For an Anglo to go native, to take up the ways of an American Indian tribe, and then write poetry from the Anglo perspective in his adopted language would seem absurdly precious to most of us. It certainly would to most Indians. For one thing, traditional Native American poetry has a far different purpose than our lyrics, which pique the esthetic sensibilities of readers, while, often, venting the weltschmerz of their writers. For another, a traditional Indian culture has no “reading audience” for poetry as Anglos conceptualize it. Poetry exists to serve practical ends. It heals the sick and assures success in hunting.

Yet, going the other way, this is precisely the reversal that a Native American poet goes through if he is to get a hearing in a predominantly English-speaking country. For anyone, writing poetry is a hazardous undertaking at best. For a person from an “ethnic” group, then, the hazards are more numerous and greater. With this in mind, it is not surprising that many an Indian poet has easily slid into the trap our society generously sets before him: asking for, not individual vision, but for the repetition of cliches and the social angst and anger that we think should be the Native American's foremost concerns. Anglos seem to find this satisfying, and for his part why shouldn't the Indian do the old dance that wins him ready applause?

That poet James Welch for the most part has refused to go for the bait is much to his credit. Early in his career he declared that he wanted to be a poet first, not an ethnic poet. To keep up the illusion of independence, many a writer has voiced that claim, but few have had the fortitude to follow through on it. James Welch has contributed a strong element in making his poetry enduring rather than frivolous.

But it takes more than fortitude to be a good poet. It takes a combination of qualities—one perhaps ultimately inenarrable but nonetheless readily recognizable—of wholeness, of being able to synthesize what we as readers perceive as daily events into unusual perspectives. They leave us esthetically refreshed and surprised, leave us seeing more in existence than we did the moment before we penetrated the poem. The best poems of James Welch have that quality, whatever the name it goes by.

Perhaps it should be said at this point that this doesn't mean James Welch has “sold out,” as we used to say in the 1960s. He has not become a “white Indian,” to use a somewhat execrable term, in order to reap the benefits of the white man's world. Part Blackfeet, part Gros Ventre, he doesn't deny this rich aspect of his upbringing any more than he denies that he is a person from Montana with a decidedly rural and small-town background. All of which is to say, however, that he is wise enough to do what any good writer does: he turns the material of himself to his own best esthetic ends.

I have written elsewhere about James Welch's poems and the aspects that make them “work.” Suffice it to say here that when they come off at their peak, they show the humor, wit, joie of using language, and psychic penetration already alluded to. Working together, such aspects rush us magically to places we've never been before, places not on the map. To continue the metaphor in Blyian terms, at his best Welch's poetic sensibilities take his readers soaring over a heightened Montana landscape, looking down with him on a tavern in Dixon or on some old Indian taking up painting for a past time, botching the job but having a hell of a time doing it.

And Welch has written some near bummers, too—haven't we all? These happen, it seems to me, when he forces the issue, riding his horse with the spurs instead of the reins, taking it all too earnestly. He ends up substituting for his own clear vision the wooden imagery of bones, worms, and stars that at its worst and most wooden can be the poorer part of Wright's and Bly's legacy. In contrast, it also happens when Welch's sheer fun with words—ah, the ecstatic but necessary dangers of that!—take him for a ride, and off go horse and poet on a silly romp.

I want to turn now from both categories to one rarely considered with writers, those poems that nearly make it into the blue-ribbon class but fall short, that promise but don't deliver on their potential. They neither fly off, taking us breathless into the poetic ether, nor crash ignominiously at some little distance from where they were launched. Instead, they wobble off—touching ground here, squeaking over a housetop there—unsure of themselves into poetic limbo.

Goodness knows, any poet worth the name writes his share of these as well as the bummers—so this is not meant as a detraction. And we cannot say precisely what went wrong in the process leading to the completed poem, why the intended horse turned out a camel—what promising whim-wham got jammed, what chemical keys failed to mesh in the laboring poet's head. What quotidian mailman came knocking on the door and threw over the whole poetic apple cart. But we do have the poems before us on the page, and whatever the unknown causes, we can talk about the results, the places in a piece where the hand jolts, the poem goes astray.

This can happen in various ways, of course, and to any poet. The poem can be wrong, stillborn from the beginning. For whatever reason, cosmic or not, this year or maybe for the next ten years the poet is not up to taking on the subject with which he insists on wrestling. Or it could be the glint of a word on the page that leads him astray, into associations having no business being there, takes him off the main track of the poem and bouncing across the underbrush. Or it can be a question of the larger schema, a failure to fulfill the promised organization. The poem seems to be going along just fine toward a goal, a completion that we cannot yet see but with all certainty believe exists. But we don't arrive there. Prepared for a party at the shore, we end up in the mountains, abashed at our swimming trunks and beach balls.

Why even bother with such an analysis? one might ask parenthetically. Because it sharpens our sensibilities for poems in general, those of others and our own included. Because it shows us just how tough it is to get through the process of writing a good poem, one good all the way through. And because it increases our thrill for the ride when, careening around poetic blind curves at breakneck speed, we arrive—yes, at the beach—but at a beach party prepared for us more glorious than we—and probably the poet—ever imagined.

In any case, I'd like to suggest that Welch's “Going To Remake The World” belongs in the third category mentioned above. In many ways, it is a workmanlike, if not outstanding, job, having the “right” instincts, doing many of the “right” things a poem should do. Yet in the final analysis one is left with the feeling that as is the poem has not filled out its promise, is not yet complete, that the final stanza is false.

One could spend some time singing Welch's praises in the first stanza:

Morning and the snow might fall forever.
I keep busy. I watch the yellow dogs
chase creeping cars filled with Indians
on their way to the tribal office.
Grateful trees tickle the busy underside
of our snow-fat sky. My mind is right,
I think, and you will come today
for sure, this day when the snow falls.

Importantly, so that we can gain our poetic bearings, Welch sets the scene, lets us know where we are. He disarms us. Using straightforward language, he invites us into the world of the poem, the world of a small Montana town populated in winter by yellow dogs and creeping cars. His rendition seems just right.

But of course, no poet's world is as simple as that. The simplicity is an illusion, a trick to make us feel comfortable while the poet works his magic. Slowly, subtly, Welch drops hints that things are not as they seem. In the midst of this supposedly peaceful scene, the poet is watchful, waiting, an outsider. Through his eyes, we see a world changed. The trees are grateful, the sky fat. What's going on? Well, the “I” has been having problems. Playfully echoing a line in Robert Lowell's “Skunk Hour,” a poem about Lowell's madness, the “I” tells us that his mind is doing just fine, then undercuts this with the conditional. So grows Welch's tone, one of patient anxiety, of anticipation, set off against the ordinary town life and clothed in a whimsical, bittersweet humor. One that, furthermore, prepares us for the developing complexity, that makes us as readers anxious for what will happen, for where the poem is taking us. Note, in this respect, that Welch somewhat casually throws in the “you,” whetting our curiosity.

But he veers away from that and in the second stanza zooms in on a specific scene. It shows us what life is like on the streets of the little town:

From my window, I see bundled Doris Horseman,
black in the blowing snow, her raving son,
Horace, too busy counting flakes to hide his face.
He doesn't know. He kicks my dog
and glares at me, too dumb to thank the men
who keep him on relief and his mama drunk.

So that's Doris Horseman and her son in a vignette of mixed violence, pity, and humor. Things are getting worse, both for the observer and the world observed. Against the backdrop of a benign nature, people aren't doing too well. As Lowell says metaphorically in his poem, “The season's ill.” So to be suffering the mental shakes as the “I” is in Welch's poem is one thing. To be suffering them in a world already gone over the brink makes the “I”'s condition all the worse. The situation holds out little promise of restored health.

The plot thickens, our anxiety builds. How is the poet going to resolve the seemingly irresolvable situation he's created?

He has an ace up his sleeve, the “you” mentioned in stanza one, not entirely forgotten by us as a figure standing in the poem's wings. Who or what the “you” is we don't know. Perhaps a friend or a girlfriend who can smooth the mental waters and make things seem right. Perhaps the poet's inspiration personified, the inspiration that can, at least in a poem, impose order on chaos. So the final stanza:

My radio reminds me that Hawaii calls
every afternoon at two. Moose Jaw is overcast,
twelve below and blowing. Some people. …
Listen: if you do not come this day, today
of all days, there is another time
when breeze is tropic and riffs the green sap
forever up these crooked cottonwoods.
                    Sometimes,
you know, the snow never falls forever.

There's some fine writing here, but technically it's the weakest stanza, and that's all the worse since it's the conclusion. We don't need, for instance, the obvious irony of the first sentence. By now, we're wound up for the finale, for the rabbit to come out of the hat, and the reference to Hawaii, to a world outside the poem, shatters rather than strengthens Welch's setup. In places the language itself becomes troublesome: “when breeze is tropic” may be an ironic echo of travel-brochure promises, but it's unpleasing to the ear, jolting when we don't need to be jolted. And it's smarty-pants.

That the “I” in the poem is even more confused than when we met him in stanza one is understandable. But note the above in conjunction with the abrupt but unresolved shifts in the middle of stanza three. They indicate that the writer himself, the controller of the poem, also is confused, and this undermines our confidence, our trust that he can control his material and bring the poem off.

And the “you” doesn't appear. This in itself is not the problem. On the one hand, we can't expect friend or genie to emerge magically just at the most intense moment of crisis and make everything hunky-dory. It could be farcical if such a figure did pop out and—kazaaam!—cure the “I” 's pain.

The problem, then, is not the nonappearance of the “you,” but the poet's handling of it. And though the last line is especially jejune, the apparent message of the entire last stanza seems to be, “Ah, well. Things are tough, but tomorrow is another day.” We are left unsatisfied with that nostrum, that failure to come to grips with the situation established, all the more so because in the endings of his better pieces Welch deftly drops in the unexpected catalysts that make the poems rush together into surprising wholes.