[In the following excerpt, McFarland examines the polemic nature of Alexie's writing and his unique poetic form.]

When a new poet [Sherman Alexie] comes on the scene, it is “both fitting and proper” to identify him or her, not so much with the intention of fixing and formulating with a phrase, but with the intention of providing a point of departure or a common ground. As to what constitutes an identity as a “Native American poet,” I would suggest that it has most to do with how the poet, in this case Sherman Alexie, presents himself or allows himself to be presented by publishers and publicists. The job of the literary critic and scholar is to create contexts for discussion and discourse.

James R. Kincaid, in his review essay, “Who Gets to Tell Their Stories?” in the New York Times Book Review for May 3, 1992, concluded, “Mr. Alexie's is one of the major lyric voices of our time.” He was speaking in the hyperbolic language of the book cover blurb of then twenty-five-year-old Sherman Alexie's first collection of poems, The Business of Fancydancing. While Alexie is a very promising young poet, his talents are not in the lyric, as I shall demonstrate hereafter, and whether his is a “major” voice of “our time” requires that at least a little of that time pass. Ranging over seventeen titles, from Ray Young Bear's Black Eagle Child, “dizzying re-creations in prose and poetry of the author's life,” to Joe S. Sando's historical work, Pueblo Nations, Kincaid's ambitious review is noteworthy for its attention to publications from small presses like Hanging Loose in Brooklyn, which published Alexie's poems, and Clear Light, the Santa Fe publisher of Sando's book (eight of the seventeen publishers were university presses). Subsequent reviewers and commentators, from Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, American Book Review, and Kenyon Review to Joy Harjo, Reynolds Price, Linda Hogan, and Simon Ortiz, have affixed their seals of approval to Alexie's writing, and in rapid succession he produced two more collections of poems, Old Shirts & New Skins and First Indian on the Moon, both of which appeared in 1993.

In “Imagining the Reservation,” from The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993), a collection of short stories, Alexie offers an equation:

Survival = Anger x Imagination. Imagination is the only weapon on the reservation.

(p. 150)

The epigraph to “Indian Education,” the first section of Old Shirts & New Skins is, “Poetry = Anger x Imagination,” and it is ascribed to one of Alexie's recurring characters, Lester FallsApart. In their all but indispensable interview for the Bloomsbury Review conducted in the fall of 1993, John and Carl Bellante questioned Sherman Alexie about that equation, and he responded: “Exactly what my attitude toward life is” (p. 15). When the Bellantes asked what “precisely” about white culture so angered him, Alexie answered, “Pretty much everything patriarchal. … We've resisted assimilation in many ways, but I know we've assimilated into sexism and misogyny. … Women are the creators. We get into trouble when we try to deny that.”

The interviewers, to their credit, did not simply walk away from this difficult issue in Sherman Alexie's writing. There is a combativeness that distinguishes Alexie's often polemical poems, for he is, in a way, at war. In most of his writing, sooner or later, Alexie is a “polemicist,” which is to say, a “warrior,” and there is nearly always controversy and argument, implied or direct, in his poems and stories. (Clearly, I am not employing the term “polemic” pejoratively here, but I do consider that designation to be provocative.) “Do you ever worry about anger becoming a negative force?” the Bellante brothers asked. Citing Gandhi, Alexie answered that anger could be a positive force: “Anger without hope, anger without love, or anger without compassion are all-consuming. That's not my kind of anger. Mine is very specific and directed.” This is not to say that this makes his anger exactly “palatable.” (I have seen people leave Alexie's readings feeling furious at what they have heard, and I suspect his response to that would be “no regrets.”)

A “registered” (to use the bureaucratic adjective) Spokane/Coeur d'Alene who grew up on the reservation in Wellpinit, Washington, where, he says in the interview, he was an “outsider,” Alexie did much of his undergraduate work at Washington State University, where he worked with professor and poet Alex Kuo. Most of those who attend his readings would consider Alexie an accomplished performance poet, and remnants of the oral tradition in Native American poetry are evident in his work, as will be obvious hereafter. Five or six years ago Alexie offered the poem “Horses” (Old Shirts & New Skins) at a reading with other students, and for a while it served as a sort of signature poem. Few left those readings without feeling that frisson (fancy French for “goosebumps”) that strikes somewhere beneath the region of the rational.

Alexie has a strong historical sensibility, as the opening lines of “Horses” (p. 28) attest:

1,000 ponies, the United States Cavalry stole 1,000 ponies
from the Spokane Indians, shot 1,000 ponies & only 1 survived,
shot 1,000 ponies & left them as monuments, left 1,000 ponies
falling into dust, fallen, shot 1,000 ponies & only 1 survived.

These four lines reveal a lot of what might be called Alexie's “poetics,” which in this poem are employed polemically. In identifying the characteristics of Indian poetry, Castro reflects first on repetition as “the most striking feature of Indian style” (1983:34), and he goes on to insist that the repetition establishes a “consciousness of oneness” and “creates holistic awareness” (p. 35). He also cites Margaret Astrov's observation to the effect that such reputation equates with “accumulation of power.”

The poem ends,
I own no horses,
the Indian was measured before
by the number of horses he owned,
the exact number, I own
no horses, I own
no horses, I own
no horses.

(p. 30)

To say that such a poem is intended to be heard, that it is oral poetry and perhaps “performance” poetry as well, is only to belabor the obvious.

In the Bloomsbury interview Alexie mentions the literary influences of Adrian C. Louis, Linda Hogan, Simon Ortiz, and Scott Momaday, and he quotes Louis's reference to “traditional” Indian poetry as “the corn pollen and eagle feather school.” It is, he says, “the sort of poetry anybody can write … a nine-year-old kid from Brooklyn, say. … I don't care for that kind of native writing. It's poetry white writers try to copy” (p. 15). It is also very lyrical in nature, stemming as it does from the traditions of Native American song; however, such poems may strike some readers as not “traditional,” but “generic.” The poems of David Wagoner's Who Shall Be the Sun? (1978) come readily to mind as the accomplished work of a white poet in a native tradition. (Castro notes the controversial nature of such undertakings near the end of his book [1983:161].) …

Perhaps the closest Alexie gets to the traditional lyric is “Grandmother,” from his first book, The Business of Fancydancing (1992):

she would be hours in the sweatlodge
come out naked and brilliant in the sun
steam rising off her body in winter
like a slow explosion of horses

(p. 23)

The simile “saves” this poem falling into the category I have called “generic.” Alexie's treatment of line is polished (note the strength of the left as well as the right margins, the location of what I call “power words”—sweatlodge / come, sun / steam, winter). The last line of that quatrain demonstrates not only Alexie's metaphoric power, but also, in the assonance of “slow” and “explosion,” his keen ear.

The four poems in his “Indian Boy Love Song” sequence also border on the “traditional” lyric, but more typically we encounter the idiom of current reservation reality reminiscent of Marnie Walsh's poems in A Taste of the Knife (1976), as in the following two stanzas from Alexie's “Reservation Love Song”:

I can pay your rent
on HUD house get you free
food from the BIA
get your teeth fixed at IHS
I can buy you alcohol
& not drink it all
while you're away I won't fuck
any of your cousins

(p. 58)

“War All the Time” begins, “Crazy Horse comes back from Vietnam / straight into the Breakaway Bar” (p. 65). “The Reservation Cab Driver” “waits outside the Breakaway Bar / in the '65 Malibu with no windshield. // It's a beer a mile. No exceptions” (p. 76). In “Crazy Horse Speaks,” from his second book, Old Shirts & New Skins, Alexie, assuming the voice of Crazy Horse (whose Indian name suggests not “loco” or “insane” so much as “wild” or “untamed,” “unbroken”), writes,

I wear the color of my skin
like a brown paper bag
wrapped around a bottle.

(p. 61)

In “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” the speaker says,

I
have seen it
and like it: The blood,
the way like Sand Creek
even its name brings fear
because I am an American
Indian and have learned
words are another kind of violence.

(p. 44)

“This vocabulary,” Alexie writes, “is genetic.” Certainly it is not “generic.” The Indians in Alexie's poems do not speak with raven spirits or go on vision quests. They are not haunted by spirit animals, as is James Welch's Jim Loney, and they are not visited by Kachina spirits, as is Leslie Marmon Silko's Tayo. In fact, it is more appropriate to think of them in psychological rather than spiritual terms. They have been uprooted from the animistic world, as has Sylvester Yellow Calf in Welch's The Indian Lawyer (1990). The power of Alexie's poems comes from the world at hand.

Just prior to his remarks on Alexie's book, Kincaid (1992:27) speaks of the “formation of new modes and generic possibilities” by Native American writers, and he suggests that Alexie's may come to be “the most commanding voice.” A strict formalist critic keen to classify Alexie's work as to genre would, in fact, be hard put, except when it comes to the twenty-two short stories that comprise The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, and even those stories range from short-short, “sudden,” or “flash” fiction of just three to five pages to more conventionally constructed stories that run nearly twenty pages. Alexie's other collections of poetry are even more problematic with respect to form (and he is a very conscious, though only rarely conventional, formalist). The forty-two items that make up The Business of Fancydancing (counting the four “Indian Boy Love Songs” as one poem, as it is listed in the contents) comprise twenty-eight poems and fourteen prose pieces, one of which is a nine-page story and eight of which run just a paragraph and could be considered prose poems, though I am inclined to regard them as sudden fiction. Old Shirts & New Skins consists of fifty items, as many as forty of which are obviously poems. But is “Snapping the Fringe” a prose piece consisting of about thirteen very short paragraphs, or a poem consisting of almost thirty lines (depending on the format) and using indentation in favor of stanza breaks? Although mixed genres like “prose poetry” always leave me feeling a bit uneasy, I am inclined to think it is his best effort in that mode. Old Shirts & New Skins, then, including such conventional forms as the sestina (“The Naming of Indian Boys”) and the villanelle (“Poem”), is the closest Alexie has come so far to a book made up of poems alone. (This essay was completed prior to the appearance of The Summer of Black Widows in 1996; all forty-seven items in that book are poems, some of them among Alexie's better work in the genre.)

First Indian on the Moon is Alexie's most daring book from a formalist's viewpoint. A hasty survey might lead to a division of perhaps eighteen stories and twenty-four poems, and many of the poems obviously look like it on the page (the flush left margin and all that white space out to the right are sure tip-offs). Most of the prose pieces are constructed by sentence and paragraph, and they read like stories even if they sometimes evolve from premises like the calendar in “Year of the Indian” or a program for treating alcoholics in “A Twelve-Step Treatment Program.” Other titles, however, involve a blend of prose and poetry, and this applies to at least a dozen, including “Influences,” “The Alcoholic Love Poems,” and “A Reservation Table of the Elements.”

In “Split Decisions” (pp. 88–91) Alexie employs a sort of “round” form which he also uses in several stories, including “My Heroes Have Never Been Cowboys.” In this form a word or phrase in the last line of one section or stanza is repeated somewhere in the first line of the next, and at the end of the poem a key word or phrase is echoed from the first line so that the effect is circular. In “Split Decisions” Alexie blends the free verse line with prose sections to produce what Kincaid may have had in mind when he referred to “new modes” and “possibilities” of genre. In this poem, and in many others by Alexie, poetry and prose, line and sentence, appear to move toward each other.

Opening with the epigraph “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee,” the poem proceeds,

Memory: Muhammed Ali
                                                                                                              knocked down
for the first time
in his career
by a thunderous left hook
                                                                                                                        from Joe Frazier.
He had so many reasons
to stay
down.

That is the entire first section of the fifteen-part poem. The next section begins with the chorus of the audience, “Stay down! Stay down!,” and the first-person speaker imagining “white hands / reaching through the television set” to press Ali against the canvas, to hold him down. While such lines may be read aloud with considerable impact, I would contend that his manipulation of line length, line breaks, and drop-line technique demonstrates Alexie's commitment to the poem as it appears on the page.

The third section of “Split Decisions” is a prose paragraph that runs eight lines in the book. Here, the speaker “watched Muhammed Ali hit the canvas with the weight of 500 years on his chest,” and he repeats “there were so many reasons for Ali to stay down.” The fourth section, nine lines of poetry, opens with the word “Downstream,” and the fifth section returns to prose, a ten-line paragraph ending with the question, posed in light of Ali's refusal to be inducted during the Vietnam War, “Did anyone call Ali a hero?” The sixth section is a powerful six-line poem:

My
heroes
carry
guns
in
their
minds.

The next section opens with an italicized observation that looks back to a hollow political promise of the war, that if we could win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people, we would win the war. The speaker concludes that “they made him [Ali] into another dark-skinned enemy,” and while the word “another” looks toward the Vietnamese, it also looks toward Native Americans.

The eighth part runs just three lines:

Children, the enemy reads us
the news
at 6 o'clock every night.

And the ninth section begins, “Nightfall equals MC² in Mississippi.” The twenty-two-line poem that comprises the tenth part is the longest in the round, and it is here that the speaker reflects on seeing Ali years later, in 1991, battling Parkinson's disease. He asks, “What did Muhammed Ali do to deserve this?” In the eleventh section, six lines of prose, he simply turns the question around: “What have we done to deserve these kinds of heroes?” In answering his own question, Alexie offers a small ars poetica: “Muhammed Ali's poetry floated like a butterfly and stung like a bee. We should all write exactly that way.”

“There is no other way to say this,” begins the twelfth part (italics added): “I needed and loved him / beyond what I knew.” Millions stood outside “watching and waiting,” the section concludes. The thirteenth section is another poem constructed of one-word lines:

I
am
waiting
for
someone
to
tell
me
the
truth.

The fourteenth section, in three lines of prose, then purports to say the “truth,” which implicitly applies to the Native American as much as it does to the African American:

It's true the African American is a better fighter than the European American because he has to spend his whole life fighting. It's true this country doesn't stop punching when the bell rings.

Appropriately, the poem ends with the fifteenth section (probably a reference to the fifteen-round fight), a four-line poem in which Ali is remembered “still standing.” Of course his name inscribed at the end of the poem looks back to the beginning so that the idea of circularity, perhaps even of an inescapable cycle of experience, is sustained.

The nine-part sequence, “Fire Storm,” also alternates between poetry and prose, and several works are set up like “Genetics,” in which the poem is transformed into prose, then back into poetry:

                              Fire
          follows my family
                    each spark
                    each flame
                              a soldier
          in the U.S. Cavalry.
                              First

it was the fire in 1973. Flames dropped from the attic of our old house and burned every quilt we owned. Cousins and neighbors came from miles away to carry furniture, clothes, our smallest possessions from the house, but they all arrived too late to save much. All we had left

was a family portrait
singed …

(p. 21)

In writing like this, the poem seems to invade the prose, and vice versa, as if both genres are required to do justice to the event. Surveying the three books prior to The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven then, one might observe a sort of tension throughout Alexie's work between prose and poetry, between sentence/paragraph and line/stanza.

When he was asked by the interviewers for Bloomsbury Review if the transition from poet to writer of fiction was difficult for him, Alexie answered that it was not difficult, that “my poems are stories. There's a very strong narrative drive in all my poetry” (p. 14). As his characters evolved, he found that they demanded “more space than a poem could provide. So it was natural to move on to short stories and now to a novel.” (He has since then had two novels published.) As the interviewers noted from the outset, Alexie is “a storyteller [with] an unmistakable poetic streak.” His powers as a poet are primarily narrative, and after that rhetorical, and with that, perhaps as a sub-species, polemical.

From the foregoing it should be obvious enough that Alexie's is a rhetoric, whether in his poems or in his fiction, that reflects pain and anger, a rhetoric that could give way to bitterness. What keeps that from happening and makes the pain and anger bearable for the reader in Sherman Alexie's poems (some of which are prose poems) and novels and stories (several of which would qualify as “sudden” fiction), is not so much the hope, love, and compassion to which he refers in the interview, but humor. Predictably, this humor is rarely gentle or playful (though it can be that at times), but most often satirical. People, white and Indian as well, laugh out loud and often when Alexie reads, and in the former case, they are frequently laughing at themselves. (I have in mind a reading in Lewiston, Idaho, about two years ago in which a good number of Nez Perce were in the audience along with a large number of whites. It was an overflow crowd, probably in excess of two hundred.)

Alexie's poems are filled with such moments of painful or poignant humor which may be described as “serious” or “dark.” The speaker in “Giving Blood” gives his name to the white nurse, he tells her he is Crazy Horse, and when she asks how many sexual partners he's had, he says, “one or two / depending on your definition of what I did to Custer” (Fancydancing, p. 78). In “The Marlon Brando Memorial Swimming Pool” Dennis Banks appears as “the first / Native American real estate agent, selling a 5,000 gallon capacity dream / in the middle of a desert” (Old Shirts, p. 55). At a reading these sorts of lines can go over like punchlines delivered by a skilled stand-up comedian, but their context keeps the humor from being easy or warm. The impact is not so much like the escape or release offered by comedy as the catharsis provided by tragedy.

Works Cited

Alexie, Sherman

1992 The Business of Fancydancing. Brooklyn, NY: Hanging Loose.

1993 First Indian on the Moon. Brooklyn, NY: Hanging Loose.

1993 The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press.

1993 Old Shirts & New Skins. Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Bellante, John and Carl

1994 “Sherman Alexie, Literary Rebel.” Bloomsbury Review 14 (May/June 1994): 14–15, 26.

Castro, Michael

1983 Interpreting the Indian: Twentieth-Century Poets and the Native American. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Cronyn, George W.

1934 American Indian Poetry. New York: Liveright, [1918]. See also A. Grove Day, The Sky Clears (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1951).

Dodge, Robert K., and Joseph B. McCullough, eds.

1976 Voices from Wah'kon-tah. 2nd edition. New York: International.

Kincaid, James R.

1992 “Who Gets to Tell Their Stories?” New York Times Book Review (May 3, 1992): 1, 24–29.

Niatum, Duane, ed.

1988 Harper's Anthology of 20th-Century Native American Poetry. San Francisco: Harper and Row.

Wiget, Andrew

1985 Native American Literature. Boston: Twayne Publishers.