BAY AREA POETS SEASONAL REVIEW 

Spring Salmon,

Hurry to Me!
Edited by Margaret Dubin and Kim Hogeland (Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, California, and Heyday Books, Berkeley: 2008), $16.95, cover art by Frank La Pena and designed by Rebecca LeGates: www.heydaybooks.com.

Years ago, as a typesetter for the once venerable graphic arts company, Archetype, I had the privilege of helping produce News from Native California. The publication made it clear that the indigenous people of this state had not disappeared; they were active on many social and political fronts, including the most important one: preserving what remained of traditional culture. Each issue featured articles on the arts and crafts of natives, stories, language (California’s indigenous population had over 50 distinct languages), and information on native plants, medicinal arts, and community. News from Native California is still being published, but this past year, Heyday Books, in partnership with Santa Clara University, published a charming collection of tribal fables and stories, reminiscences, and of special delight to our readers—poems.
   
Spring Salmon, Hurry to Me! is an anthology edited by News from Native California’s managing editor, Margaret Dubin, and columnist Kim Hogeland, an Oakland freelance writer. They provide a layering of poems and prose grouped into their seasonal settings.   
Native American poetry is rooted in a strong oral/aural culture. It relies on strong images, appealing sounds, and compelling rhythms. The first selection in the book is a poem from the Karuk tribe:

Young brodiaea plant,
    you must come up quickly,
        hurry to me!
Spring salmon,
    shine upriver quickly,
        hurry to me!
My back has become like a mountain     ridge,
    so thin,
        so hungry.

This short apostrophe to nature illustrates the seeming simplicity of Native poetry. It is direct, it is clear in what it names and asks, yet the simplicity is, as I said, a “seeming” one. How many of us know a broadiaea plant from a cow’s parsnip, or a salmon from a rainbow trout for that matter? What is it for someone’s back to become a mountain ridge, thin and hungry? In the context of the sparest season, it makes complete sense. The imaginative leap is a well prepared ground.

Engagement with the natural world is anything but simple when there are many distractions and obstacles to our awareness or access to it. In traditional cultures—ones relatively intact and untouched by industrial economy— the shaman is not a magician but someone who has cultivated his or her innate sensitivities to the enveloping world. (For a fascinating study of this, read David Abrams’ The Spell of the Sensuous about Indonesian indige- nous cultures.) The poetry from these other worlds—delivered orally and only later recorded into script—can return us to the natural world but it must be attended to in quiet, with our minds available to the varied biophonies at play in our physical surroundings. Georgiana Voloyce-Sanchez invites us into her vision of winter:

Winter comes

The sun is low across
the sky    gray days
daily struggles
and discord    weigh
heavy
like fallen snow
on tree limbs
bent near to breaking

    but we do not break

Here’s another example by the same poet, a member of the Chumash and Tohono-O’odham tribes:

An old man holds a polished stone
up to the sun
turning it
to catch the light

High above the earth
a ribbon of geese drifts south
the call of a long journey
echoing
across the endless sky

In this literature, the internal world, our concerns, wishes, ruminations, are sculpted by the outer world.
   
Spring Salmon showcases poems by six poets in particular, with single poems by two or three others.
   
Stephen Meadows (Ohlone) attended the University of California Santa Cruz and San Francisco State University. His poem “The Burial,” delivers a quick punch to the heart. Here is an image of an open grave:

A scene one remembers
from a night full of dreams
The wet pit disguised
by a square of green cloth
Here and there small birds
forage in the grass
pecking to and fro
for each sad urgent seed

Soon “small fists of relatives” will gather softly in remembrance. Even after reading the title, I was not prepared for the startling last image of the poem (which I won’t reveal here). This is a gem, the work of a craftsman with an eye for the most evocative detail.

Janice Gould (Konkow) proves a master of the sestina (a form I usually find too Byzantine to completely enjoy). Her “U.C. Mascot, 1959” is riveting, using repetition to transport us into all too familiar territory—the racism that often accompanies sports teams’ logos and symbols. In this poem, Gould gives it to us through a child’s awakening eyes:

              . . . Around U.C. campus mock
lynchings go on. Beneath porches we see hung
the scarecrow Natives with fake long braids, dead
from merry-making. On Bancroft Way one has fallen
undecorously to a lawn, a symbol of the debacle
that happened a generation ago in California’s hills,                                  where
Indians were strung up. . . .

Gould has devoted her life to the liter- ature of native people, producing a dissertation on the work of Joy Harjo, and an anthology entitled Speak to Me Words: Essays on American Indian Poetry (2003), coedited with Dean Rader.
   
Deborah Miranda (Esselen)  con- tributes a quartet of sharply imagined lyrics that immediately place you in a world ready to reward anyone in touch with her senses:

Snow falls that night,
spreads heavy and smooth
like stone, like white granite.
It takes the sharp cut of deer tracks.

In nightgown and bare feet,
she follows a string
of cloven hearts wandering from the woods,
past the barn with its scents of straw,
cats, cobwebs; lapping the length
of the skinny tin trailer . . . .
          (from “Petroglyph”)

Miranda’s work is stunningly beautiful, a pleasure to read.

Georgiana Valoyce-Sanchez, mentioned above, is a storyteller active in the preservation of California Indian languages, sacred sites, and traditional arts. Her unique way of witnessing the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II and the dropping of the atomic bomb deeply moved me:

Summer     1945
rural East L.A.
the hills     a gathering
golden quail      waiting
uncut fields of hay swaying
in the wind     around
my Japanese schoolhouse
home
    abandoned      they said
the wood-frame schoolhouse
   
As the poem unfolds, the stark reality of what has happened to the local Japanese, and what happens later to their distant kin in Hiroshima and Nagasaki break open the poet’s heart and our own.
   
Dorothy Ramon (Serrano) is pub- lished here posthumously, having passed away in 2002 after nearly a century of living. Her poems preserve her native tongue and are also transcribed into English;  they convey a vital cultural experience of nature, alive with plants and critters. The first poem is about picking and eating yucca flowers; the second teaches us “Why People Did Not Kill Tarantulas.” In Spring Salmon, the English lines follow her native language:

‘Aam tecqwam ‘ip kiikam waha’ wuuwerham.
There are a lot of tarantulas living here.

‘Aam ways’ pavay’pa’ te-er’ cu’ow.
They come out after thunder showers (in the summer).

‘Apya’vu’hiit te-eer’c, ‘apya’m wangatk peekinu’.
After it thunders, they come out of their holes.

Weerr, Weerr nemey ‘ip tengek. Tecqwam keym ‘aam.
A great many of them walk around here. They call             them tecqwam ‘tarantulas’.

Native poetry can take on a matter-of-factness in its tone, a flatness that simulates informality; lines are unembellished, direct, and convey the feeling of having been repeated many times and for many generations. Because of this, I often imagine the taste the words in my mouth, the flavor of red earth or yellow sand, sage or coastal mist. The poems are teaching tools, asking us to pay attention, to be clear that the information contained in them may be vital to survival. We receive it as a gift; the teller has an obligation to share. Ramon’s work captures the time- lessness of the voice that has fully lived its story.
   
Shaunna Oteka McCovey (Yurok/ Karuk), on the other hand, has a much more acculturated voice with the syntax and naturalness that is recognizable to those read contem-porary free verse; McCovey’s poems focus on the relationships, the links between generations. In “Conception” a mother takes her child back to the place where a seed was first planted:

It isn’t hard to imagine
you were conceived here
in this beautiful place of

canyon walls covered thick
with maidenhair fern,
a stream carving its way

to the enormity of the Pacific.
What a story to tell, that
spring when you became

more than a wish, more
than a dream that
lovers dream.

There are only three short “Haiku/Senryu” from Roberta Cordero (Chumash) but the first one is a wake-up call about Native perceptions of America’s birthday celebrations:

4th of July

Independence day
occupation made holy
glares red and bloody

In her other two brief poems, she offers delicate homages to a water-strider and a heron. I look forward to reading more of her work in future publications.
   
In addition to a few anonymous poems from oral tradition, including a transcription of a story from Ishi, Spring Salmon concludes with a poem by Darryl Wilson (Sul’ma’ejote) from northeastern California. It  recounts an atrocity committed by the United States military. The poem is entitled “Splashes of Red Autumn 1867, Tawutlamit Wusci,” a reference to Infernal Caverns, where the poet’s grandmother was born and where the violence occurred:

They did not think
   about the Paiute woman
   who slept with the soldiers
   . . . And they told her of the gathering at                                            tuwutlamit wusci

   . . . And they came on sweating horses
   with their rifles in their hands

Frightened
   young mother ran towards the safety of                                             tuwutlamit wusci
   . . . Too late

These are things we do not wish to read about, to be reminded of, so painful the American story can be. Yet, poetry is obligated to bring us this news, these alternative views of reality. And we are obliged to listen and learn.
   
California’s indigenous population is alive and well as represented by this anthology. Spring Salmon reminds me—through the People’s own words—what they see, hear, feel and know about all of us. I feel privileged to have been invited in to hear their words.
            —Reviewed by Jannie M. Dresser

POET WRANGLER: Tonight we have just time for one short poem from each of you. Give it your best . . . . Let’s hear it for Willi Chisled.
WILLI: Okay, cool. Well, I have ten poems tonight: one for each finger. They are tightly bound in a neat organic sequence, a Gordian Slip Knot of Relentless Ecstasy, so I’ll just have to read all ten.
POET WRANGLER: TIME! Next, Paulette Nasal.
PAULETTE: Hi, everybody. Here is a world premier audience participation poem that requires everyone in the audience to strip to the waist . . . no need to rush!!!
POET WRANGLER: TIME! Next, we have Rufi Cockle.
RUFI: I think Mother Nature is awesome: how about you? Title of my poem is “Earth Tickle.” To get us in the mood we will close our eyes for five minutes. If we listen ever so closely, we can share that unforgettable sound of raindrops hitting the lid of an 18“ pizza box . . . .
POET WRANGLER: TIME! Meet Cynthia May.
CYNTHIA: This is a one word, extremely urgent, concrete, survival poem. It’s untitled.
“sponge sponge sponge sponge sponge sponge sponge . . . “
POET WRANGLER: TIME! Last but not least, we have Harry Buns.
HARRY: My poem is titled “Plato’s Squeeze.” It begins with an enlightened mirror image, scary, but oh so meaningful. From there we dash to phil- osophical debate: just like that Symposium but with a full bar. Moving right along, we languish briefly in a sweet lyric interlude of cloying self- indugence. Next we submerge ourselves in a spirited Apocalyptic Vision: all the Disney characters bravely face their Final Destiny without any licensing rights, except Pluto. Then we . . . 
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