The Huge Opening and Closing Sky:

            An Encounter with Pueblo and Hopi Poets

(The following was written at The American Indian Language Development Institute in Tucson, 1999.)

by Julie Bolt  

        
   Sometimes when Ramson Lomatewama reads his work he is asked the question: “What’s your definition of poetry?”  He answers, “Poetry is life.  It starts at birth.”  But Lomatewama knows that in a world of polarization, in a dynamic world of tensions, we struggle with poetry: “If you have resistance you are probably telling yourself something and that something is fear.”

When I heard Lomatewama speak these words. I nodded. I have known that fear.  As an on-again off-again writer, and a teacher of writing, I sometimes feel self-conscious, overwhelmed, critical and frustrated with the limitation of my words and understandings.   Sometimes I feel my imagination has dissipated into the soup of analysis that is graduate school, and the great rich stew of being a teacher. 

Still, after hearing Ramson read on Tuesday evening I felt poetry rattling around in my brain.  It was way back in there: stuck.  Poetry rattles around while I write this short essay documenting my recent encounter with Ramson and other Hopi and Pueblo poets.   

Ramson pointed out the difference between “Is” and “it.” The things we identify as being part of ourselves and the things we feel distant from or cant’s control.  For example, when in a happy relationship the relationship becomes “ours.”  However, the dysfunctional relationship becomes an “It.”  I feel that Ramson implied that the human struggle is replete with this tension, that the poles help us by letting one thing shine light on another, whatever dimness or brightness has infused that light. 

After Ramson’s morning visit I rode my bike home for lunch and sensed the rhythms of his words hanging around.  I turned a corner and rode up onto the sidewalk.  The sun was pushing on my shoulders as my mind and vision wandered.  Suddenly I turned my handlebars to avoid a lizard that scurried before my path.  But the lizard seemed to vanish, to dart under a stone --- no --- it was dancing above the gravel. I realized in those quick seconds that I was not viewing a lizard, but the shadow of a bird during its flight to the tree above.  I heard cooing as the bird settled into the branches.

I thought about Ramson’s comment that Hopi writers do not use “articles” in front of animals, just as one wouldn’t in front of people.  As Ramson said, would you call your friend “the george”?  The article turns a living thing into an object.  I was struck by the respect for living things in the Hopi language and the ways the English language attempts to usurp the intimacy out of creatures.  Abruptly I halted my bike, sat on the curb, and pulled my notebook from my knapsack:

       Shadowbird darts

       from stone

       to scrub

       and disappears like Lizard.  

       Skybird is invisible

       but for Sun's dance

        but for those 
        who see

        her song.

During the next five blocks I literally leaped off my bike two more times to scribble ideas for poems.  For this one afternoon, a new perception freed some of my words.  If I had not heard Ramson I would have never thought of Shadowbird as a spirit who is reflecting Skybird.  I would not have glimpsed the subtle but precise spirits of Lizard and Sun.

After this experience I believed I was on a track for my explorations of Hopi and Pueblo poetry.  I found myself looking for the presence and power of nature, perceived with respect and conveyed with delicacy.  I did find this in the work of Simon Ortiz, in the Coyote Stories of Helen Sekaquaptewa, and in the songs of Harold Little Bird and Lorezo Boca.  However, it was not that simple.  I also found great diversity in the work of the persons named above, and in the other worked I explored.  The tensions are between urban and rural communities, and between Indian and non-Indian communities.  They are between the past and the present and the future.  In the next paragraphs I will discuss my encounter with these other Hopi and Pueblo poets, starting with a summary of the assignment to which I am responding.

During our Southwest Literature class at the American Indian Language Development Institute our teacher, Professor Ofelia Zepeda, shared samplings of the poem-songs of Harold Little Bird and Lorenzo Baco on audio cassette.  Both poet-singers juxtaposed playful songs with social commentary, and delicate powerful songs sung in the language of Laguna Pueblo. Professor Zepeda also shared the work of Lomawywesa/Michael Kabotie with us, and made several other suggestions.  To augment this experience I watched the video Hopi Coyote Stories with storyteller Helen Sekaquaptewa, and read Simon Ortiz’s poems in “Going for the Rain” a body of work in Woven Stone, a large compilation including three collections of Ortiz’ prose and poems.  (Since I have read Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, and we are going to read from her collection Storyteller, I have chosen to focus on Ortiz with whom I am less familiar.)

I loved viewing the video of Hopi Coyote Stories.  I loved it because it conveyed the magic of the storyteller.  Surrounded by children, the elder Helen Sekaquaptewa’s face glowed as she animated songs and stories for a circle of children.  I was so caught up in the sounds of her Hopi language stories, the animation of hands and face, and the smiles of the children.  Since this kind of oral storytelling was new to me and since, more significantly, her stories are embedded with cultural meanings I could never penetrate, I feel at a loss to convey the content of her stories.  However, I will extract a few observations that may be significant for one level of understanding of Hopi and Pueblo writing.  Her stories were fables --- small stories of small creatures animating large lessons.  They were fun and magical, and quietly instructional.  The humanist scholar might say that the animals are “personified.”  Of course this is absurd from the perspective of respecting animals as brothers, sisters, and gifts for survival.  The Anglo or humanist scholar would be coming from the perspective of “objectifying” the animals.  In contrast Helen Sekaquaptewa universalizes the animals in the sense that larger meanings can be found, lived and enacted, through the metaphors of animal interactions.

The Laguna poet-singers Harold Little Bird and Lorenzo Baco honor and carry on the storyteller tradition in the songs from their cassettes A Circle Begins and Lorenzo, Songs, Poems, Lies.  At the same time they incorporate the ironies of modern life in Capitalist America.  Through humor they express the absurdities of post-colonial Indian life.  Baco sings, “If I had a great big tee-pee would you love me?”  He progresses through the capitalist material food chain ending up with the gaudy question, “If I drove a Porsche, would you love me?”  However, Baco ends with a playful rejection of the material values he is mocking, “All I got is this drum and singing, but I love you.”  In the end he uses humor to embrace his connection to the music and his culture.  Similarly Little Bird sings a doo-wop song about the “Big Bad Buffalo.”   Although the song is hysterical and sends up stereotypes, toward the end it moves to ballad-like sadness about the buffalo’s near extinction, to a playful celebration of the buffalo’s survival and Big Bad return.  What a delight to have a song that is at once silly and profound, that works on so many levels.  Most interesting about the works of these two contemporary creative people is that they are consciously fueling their traditional language and traditional music while also contending with English and biting irony about the present and past.

The dynamics described above are some of the reasons I titled this short essay “The Huge Opening and Closing Sky.” a lyric from one of Harold Little Bird’s songs in, A Circle Begins.  The tension of opening and constricting possibilities; of the present, future and past; of rural and urban; and of culture and identity were prominent in the work I read by Simon Ortiz.  Ramson Lomatewama and Joseph Campbell would probably call the section of Ortiz’s that I looked at I focus on the poems on “the hero’s journey.”

In  “Going for Rain,” the poet chooses poems that depict his journey from childhood on the reservation, to political involvement and traveling throughout the country, to returning after all of his experiences, to the present… a place where ‘the rain falls,” nourishing the future with the knowledge of the past.  It is interesting that the first and last parts of Ortiz’s journey most echo the coyote stories, and the peace and wisdom within them.   

I have so much to write about regarding the encounter with Hopi and Pueblo poetry above…  I want to discuss identity and language, Ortiz’s New York poems and the contrast of that concrete landscape  to Acoma.  I am interested in this because I grew up in New York City and deep in my bones is the magic of this frenetic place. For all its faults I’m forever moved by its dense human energy.  Yet when I first came to the Southwest four years ago I felt something I had never felt before: the ancient properties of things.  Other places in the country that I have roamed have lovely rural places, but they never spoke to me.  But somehow here I can listen and I know of no other place with more Loud Silent Beauty than Acoma.

Since I grew up in small spaces, since my experience is what it is and is not what it is not, I know I can never penetrate all the levels of Ramson Lomatewama’s poetry, of Harold Little Bird and Lorenzo Boca’s songs, of Simon Ortiz’s journeys, of the Coyote Stories.  Instead I will find something of life, something human and true within them. They will challenge my world view and the world view of those I pass them too.  What I am looking forward to is the next time I am teaching when my of student’s asks, “Okay Julie Bolt, tell us the definition of poetry?”  I know what to say now:

                                 the huge opening and closing sky.