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Saturday, March 25, 2006

A Visit to a Pottawatomie Medicine Dance (1842).

Catherine Stewart took the opportunity, while residing on a Pottawatomie reservation, in the early 1840s, to learn something of the language and to attend a number of activities including a Medicine Dance. As sympathetic as she was to the problems of the Native American populations of the Upper Mississippi she did not come to see them from the inside. Nevertheless, she is a more than normally curious and observant witness. We can only be disappointed that she did not stay for the entire dance.

Of all the religious observances overshadowed by superstition, a Medicine Dance, or Me-ta-me-go-sha of the Pottawattamies, is perhaps the most strange, and not altogether divested of the ludicrous. To witness this extraordinary ceremony, a party, in times past, set out, and surmounting many difficulties in passing through a dense forest, and finally crossing a stream of water on a fallen tree, arrived after dark at the scene of mystic reveling.

Near one of the wigwags of the village, kettles of venison were suspended from poles, over a large fire. Around this festive preparation, groups of Indians were sitting, while others were standing, or moving to and fro.... An Indian woman handing a basket of wild plums to her white visitors, in a measure reassured them, and they forthwith regaled themselves, seated on mats around the fire.

Presently, the drum beat, and raising a piece of bark, which served as a door, they entered a wigwam, where as yet only three persons were assembled. Ne-se-wa-be, the grand high priest, or medicine man, old and attenuated, presided over the ceremonies. He rehearsed some strange jargon, with much fluency, not wholly intelligible to the interpreter; it however, had an allusion to the creation of the world, and events handed down by tradition. He was sitting on a mat with two others, who beat a drum composed of some rude material, and rattled a gourd filled with deer's teeth. With a solemn gravity of mien, their eyes fastened on the ground, they seemed totally absorbed in the solemnity of the occasion.

After some time passed in this way, others having arrived and seated themselves round the fire in the middle of the wigwam; they all rose, men and women, and began to dance with much moderation, to the music of the drum and gourd, never raising their feet, except the heel a little, their heads bending down as if in serious reflection. Old Ne-se-wa-be displayed more agility than anyone else; his adroitness evincing that he was no novice in these ancient mysterious rites. They moved, one after the other, round the fire, some of them holding the skin of a small white animal which they kept in a horizontal position, with the head foremost. When, in this way, it was pointed towards any one outside of the circle, he fell immediately to the ground, all animation apparently suspended.

Whether these rites were performed on the initiation of a new member, or for the restoration of a sick person, was not fully comprehended by the spectators; who finding them too monotonous, and feeling no disposition, if permitted, to participate in the festive termination of the dance, departed. This is deferred till near daylight, when the venison being steeped into a savory broth, the dancers refresh themselves at the caldrons, and take away the meat to be eaten at their homes the following day.



New Homes in the West by Catherine Stewart. Nashville: Cameron and Fall, 1843. (Readex Microprint, 1966.) 40-44.



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Saturday, March 18, 2006

American Life in Poetry #51: Jim Harrison.

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

Walt Whitman's poems took in the world through a wide-angle lens, including nearly everything, but most later poets have focused much more narrowly. Here the poet and novelist Jim Harrison nods to Whitman with a sweeping, inclusive poem about the course of life.



Marching

At dawn I heard among bird calls
the billions of marching feet in the churn
and squeak of gravel, even tiny feet
still wet from the mother's amniotic fluid,
and very old halting feet, the feet
of the very light and very heavy, all marching
but not together, criss-crossing at every angle
with sincere attempts not to touch, not to bump
into each other, walking in the doors of houses
and out the back door forty years later, finally
knowing that time collapses on a single
plateau where they were all their lives,
knowing that time stops when the heart stops
as they walk off the earth into the night air.



"Marching," from Jim Harrison's "Saving Daylight" (2006) is reprinted by permission of Copper Cayon Press. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does not accept unsolicited poetry.




Also at Virtual Grub Street by/about Ted Kooser:

Also of Interest:

  • Call for Submissions Page: A regularly updated listing of competitions and calls for submission of poetry, prose, freelance journalism, visual arts, academic/professional papers and more.

American Life in Poetry #50: Grace Bauer.

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

Thousands of Americans fret over the appearance of their lawns, spraying, aerating, grooming, but here Grace Bauer finds good reasons to resist the impulse to tame what's wild: the white of clover blossoms under a streetlight, the possibility of finding the hidden, lucky, four-leafed rarity.



Against Lawn

The midnight streetlight illuminating
the white of clover assures me

I am right not to manicure
my patch of grass into a dull

carpet of uniform green, but
to allow whatever will to take over.

Somewhere in that lace lies luck,
though I may never swoop down

to find it. Three, too, is
an auspicious number. And this seeing

a reminder to avoid too much taming
of what, even here, wants to be wild.


Reprinted from the literary journal, "Lake Effect," Volume 8, Spring 2004 by permission of the author. Copyright (c) 2004 by Grace Bauer, whose new book, "Beholding Eye," is forthcoming from Wordtech Communications in 2006. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. This column does not accept unsolicited poetry.




Also at Virtual Grub Street by/about Ted Kooser:

Also of Interest:

  • Call for Submissions Page: A regularly updated listing of competitions and calls for submission of poetry, prose, freelance journalism, visual arts, academic/professional papers and more.

Tuesday, March 14, 2006

American Life in Poetry #49: Rodney Torreson.

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

This fine poem by Rodney Torreson, of Grand Rapids, Michigan, looks into the world of boys arriving at the edge of manhood, and compares their natural wildness to that of dogs, with whom they feel a kinship.



On A Moonstruck Gravel Road

The sheep-killing dogs saunter home,
wool scraps in their teeth.

From the den of the moon
ancestral wolves
howl their approval.

The farm boys, asleep in their beds,
live the same wildness under their lids;
every morning they come back
through the whites of their eyes
to do their chores, their hands pausing
to pet the dog, to press
its ears back, over the skull,
to quiet that other world.



From "A Breathable Light," New Issues Poetry and Prose, 2002, and first published in Sou'wester. Copyright (c) 2002 by Rodney Torreson and reprinted by permission of the author. This weekly column is supported by
The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does not accept unsolicited poetry.





Also at Virtual Grub Street by/about Ted Kooser:

Also of Interest:

  • Call for Submissions Page: A regularly updated listing of competitions and calls for submission of poetry, prose, freelance journalism, visual arts, academic/professional papers and more.

American Life in Poetry #48: Walt McDonald.

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

Every parent can tell a score of tales about the difficulties of raising children, and then of the difficulties in letting go of them. Here the Texas poet, Walt McDonald, shares just such a story.



Some Boys are Born to Wander

From Michigan our son writes, How many elk?
How many big horn sheep? It's spring,
and soon they'll be gone above timberline,

climbing to tundra by summer. Some boys
are born to wander, my wife says, but rocky slopes
with spruce and Douglas fir are home.

He tried the navy, the marines, but even the army
wouldn't take him, not with a foot like that.
Maybe it's in the genes. I think of wild-eyed years

till I was twenty, and cringe. I loved motorcycles,
too dumb to say no to our son--too many switchbacks
in mountains, too many icy spots in spring.

Doctors stitched back his scalp, hoisted him in traction
like a twisted frame. I sold the motorbike to a junkyard,
but half his foot was gone. Last month, he cashed

his paycheck at the Harley house, roared off
with nothing but a backpack, waving his headband,
leaning into a downhill curve and gone.



First published in "New Letters," Vol. 69, 2002, and reprinted from "A Thousand Miles of Stars," 2004, by permission of the author and Texas Tech University Press. Copyright (c) 2002 by Walt McDonald. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does not accept unsolicited poetry.




Also at Virtual Grub Street by/about Ted Kooser:

Also of Interest:

  • Call for Submissions Page: A regularly updated listing of competitions and calls for submission of poetry, prose, freelance journalism, visual arts, academic/professional papers and more.