drache, Koochiching
Mark Phillips 148 Richard Dokey, Sundown, and Jack
L. Stoll, Rex, A Fictional Satire and
Comments on the American Way of
Sex
Robert Seabloom 150 The World After Nuclear War: A
Review of a Conference on Long-
Term Biological Consequences of
Nuclear Conflict
Max Westbrook 152 Jackson J. Benson, The True Adven··
tures of John Steinbeck, Writer
Robert W. Lewis 154 Timothy Young, "Men Don't Dance
in America"
A. William Johnson 156 Theses and Dissertations Accepted by
the Graduate School of the Univer-
sity of North Dakota - 1984
Editor's Notes 169
Contributors 172
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Letter and Leaves:
McGrath's Indian Culture vs.
Whitman's Poetic Tradition
THOMAS MATCH IE
At least one critic has described Parts I and II of Tom McGrath's
Letter to an Imaginary Friend as "the best long poem in America since
Leaves oj Grass." I After the appearance of the "Christmas Section"
of Part III in the early 1980s, Diane Wakoski said it is definitely in
the tradition of Whitman and' 'could become the greatest poem out
of the heart of the American midwest."? Because that tradition is so
important I want to discuss ways in which McGrath looks back to his
New York predecessor for his own development; I also want to focus \
on the history, though-particularly the Indian history-that separates
these two, and upon which McGrath depends so heavily for his theme
and structure. McGrath is a student not only of poetic history, in which
Whitman is a pioneer, but also, like Whitman, of social and political
development in America. McGrath, however, beginning his long poem
in 1955, wrote exactly one hundred years after the publication of the
first edition of Leaves oj Grass and centers on events, particularly the
settlement of the West and the Indians' demise, that are too late or
too far removed from Whitman's experience. Hence the interests that
link him to Whitman in an ironic way make him significantly different.
First, then, a look at some of the factors that tie these two poems
together. Like "Song of Myself," McGrath's poem is pseudo-
autobiographical. Whitman's poem went through ten editions between
1855 and his death in 1891. He includes such things as his boyhood
on Long Island, details of his days as a newspaper reporter in Manhat-
tan, and experiences during the Civil War; McGrath begins Part I of
his Letter as a boy on a farm in North Dakota, moves through collegelife in Grand Forks and Louisiana in the 1930s, recounts violent episodes
from his military duty during World War II, and ends in the mid 1950s
as a writer in Los Angeles. As with Whitman, McGrath's poem is in-
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complete; he once said the one thing he wanted to do was keep work-
ing on Letter,' and it now appears that Parts III and IV are ready for
publication. At any rate-though one starts in New York, the other
in North Dakota-both poets write from their experiences, which they
then use to comment on events of their respective centuries in a larger-
than-personal sense; they really interpret through their own lives the
changing consciousness of a country.
That interpretation comes through their commentaries on rural as
well as urban settings. Both, for instance, describe their boyhood selves
as a part of the land. In "There Was a Child Went Forth" the lilacs
and farmyard on Long Island become an intimate source of Whitman's
psychic life, and in "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" the sea and
the bird contribute thematically to his own becoming a poet through
the conscious acceptance of death. Brooks sees this kind of acceptance
as an important lesson for a nation obsessed (in the mid 19th century)with material progress." So in McGrath's Letter some of the richest
poetry is in the poet's description of his young growing self in connec-
tion with the farmland of North Dakota. And though he sees much
wrong with his own state, he finds the prairie and coulees renewing
and refreshing, for himself and all America. 5 Smeall adds that McGrath
moves from autobiographic idyllic remembrances of the prairie-' 'the
Indian dead," for instance-to a universal dream of a better society,
and in the process changes the structure of our feelings. 6
Regarding the city, both had that realistic eye of the reporter, and
though Whitman romanticizes the urban landscape in "Crossing
Brooklyn Ferry," his graphic details of city life- "the suicide sprawls
on the bloody floor of the bedroom" (Sec. Sr-are reflected in
McGrath's observations of similar scenes as a writer in Los Angeles:
Thump.
And out of that colorless heaven
Some poor mad whore falls a whirling praying
Ten stories.
Thump.
To give us our Daily News:
(pp. 153-154)'
The rhythm in both poems mirrors the fast pace of the city, though
McGrath's is more erratic and his texture more complex-here the iam-
bic hexameter catches the "thump" of both the dead body and the print-
ing press on which the story is recalled. As with Whitman, however,
his life experiences help interpret the social problems of an industrial
age.
A second and deeper way in which McGrath and Whitman are alike
is that both are healers-medicine men, if you will-who look at
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themselves as spiritual envoys to the same Union whose history they
mirror in their own lives. In his study of Whitman, Cleanth Brooks
points out that this poet uses all the marks of such a primitive doctor.
The poem begins in a trance-"I mind how once ... you / ... gently
turned over upon me, / ... and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript
heart, ... / And I know / ... all the men ever born are also my
brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers" (Sec. 5)-wherein he
becomes aware of his role as a shaman: to rise above the present cor-
rupted condition of man and undertake mystical journeys in order to
heal the wounds that separate people from each other. 9 In this context,
where "a kelson of the creation is love," he fulfills the primitive pat-
terns of such specialists in ecstasy, including an appeal to and dialogue
with animal spirits-" Ya-honk" (Sec. 14), the wild gander says-and
where music and dance-"my cornets and my drums" (Sec. lS)-help
prepare the soul for its mystic journey. {O Thus in his own consciousness
this poet becomes not just a verse-maker, but what Emerson calls "a
liberating god." And when he says, "I will plant companionship thick
as trees along all the rivers of America" (Whitman, p. 117), he speaks
as the nation's shaman.
McGrath's poetry also involves a "medicine bundle." His epiphany,
however, comes not through a sexual relationship though, as with Whit-
man, sex is important to his vision, but in the context of work. During
a fight on a threshing rig, where his uncle swears at his friend Cal-a
leader in getting the men to strike-the boy discovers something pro-
found about the meaning of labor: "I remember that ugly sound, like
some animal cry touching mel Deep and cold, and I ran toward them/
And the fighting started" (p. IS). Stern says this is the beginning of
McGrath's political-economic view of America, it one through whichhe becomes very critical of the industrial-scientific progress that Whit-
man tolerated and at times praised. In this context the references to
animals and elements of music make sense, helping to define the poet's
mission. The "secret language" of "ducks," for instance, unveils his
animated view of the universe as he begins his mystic' 'journeys," ac-
companied by "the singing services/ And ceremony cheerful as a harness
bell" (p. 2). So, too, the crickets, frogs, and a hawk help the poet sing-
in this case the "formal calls of a round-dance" (p. 22), including the
Indian kachina so basic to this poet's music. Like Whitman, then,
McGrath is aware of his role as a shaman whose poem wiII be a unify-
ing device for the society he criticizes.
A third similarity in the two long poems is that the poets want
something new for America. Whitman's life, of course, parallels theindustrial revolution and settlement of the whole continent. As a
Romantic he celebrates America's geographic and social growth ("The
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latest dates, discoveries, inventions, societies, authors old and new"-
Sec. 4), calling for a democracy where city and country, North and
South, male and female, upper class and lower--indeed, President and
prostitute (Sec. IS)-will be truly one. Brooks calls Whitman a true
democrat, a freethinker ("I believe in the flesh and the appetities,1 See-
ing, hearing, feeling, are miracles ... "-Sec. 24). The poet also has
a mystic devotion to freedom, equality, and fraternity-including free-
ing of the slaves, championing of women's rights, and respect for the
old, the "ineffable grace of dying days"-Sec. 4S). He looked at his
poetry as a major resource for "redeeming" this nation, something
ref1ected not only in his themes, but in his "free verse" -his departure
from rhyme and set stanzas, as well as his rhythmic freedom and the
flexibility of his lines and verse paragraphs. 12
McGrath is also interested in the group, or solidarity. His idea of
community (or commune), however, is rooted in work, which he sees
as the antithesis of industrial wealth. "Love and hunger," he says, "that
is my whole story" (p. 31). Holscher outlines McGrath's own work
experiences as they are related to brotherhood and then expressed in
a language of "radical consciousness." 13 McGrath is often seen as a
Marxist poet, but as Engel so clearly details, McGrath is a humanist
rather than an ideologue, a man with a spiritual hunger for sharing
community that grows out of his experiences, not out of the abstrac-
tions of social philosophy. I. In Letter he says:
It was good singing, that silence. From the riches of common work
The solidarity of forlorn men
Firm on our margin of poverty and cold:
Communitas ...
(p. 46)
It is interesting that the devotion to mystic freedom in Whitman also
comes through McGrath. At the end of Part I he blesses love and sex-
"by cock and by cunt" as well as "thy woman's warmth in this human
winter" (pp. 97-98)-friends, children, the universe, everything that
gives meaning to life and makes it pleasurable. Duss says that life for
McGrath is "a warm primal intoxication ... full of mystery, delight,
and beauty" and includes a "passionate demand for justice and a burn-
ing contempt for all that exploits and contaminates the good basic stuff
of life." 15 And, as with Whitman, though in a different way, his form
is free and flexible as he speaks his successive perceptions, moods, ref1ec-
tions, and aspirations.
The fact that both McGrath and Whitman, therefore, write out of
their own experiences as healers and visionaries, and that they do this
in dramatically new open forms, puts them into a common American
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poetic tradition. But to be more specific, history separates them
thematically and technically. Whitman, of course, was aware of
America's social problems. In "The Sleepers" he speaks of the fugitive,
the poor, the felon, the idiot, the slave, the ungrown son, the rheumatic.
But he does this in the same breath he celebrates the scholar, the lover,
the dancer, the red squaw. For him "the universe is duly in order. ...
everything is in its place" (p. 432). In "Democratic Vistas" he says the
... policies of the United States, have ... with all their faults,
already substantially establish'd, for good, on their own native,
sound, long-vista'd principles, never to be overturn'd, offering a
sure basis for all the rest [emphasis mine]."
Partington claims that Whitman, aware and critical of the problems
of the Gilded Age, was essentially a prophet who championed the future
of America. J7 A reformer in the tradition of Paine and Emerson, he
thought the basic "stuff" of America was sound, that it only had to
be renewed.
It is in this context that Whitman "hear[s] America singing" (p.
12), including the mechanic, the carpenter, the mason-the builders
of industry. Mystic though he is, "Hurrah for positive science" (p. 51)
becomes his cry. It is also in this context that he idealizes not just
nature-which for him is always a purifying element-but the city in
one of his most beautiful poems, "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry." Wendell
says that Whitman came to maturity within the scent of the East River.
Separating New York from Brooklyn, he says this was "at that time
the spot of spots where life seemed most material, most grindingly dis-
tant from ideal beauty." Yet this is the spot he uses to show that "the
glories and beauties of the universe are really perceptible everywhere."18
Ah, what can ever be more stately and admirable to me than mast-
hemm'd Manhattan?
River and sunset and scallop-edg'd waves of flood tide?
(Sec. 8)
What this means is that Whitman may overlook a certain aspect of reali-
ty, and through his role as a poet add enhancing brightness. In
"Democratic Vistas" he actually calls for such poets-poets, if need
be, with "the religious fire and abandon of Isaiah." 19
It may be that Tom McGrath is one of the very poets that Whit-
man called for to save America (he certainly has something of Isaiah
in his blood), except that this poet is not so sure that America has not
been "overturned," its basic principles thwarted. And his evidence is
historical-an event, the Westward Movement and consequent demise
of the Plains Indians, trends which intersect near the end of Whitman's
life, and might be symbolized in the Battle of Wounded Knee (1890) .
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This event radically affected McGrath's faith in this country as an in-
herent power for good, and his tone is changed from Whitman's to
one of frustration with the American Dream. Whitman may celebrate
both the Union and Confederate forces, in fact, even "overcome
heroes" (Sec. 18) like Crazy Horse. But McGrath adopts Crazy Horse's
anger and resistance to the corruptive elements in America's westward
"progress." This does not mean that McGrath rejected the possibility
of renewal, even redemption in America, but the model he turns to is
not the ideals of the Enlightenment but again Native America, this time
the Hopi Indians. We do not know what Whitman would have thought
of McGrath, but he is his poetic successor nonetheless. In this context
his idea of wounded America, his special kind of resistance, and the
Hopi music which he sees as part of the nation's survival are worth
investigation.
Indigenous to McGrath's Letter is the concept of "wound," whichhe seems to equate with a fundamental betrayal of values in America.
In beginning Part I McGrath makes a journey-he is writing from Los
Angeles in 1955--to North Dakota, which then becomes the locus of
his poem: Dakota, he says, is everywhere, "a condition" (p. 103), and
it is a place which this author uses for the first time to "see things"
he had never seen before." If Whitman idealizes the city in spite of
its limitations or failures, as he does with America at large, McGrath
begins his examination of corruption with the Midwestern prairie,
which-with its revolutionary past-he says may be a kind of gift to
the city; indeed, it was on that prairie that this all-important wound
took place, a wound the city tries to cover over.' i Many times in Letter
he speaks of his journey "toward" or "around" that wound, which
in turn he describes as "endless" and "enduring" (pp. 1, 87). Whatthis wound involves is hinted at early in Part I when the boy poet walks
by "Indian graves" and "boneyards" (pp. 9, 44), and as he explains
events by analogy to Indians-"Confederations of Sioux," for instance,
or "Custer's massacre" (pp. 7, 9).
At this point it's important to note that McGrath is not an either/or
poet, as though he chooses the country over the city. As with Whit-
man, both are important, though at different times and in different
ways. It is simply that, as a shaman, he takes on various postures to
suit his purposes. In his review of Eliade's Shamanism, Hughes shows
that these shamanizings are sometimes" full of buffoonery, mimicry,
dialogue and magical contortion."" In McGrath's case, his visionary
experience is similar to the shaman's trance; it is a posture from which
he can see the world from Crazy Horse's viewpoint, one that is a caustic
and relentless critique of what this warrior sees as the White Man's
blindness to the Indian's plight. To become a shaman is not to detract
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from the complexity of a situation, but merely to illuminate it in a par-
ticular way and at a particular time. Whitman, of course, was aware
of failings in America, but he did not choose to treat these in a negative
way through his poetry. McGrath, on the other hand, dramatizes the
notion of the wound in order to set in perspective his own under-
standing of America and its special need for redemption.
In Part II, McGrath reaches back into the past (the 19th century)
and becomes explicit about the origin of that wound in relation to the
Indian. He speaks of his father as a boy at Fort Ransom, swapping
ponies with the Indians in the spring and fall. But then, amidst the last
of the fighting, he remembers "Wounded Knee" and "All is finished."
About three hundred Indians were killed during this episode, and it
ended several decades of warfare on the Dakota plains. McGrath
philosophizes, making Wounded Knee "the wound";
From Indians we learned a toughness and a strength; and we gained
A freedom: by taking theirs: but a real freedom: born
From the wild and open land our grandfathers heroically stole.
But we took a wound at Indians hands: a part of our soul scabbed
over ...
(p. 190)
The language here is political and caustic. Not the best poetry, it is still
a deeply felt reaction to the white man's treatment of Native Americans.
Curiously, the idea of wound is turned around so that it is the wounder
who is wounded. In an article on Letter McGrath says the East "paved
over" America's wounds; in the West it is the duty of art to "keep
them open." 23 McGrath is different from Whitman here, for he is more
direct about the causes of evil; as a shaman he sees these wounds asa key to our identity, and not to be hastily forgotten, even in the name
of unity. This is not to oversimplify history, as though the Indians had
no responsibility in the matter, but again as shaman to demonstrate
a significant viewpoint of an event-that one man's freedom is born
of another man's loss.
If McGrath's father is a key to history, so is his "dancing grand-
father" (p. 11), who must have shared a deeper knowledge of the In-
dian world with the boy. In a poem "Buffalo Coat," McGrath describes
that grandfather's coat, which ironically keeps him warm, but also em-
bodies the "lost heat" of Indian ways. 24 In Letter some of McGrath's
best lines are reflections upon that loss-a loss that reverses the mean-
ing of the progress envisioned by Whitman.
The tracks of a million buffalo are lost in the night of a past
Lit only by the flare of a covered wagon
a harp of flesh
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Is silenced
the book of feathers and moonlight is closed
, forever
On exhausted roads spun out of acetylene lamps of the dead
Overlands
the transcontinental locomotive is anchored in concrete
Next to the war memorial
under the emblems of progress
A vision of April light is darkened by absent eagles, ..
(p. 206)
Here McGrath mourns the Indian past and "the future that never ai
rived" (p. 206). This is the wound that as a poet he carries out fror
Dakota to 20th century America at large, and he forcefully roots it
cause in the industrial revolution.
The growing America Whitman celebrated, therefore, has fo
McGrath backfired in the prairies of the Midwest. Nor did the "prog
ress" stop with the Indians:
And the people?
"First they broke land that should not ha' been broke
and they died
Broke, Most of 'em. And after the tractor ate the horse-
It ate them. Most of 'em. And now, a few lean years,
And the banks will have it again. Most of it ... " (p. 197)
McGrath refers here to the farm foreclosures of the early 20th century;
for him the capitalistic forces that exterminated the Indian did the same
to the farmer. Wakoski says McGrath's radical spirit is akin to that
of the early Non-Partisan League whose members fought the interests
of big business, bankers, and politicians on the plains of North Dakota"and actually governed the state from 1916 into the 1920s, establishing
the nation's only state bank and state grain mill. It is a unique part
of North Dakota's history and an example of how the effects of the
wound-for McGrath a kind of original sin-can be fought politically
and economically as well as poetically. Indeed, he inspires that kind
of action with his poetry.
Because Whitman has faith in democracy and McGrath challenges
its development historically, the predominant tones of the two poems
differ. In "Song of Myself" Whitman celebrates all "Space and Time!"
(Sec. 33), combining practical American realism with Oriental
mysticism." Though he recognizes darkness as well as light, pain in-
side of joy, depths alongside heights of emotion in the movement of
the individual psyche, generally his tone is one of exuberance as he strug-
gles to transcend the human condition, hoping the nation as a whole
might experience a new solidarity. "Afoot" with his vision, Whitman
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is equally optimistic about the Eastern city's houses as he is Western
"log huts, camping with lumbermen," about "Weeding my onion-patch" as "Prospecting, gold-digging" out West (Sec. 33). This is not
to say his attitude remains unchanged. After the Civil War, and upset
with the greed and economic corruption that followed it, he indicts
America in his essay "Democratic Vistas" (1871), saying our "underly-
ing principles are not honestly believed in ... ," that "We live in an
atmosphere of hypocrisy throughout. "27 But this attitude is true only
in his prose, and as Shapiro observes, poetically Whitman still "per-
sists in his faith that the principle of democracy will overrule the cor-
rupt." 28
This principle is precisely what McGrath thinks has failed. By con-
trast to Whitman, McGrath as shaman built into his poetry a thematic-
tonal resistance to the corrupting cultural forces he saw taking over
America. And his symbol for this almost stubborn posture is CrazyHorse, the Sioux warrior who, unlike his contemporary Red Cloud,
opposed treaties and compromise of any kind with the White settlers,
miners, and soldiers who usurped the Great Plains in the last half of
the 19th century. Perhaps no author has better recreated the psychic-
historical growth of that attitude than has Mari Sandoz in her novel
Crazy Horse (1942).29This same kind of spirit comes through McGrath's
Letter, as when he calls for a poetic "Revolution":
Myself there to make a winter count and to mine my bread.
And others like me:
mavericks in lonesome canyons, singing
Into the desert ...
Bone-laced shining silence faced us ...
=-But sang there!
"Making a little coffee against the cold"-
(Alvaro showed me.)
Inventing again the commune and round
Song gathering the Crazy Horse Resistance ... (p. 117).
Indeed, for McGrath, poetry is political, "a weapon." 30 This posture
is consistent, of course, with Whitman's call for a poetry of reform
in America. It's interesting, though, that McGrath's poetry is scandalous
in a different way from his predecessor's. If Whitman was dismissed
from the Indian Bureau in Washington because of the sexual frankness
of Leaves oj Grass, McGrath's poetry is "unAmerican" because it
challenges the very political-economic system on which this country has
come to be based."
The rebellious spirit of McGrath expresses itself in many contexts-
the violence of war, the suicide of the working poor, the misuse of
Blacks. But beneath all of these cases, indeed, within the very fabric
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of daily living seems to lie the corrosive power of capitalism,
McGrath America's "real" religion:
In New York at five past money, they cut the cord of his sleep.
In New York at the ten past money they mortgaged the road of
his tongue
Slipped past the great church of song and planted a century of
silence
On the round hearts' hill where the clocktower the cock and the
moon
Sang.
At a quarter past money in New York a star of ashes
Falls in Harlem and on Avenue C strychnine condenses
In the secret cloisters of the artichoke.
At half past money in New York
They seed the clouds of his sleep with explosive carbon of psalms,
Mottoes, prayers in fortran, credit cards.
At a quarter to money
In New York the universal blood pump is stuffed full of stock
quotations:
And at Money all time is money.
False consciousness.
Bcbbery.
Meanwhile, of course
-wait for the angel .
(p. 127)
Even the workers themselves-McGrath's bulwark against the illusior
of lndustryv=-sometirnes become "fully transistorized ... lost" (I
124). J3 In Part II I he gives us the motive for his resistance:
And anger sustains me-it is better than hope-
it is not better than
Love ...
but it will keep warm in the cold of the wrong world.
And it was the wrong world we rode through then
and ride through now-
(p. 128)"
Such an attitude is foreign to Whitman, but crucial to McGrath, an
if Whitman's poetry fades in the days following the Civil War, McGrat
as a modern shaman never lacks for spirit in his castigation of America:
materialism.
At the same time, McGrath sees Crazy Horse, not as a negativ
force, but as a leader, aware of the great evil in the universe, but sensitive to the regenerating power of the natural universe. Like Craz
Horse, he somehow believes he can "bring back the buffalo." Hence
the poet opens Part II looking for a breeze, a "wind" that is
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constant abrasive
North Dakota
is everywhere.This town where Theseus sleeps
on his hill
Dead like Crazy Horse.
This poverty.
This dialectic of money-
Dakota is everywhere.
A condition. (p. 103)
Notice that the image here is one of a dead or sleeping society, while
the rhythms suggest a kind of gentle prairie breeze, creating a retlec-
tive mood. But what the poet would have us reflect on is that this poem
itself (a wind) is constant and abrasive as it attempts to jar America
"free of that order";5 that holds it "A nation in chains/ Called
freedom" (p. 148). Ironically, in a spirit and tone reminiscent of theyoung Whitman-"Smile 0 voluptuous cool-breath'd earth!/ Earth
of the slumbering and liquid trees!" (Sec. 21)-McGrath would even
bring back Crazy Horse to challenge the existing order:
All things are doorways: all things are passing
And opening into each other always ...
our housedoor equally
On Crazy Horse and the Cadillac. (p. 204)
Here the faster tempo creates an urgency to choose. In short, while
remaining firm, the shaman-poet modulates his style as an invitation
to change-either/or, resistance or compliance. Donahue says that
Whitman's later poetry is destitute because of a gap between his old
metaphors and new historical f'acts." McGrath finds those newmetaphors.
Whitman, then, idealizes American democracy and in the process
transcends the social evils of society-Chari says he does not purport
to portray evil. 37 McGrath, on the other hand, introduces the concept
of a wounded society and calls for a poetic resistance to its sources
within America. A third distinction between the two long poems=-the
one of overall form-grows out of the first two. I have said that both
use a type of free verse that avoids regular rhyme and set meter, that
both write from personal experience in instinctive rather than formal
ways, and that both are in a way mystics who envision new worlds for
their readers. Because of his notion of wound, however, and a resistance
that is built into his language and tone, McGrath chooses an underly-
ing form that seems to fit his purposes, one that may be rooted in In-dian music rather than the music of civilized man, namely that of the
Hopi kachina. McGrath says that "in a small way the whole poem is
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a kachina."38 This dance involves McGrath's vision as well as a poeti
method, and a review of the musical aspect of Leaves, compared wit]the music in Letter, clearly shows the manner and extent to whicl
McGrath depends on the music of primitive America for his composi
tion as a whole.
Whitman's Leaves apparently has no real plan but grew organical
ly around a number of general themes. 39 In creating the work Whit
man's own personality and experiences were primary, a group of "in
ner principles breaking through the maze and confusion of life on th.
surface. "40 Selincourt says the long poem is analogous to music, when
the words are like notes and the independent lines find a continuitj
in the overall rising and falling of the poet's orchestration of moods. 4
Brooks claims, however, that it is not a classic composition, but "8
series of emotional pulsations, of attitudinal posturings, of mecurially
shifting responses" that work themselves out organically. 42 In short,
Whitman as a poet used the music of words not only to describe the
world, but to recreate it in a new and idealized fashion. Rexroth right-
ly observes that this is an example of "realized eschatologyvv=-the
bringing of a future utopia into the American present through a tech-
nique that is at its heart musical.
Consider, for example, in "Song of Myself,"
Endless unfolding of words of ages!
And mine a word of the modern, the word En-masse.
A word of the faith that never balks,
Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time
absolutely,
It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all,
That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all.
I accept Reality and dare not question it,
Materialism first and last imbuing.
(Sec. 23)
Notice how the one line is carried into the next and expanded upon,
creating the sense of flowing in and out-Selincourt says that in Whit-
man each line is like an individual sea-wave"'-and through lines of
variable shapes and sizes he develops a virtual musical composition,
and through it a whole world view. Interestingly, the very theme of
this fragment is what he is doing musically throughout Leaves, name-
ly, spiritualizing the material world with his poetry. And that is hisdream for America, what Rexroth calls, "the liberation and univer-
salization of selfhood. "4;
McGrath, on the other hand, claims that his poetry has no previous
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ly true of the Hopis." Natalie Curtis adds this:
To seize on paper the spirit of Hopi music is a task as impossi-
ble as to put on canvas the shimmer and glare of the desert. Hopi
music is born of its environment. The wind sweeping among the
crags .... Its echo is heard in the song of the Hopis yodelling
through the desert solitudes. There, in that wild land, under the
blaze of the Arizona sun, amid the shifting color of the tinted sands
and purple-blue of the sharp-shadowed rocks, must the songs be
heard to be heard truly."
That McGrath is aware of these peculiarities in Indian music is ev
dent throughout Letter. A typical passage reads:
Far.
Dark.
Cold.
(I am a journey toward a distantAnd perfect wound)
-to the stark
And empty boyhood house where the journey first began ...
-to search there, in the weather-making highs, in the continental
sleep
For the lost sign, blazed tree, for the hidden place
The century went wrong: to find in the Wobbly footprint Cal's
Country ..
-and sat there
in those first nights:
waiting
(Genya, the ransom of cities, and all my past, sleeping
And the ghosts loud round my light)
Waiting.
(The poem is merely what happens
now
On this page ... )
Night here.
The breathing dark.
Cave of sleep.
I enter.
Descending is ascending.
Go down
Past the stone decades and the bitter states of the anguished and
enchanted salt
Toward my dead.
A static of hatching crystals ticks in the rock
Like a clock of ice.
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The dead swim through the night-stone, homing
Into my side.
Come now
my darlings
my dear ones
begin
The difficult rising.
I'll help you.
Slip your foot free of the stone-
I'll take you as far as the river.
Sing now.
We'll make the kachina.
(pp. 133-34)
This piece is a summary of the entire poem-the poet's boyhood, the
part played by his friend Cal in his philosophy of work, the impor-
tance of recognizing the societal wound, his caution that the city has
glossed over America's corruption, the need for redemption, and the
part the poem itself plays as an invitation to take part in such a rite.
The meter may be seen in terms of a classic six-beat line, just as it is
possible to view the poem overall as a parallel to Dante's journey to
Hell, with Cal as the poet's Virgil, or guide.
But McGrath, again as shaman, is also versatile enough to use In-
dian poetry and music to give even greater scope to his art. In this sense
the rhythm as well as the visual movement is irregular, even erratic-
as though a deliberate distortion of normal tonal patterns. Many of
the sentences are either short or fragmented, and the number of stresses
in each line varies, thus generating irregular rhythms. Basically, the
overall movement is downward but does not follow any set pattern or
melody. The relation of this paragraph to pictorial art is also evident,
for the poem seems to "go down stairs," and as in Indian music thekeynote is at the end of a descending melodic interval. Here we find
such final words as "waiting," "dark," and "kachina," which also
represent in a visual way the inner kiva where the Hopi kachina dancers
begin their ceremonial gestures.
Truly the poem is rooted in the environment, not only of Dakota,
the poet's symbol of America, but of the Hopi desert and stone mesas
where the kachina itself is performed. The poet's rhythm-with its er-
ratic beat-helps place us in this Native American setting. IfWhitman's
poetic form is symphonic, McGrath's represents a different kind of
music-adiatonic or without scale. And the future here is not "real-
ized" by the poet as in Whitman's "Song of Myself"; rather, as in
a liturgical rite, it is an invitation for all to join in the chorus (more
important for the Indian than particular singers) for purposes of bring-
ing on the future. It is a tribute to McGrath that he is able to utilizeso many aspects of Hopi culture-its music, ritual, and mythology-
to underpin the very texture of his own poetic style.
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It is also interesting that IVlcGrath chose the Hopis as a grour
work for his poem. The Sioux, of course, are the Indians of the plaiwhere McGrath grew up, and we have seen how he has used Wound
Knee and Crazy Horse from the history of this nation. The Sioux w e
nomadic and warlike-and this posture is important for McGrath. F
his overall form and final vision, however, he goes to the Hopi, whi
means "peace." They are a sedentary tribe, an agricultural corn-growl
group who lived not in teepees, but atop huge desert mesas. O'Ka
says that their view of life is the opposite of American thinking; n
interested in competition and progress, they promote a harmony wi
the natural world." They look not to technology, but to their ancie
myth of creation and re-creation. A new world-called Saquasohuh
will emerge from the dark womb of the earth (the kiva), and it is tl
kachina dancer who brings on this world renewal."
Consider, for instance, this passage:
Wait for the Angel.
S A QUA SOH U H:
the blue star
Far off, but coming.
Invisible yet.
Announcing the Fifth
World
(Hopi prophecy)
world we shall enter soon:
When the Blue Star kachina, its manifested spirit,
Shall dance the kisonvi for the first time.
In still light
Wait.
"But it's cold here!"Hush.
I'll take you as far as the river;
But no one may dream home the Revolution today though we offer
Our daily blood, nor form from the hurt black need
The all-color red world of the poor, nor in the soviet
Of students transform this might; nor alcohol compound
Manifestoes; nor pot set straight a sleepy rifle's dream.
Still we must try.
S A QUA SOH U H.
Far off: the blue
Star.
The Fifth World. Coming.
Now, try:
Necessary, first, the Blue Star kachina to dance the kisonvi;
Necessary that the kapani at the crown of the head must be
Kept open always.
Loosen your wigs.
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I go to the far
Countryto the sacred butte and the empty land
I'll make
The kachina ... (pp. 131-132)
The broken sentences and uneven rhythms here are those of a dance
as described above, and the tempo and sounds vary from the soft and
slow "wait" and "hush" to the louder and fuller immediacy of "SA-
QUASOHUH." This is not music that follows external guides, but com-
prises organic patterns that rise and fall instinctively, without the aid
of notation or the accompaniment of instruments. Nor can one miss
the "red" and "black" colors, which are as much a part of the painted
ceremony as they are the political theme.
Thematically, the Saquasohuh is the fifth or new world. The "blue
star" signals this yet invisible world. "Kisonvi" is the plaza outside
and near the kiva where the dance takes place. "Kapani" is the head-
one of the five regions of the body for the Hopi-where the news strikes
a man; it is topmost; hence the phrase "Loosen your wigs." The angel
in this section is most important. Whitman's city has been lost-"Los
Angelized." Now the new angel is called upon by the kachina dancer,
which in this case is the poet, who says, "I'll take you to the river"-
the age-old symbol of new life. McGrath therefore sees his poem as
a kachina and invites us all to help make it, indeed to "change the
world" (p. 108). This is not to say McGrath is Hopi, anymore than
he is communist or pagan. Duss points out that he is all of these things,
and Christian too, depending on the context. 5l In fact, McGrath in-
corporates many perspectives in this passage-the pagan myth, therevolution, even the Christian prayer "our daily blood." It is a
multifarious poetic "rite" in which we are all invited to participate.
But in a larger sense, the entire poem is a kachina. When McGrath
makes that journey back to Dakota in Part I-and Parts II and III go
back and circle the same themes--it is a journey to the "dark interior,"
as though going into a kiva. The many journeys, whether back to or
out from Dakota are laced with such important kachina terms as
"nightsong," "stone" or "granite," "holy Earth." The dark aspect,
however, is always accompanied eventually by a bright side, as though
coming out of the kiva through the "night of rock" toward the "com-
mune of light." The poet often refers to such things as a "wind" or
"breeze," "sunrise on the rock," a "blue" or "blazing star." It is in-
teresting that the kachina ties the entire Letter together. The journeyto the "dark dominion" of Dakota is "around a wound" (Wounded
Knee), which keeps "turning, turning" in Yeats ian fashion, but that
journey also embodies the spirit of Crazy Horse
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Inventing again the commune and [the) round
Song gathering the Crazy Horse Resistance ... (p .117).
Still the music is primary-in McGrath's words: "a new jazz, a blue
for our old Fourth World"56 (that's us) as the poet takes you and m
"as far as the river" and helps "slip your foot free of the stone" -th
entrapment in what McGrath calls "false consciousness."
Though this poet denies he is a disciple of Whitman, the two belen
to a common tradition, and one builds upon the other. Where McGratl
emerges-in theme and tone-as different is in his exposing a prairi.
wound and challenging the nation to account for it. Whitman wa
disturbed in the 1870s when his democratic vision for America seemer
incompatible with reality. McGrath-no less a visionary, and longin,
for community sharing-dramatized America's fault and his resistanc:
to it through Indian history. His solution is not Jeffersonian, but Hop(a five thousand-year-old tribe that itself faced the ravages 01
Americanization in the 1940s).57He uses their myths and music to struc-
ture his poem, inviting us all to join in the redemptive rite, a kind of
religious ceremony where the music is both old and new-an old kachina
and a newjazz. Whitman, worried about America's moral corruption,
called for a poet with the fire and abandon of Isaiah. McGrath in his
own way answered that call.
Notes
Ijames Bertolino, Introduction to "McGrath," Epoch, 22 (1973), 207.
'Diane Wakoski, "Passages Toward the Dark: Thomas McGrath,"
American Book Review,S (May-June, 1983), 18.
'William Childress, "Thomas McGrath," Poetry Now, Vol. 2, No.4, 38.
"Cleanth Brooks, "Walt Whitman," inA merican Literature: The Makers
and the Making, Vol. I, Cleanth Brooks, R. W. B. Lewis, and Robert Penn
Warren, eds. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1973), p. 942.
'Bernard F. Engel, "Thomas McGrath's Dakota," Midwestern Miscellany,
4(1977),3-7.
'Joseph F. S. Srneall, "Thomas McGrath and the Pastoral Tradition,"
North Dakota Quarterly, 48 (Autumn 1980), 31-32.
'Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, Sculley Bradley and Harold W. Blodgett,
eds. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973). "Song of Myself" is indicated by sec-
tion numbers; otherwise page numbers are taken from this text.
'Thomas McGrath, Letter to an Imaginary Friend, Parts I and II (Chicago:
Swallow Press, 1970). Page numbers are taken from this text.
'Brooks, pp. 934-35.
"Brooks, pp, 947-48.
"Frederick C. Stern, " 'The Delegate for Poetry,' McGrath as communist
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Poet," in Where the West Begins. Arthur R. Husebce and William Geyer, eds.
(Sioux Falls: Studies for Western Studies Press, 1978), p. 123.
"Brooks, pp. 930-32, 936-37."Rory Holscher, "Receiving Tom McGrath's Letter," Moon and Lion
Tailes, 4 (January 1976),36.
"Engel, p. 3
"Erling Duss, "Waiting for the Angel," Dakota Arts Quarterly (Sept. 1977),
p. 30.
"Walt Whitman, "Democratic Vistas," in American Literature, p. 1011.
"Vernon Louis Parrington, "Afterglow of the Enlightenment: Walt Whit-
man," in Main Currents in American Thought, III (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1958), 84-86.
"Barrett Wendell, Literary History oj America (New York, Charles
Scribner's Sons, 1900), pp. 472-73.
"Whitman, p. 1012.
"Mark Vinz, "Poetry and Place: An Interview with Thomas McGrath,"
Voyages to the Inland Sea, 3, John Judson, ed. (La Crosse, Wisconsin: Centerfor Contemporary Poetry, 1973), p. 40.
"Thomas McGrath, "McGrath on McGrath," Epoch, 22 (1973), 219.
"Ted Hughes, "Secret Ecstasies," Flights: Readings in Magic, Mysticism,
Fantasy, and Myth, David Adams Leeming, ed, (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1974), pp. 13-15.
"McGrath, 217.
"Thomas McGrath, The Movie at the End ojthe World (Chicago: Swallow
Press, 1972), p. 130.
"Wakoski, p. 18.
"Richard Volney Chase, Walt Whitman Reconsidered (New York: Will iam
Sloane Associates, 1955), pp. 81-82.
"Brooks, p. 945.
"Karl Shapiro, "The First White Aboriginal," in Start with the Sun: Studies
in Cosmic Poetry (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1960), p. 63.
"Mari Sandoz, Crazy Horse (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1942).
Sandoz details the gradual growth of Crazy Horse's posture toward the Whites
as they took over the land and world of the Sioux. In the 1960s Eugenia and
Tom McGrath edited several editions of an anthology of poetry entitled Crazy
Horse.
"Thomas McGrath, "Thomas McGrath: An Interview," Another Chicago
Magazine, 5 (Chicago: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1980), p. 74.
"Holscher, p. 32. Holscher recalls McGrath's appearance before the House
Un-American Activities Committee in the early 1950s, causing him to lose his
job, and to which he reacted strongly in the writing of Letter to an Imaginary
Friend.
l2Will iam Childress, "Thomas McGrath," Poetry Now, Vol. 2, No.4, 38.
Here McGrath contrasts work and riches, saying work is the source of art, while
aft1uence brings only phoniness.
"Holscher, pp , 36-39. This critic shows how McGrath's resistance takes
on various styles, even-in this case--dreamtalk, when the workers have sue-
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cumbed to the illusions of industry, and about which the poet reflects at a
distance from the immediate experience, but which he has now internalized
and transformed."McGrath, Passages Toward the Dark, p. 128.
"Thomas McGrath, Letter to an Imaginary Friend, p. 102. McGrath quotes
Claude Levi-Strauss, who says that the only hope of salvation lies in the "ab-
surd and despairing attempt to get free of that order."
"Denis Donoghue, Connoisseurs of Chaos (New York: Macmillan, 1965),
p . 41.
"V. K. Chari, "Whitman and Indian Thought," Western Humanities
Review, XIII (1959), 297.
"Thomas McGrath, "A Note on Letter to an Imaginary Friend," Introduc-
tion to Passages Toward the Dark (Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press,
1982), p. 96. Here McGrath details many of the abstract styles used in Part
III of Letter.
"Roger Asselineau, "The 'Plan' for Leaves of Grass," in The Evolution
of Walt Whitman, trans. Roger Asselineau and Richard P. Adams (Cambridge:Belknap Press, 1960), pp. 11-13.
'"Henry Alonzo Myers, "Whitman's Conception of the Spiritual Democracy,
1855-1856," in American Literature, VI (Duke Univ. Press, 1934), p. 246.
"Basil De Selincourt, Walt Whitman, A Critical Study (New York: Russell
& Russell, 1965), pp. 94-118.
"'Brooks, p. 936.
"Kenneth Rexroth, "Classics Revisited XXXV: Walt Whitman," Satur-
day Review, Sept. 3, 1966,43.
'''Selincourt, p. 98.
"Rexroth, 43.
"McGrath, Passages Toward the Dark, pp. 93-96.
"Thomas McGrath, "Conversation and Reading," Cassette tape, pt. 1
(Fargo, ND: North Dakota State Univ. Library). McGrath traces the origin
of Midwestern poetry to the Plains Indians; Sitting Bull may be the authorof this example.
"Benjamin Ives Gilman, Hopi Songs (New York: Houghton Mifflin Co.,
1908), pp. 1-8.
'''Gilman, p. 112. Here is an example of Gilman's representation of a
pathway of tones in the malo-katcina:
Oherred.
s'
c t . '
c'';T
a.
9fe
d
c.
~_J,
G
F
B'
.. t! I 0'
"
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