Transmotion Vol 1, No 1 (2015)
Revard, Carter. From the Extinct
Volcano, A Bird of Paradise. Norman, Oklahoma: Mongrel Empire Press, 2014.
100pp.
http://mongrelempire.org/catalog/poetry/from-extinct-volcano.html
One thing you can be sure of with the authorship
of Carter Revard: it never fails to offer a full menu, what the French call une bonne bouche. How else to designate
this New and Selected with its span of Osage and other tribal creation stories,
the community role of song, evolutionary biology (especially dinosaurs),
astrophysics and the cosmos, hummingbirds, Oklahoma dust and history, Wall
Street, the Iraq War, and not least a run of haiku? Drawing upon the early collections
Ponca War Dancers (1980) and Cowboys and Indians, Christmas Shopping (1992)
and the composite How The Sings Come Down
(2005) in Salt's Earthworks series, together with new work, Revard lays it
on you: intertextual Milton and Shelley, troves of learning from Bible and
Latin sources through to entomology. If all this sounds a touch professorial it
no doubt is. But the upshot is engagingly redeemed by the writing's slivers of
vernacular wit, the ready intervention of speaking voice.
The thirty-plus contributions include a number
of pieces now standard in the Revard repertoire. "What the Eagle Fan Says,"
from An Eagle Nation (1992), reflects
his longtime university work in Old and Middle English, a poem structured as kenning with due use of caesura and
parallel phrasing. But far from any Anglo Saxon or Norse landscape the world at
hand is Native American, one of powwow dance, South Dakota's Wakonda, ceremonial
bead and rattle, and above all, the poet's obligation to honor and remake
legacy. "Dancing with Dinosaurs," originally to be found in his collagist and
hugely engaging Winning The Dust Bowl
(2001), exploits a fine seam of avian imagery, dinosaur into bird, the
transition from the poet's own tribal naming as Thunder Person into verse maker
and songster. "In Chigger Heaven," from Cowboys
and Indians, links the mites being referenced to the poet's itch to
articulate Creation's infinitudes large and small. "Dreaming in Oxford," first
issued in Yellow Medicine Review (2010),
remembers a 4AM college wakening to a lyric-oneiric landscape that spans Lewis
Carroll, Robert Frost and swans patrolling the River Isis.
"Parading with the Veterans of Foreign Wars,"
from An Eagle Nation (1992) has
understandably become one of Revard's signature compositions ("almost a found
poem" says the accompanying note). Opening with the lines "Apache, Omaha,
Osage, Choctaw,/Comanche, Cherokee, Oglala, Micmac: our place was
ninety-fifth," it plays allusions to Custer and the Seventh Cavalry and
Jefferson Barracks Park ("where the dragoons were quartered for the Indian
Wars") into a savvy riff on what the parade now signifies, to include cleaning
up horse poop and heading to KFC in its aftermath "given the temporary/absence
of buffalo here in the/Gateway to the West, St. Louis." Allusion is made to the
Judging Stand, a tacit invitation to
history's necessarily far larger judgment, that of how America might or should
assess its treatment of the tribes and their plies and skeins of cultural life.
Whose "foreign war," runs the sub-text, most applies?
There can be no want of further choice. "Songs
of the Wine-Throated Hummingbird" turns as much on the "language" of humpback
whales and dolphins as of hummingbirds. The poem celebrates the natural world's
different musics—whales " in the sapphire ocean," the "arias" of the dolphins,
the "varied outpourings" albeit for a minute only of the hummingbirds. Each, non-humanly,
and in Revard's envisioning , contributes "the smaller ripples that we call
Meaning," The concluding lines bespeak a near Whitmanesque note, the earth's
land and sea as yielding symphony, an ecological chorus. The grasp of global
span is typical:
Deep
in the blue Antarctic seas, high
in the green Guatemala jungle, here
in these cracked
English words,
can you hear the sing,
the hummingbirds, the humpback
whales,
a neutron star, a human soul?
"Living in the Holy Land," which made its
appearance in Stand Magazine, ostensibly
memorializes the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial in 2006. But its evidently more
inclusive purpose is to remember "our Diaspora," the history that predates
frontierism, runs through Empire and the Civil War, and continues into the Oil
regimes ("And then the Oil Men came,/their rivers of black liquid gold washed
away/too many of our people, to many of our ways."). The poem nicely begins
from Osage creation story as though an anticipation of the Declaration of
Independence ("our Osage forebears brought forth,/ on this continent, a new
nation,/ conceived in liberty and dedicated to/the proposition that all beings
are created equal."). It closes with homage to song and drum "that we may live, that we may yet remain/a
sovereign Nation in this holy land" (italics in original). Revard's keen
sense of heritage, tribal past-into-present as never to be forgotten, can
hardly be doubted.
Along with a number of wry prose pieces (try
his Buck Creek picture of winter moths in "Meadows, Moths, Slatebeds,
Dictionaries" or his Dylan Thomas whippoorwill and booze story set in Osage
County, Oklahoma, "He Should Have Drunk Goat's Milk Maybe" ), not to mention
the often assiduous notes and glosses, From
the Extinct Volcano, A Bird of Paradise supplies a due and timely reminder
of the Revard oeuvre. He brings an expansive mind to bear, a beckoning appetite
across science and the arts, across geographies from Oklahoma and the other
southwest to Bethlehem. The menu's poetry indeed comes over full, a
degustation.