All history is contemporary history. So said Benedetto Croce, the Italian philosopher and editor of the early 20th century who championed the notion of history as inextricable from the sense of our obligation to the future. The role of history is to chart a past self-critically, with attention to the flawed but necessary means by which we approach the past, and thereby to put historical consciousness in dialogue with our aspirations, to provide a laboratory for ideals, to critique them as Croce did with the fascist ideals of his time and culture, to reveal their psychic origins and destinies—motives, distortions, and prospects of abomination and erasure, abuses of power that begin in the cultural self-narratives shaped by a dominant discourse.
Diane Glancy, in addition to being such a good friend to me personally and a spirit of generosity throughout the Texas literary community, is the poet who for me best brings into focus Croce’s sense of the historian’s role as central to virtues of poetic meaning and poetry’s imaginative powers of connectivity. Sydney famously declared that the historian tells us what was, and the poet what could be, but we, in our own historical position, recognize the failings of that distinction. Nevertheless there remains some value to the notion of poetic meaning as animated both by memory—or in skeletal form, reportage—and eros: the sense of language as elegiac or amorous or, more commonly, both, on the threshold of the unspeakable, summoned by some necessity, some longing for communion with the lost. Through an imaginative act, a collective summons of logos and eros, knowledge (as one pretext of love) transfigures into homage, so often heartbreaking and emotionally binding, a bridge made of the distance to be bridged. Or, in the sense of imaginative reckoning at the precipice of the unknown: a myth.
Glancy’s more recent books in particular, including Report to the Department of the Interior and The Keyboard Letters, embody a hunger to connect to the past by way of surprising leaps in cultural context that bring figures seminal to her imaginative life—such as Melville, Dali, and Cezanne—into dialogue with the more obvious signatures of the local and indigenous, be it her heritage as a native American or the elements and the histories of ranchland in North Texas. In Glancy’s books, all history is contemporary, in the sense that she refuses to extricate the past from her relation to it and the both problematic and inherently poetic nature of that relation. Even the word “indigenous” crumbles a bit under pressure when contemplating the way a consciousness works, and Glancy’s poetry is first and foremost about consciousness (as opposed to something inflexible and ready-made) as both embedded in history (or rather, histories) and yet free to explore multiple relations and open up new possibilities of empathy and identification, new challenges to the dominant stories that distort who we are and where we come from. Her poems are those of great precision that eschew exoticism in the face of the unknown, in favor of a more attentive and outreaching spirit.
And yes, the power of story-making and a redistribution of voices of authority become key to a more compassionate and genuine sense of history. And yes, identity as a fundamental human need depends upon both a better report of the past and a recognition that the self is not identical with a construct. Such is the most recurring fallacy that often signals a breakdown in the way we talk about self. The word “I” has many meanings, only one of which is identity, and indeed there is always a sense in which we use the word to signal something that is fundamentally unrepresentable—a meaning more akin to “subjectivity” or “the seed of our volition” and, as such, in a perpetual state of transformation. We often find our confusions about selfhood to be rooted in the unconscious and understandable conflations of these meanings. To say this does not dismiss the critical role that identity plays in psychic life, nowhere more evident than where the cultural legacy is obscured, erased, distorted by a dominant culture. Too often, a largely white avant-garde is premature or misguided, cruel even, in dismissing the spiritual essentials of self-construction and their relation to communal and psychic life.
Thus at the opening of Glancy’s book Report to the Department of the Interior, we find under examination the following challenge of narrative preemption specific to native culture and acculturation. We begin in the middle—always little early, a little late—with a proem entitled “Postscript at the Beginning:”
History is the hard part of the story. Let Indian education and first government-contact speak. Early missionaries, evangelists, government agents, educationists, boarding schoolists, Sunday schoolists. Winter after winter they crowded the sidewalk to school. Shivering. Shivering. The clouds lined up in their school rows. Not another sad-sack story of assimilation. But with respect to the relatives—we have arrived on the other side of learning. The history of these voices walks with us. (3)
As resonant as this poem is on its own, these lines become significantly enlarged by the poems to come. For one thing: “History” here is “part of the story”—that is, it becomes impossible to extricate the history of story-making—its legacy of erasure and distortion—from the story that it makes. The gesture of intimacy at the end of the poem affirms a mode of connectivity that does not simply solve the problem of erasure. Rather, it delineates the limitation of “learning,” particularly as an incursive, institutionalized practice. Indeed it does not lose sight of the critical role of mediation in any act of communion with the past—a specifically ancestral past that figures as so central to a mode of indigenous spirituality rooted in love, gratitude, and the transmission of wisdom. It is not simply the “voices” that walk with us, but the “history of these voices.” What this emphasizes is the critical role, once again, of language, including our contemporary language, in strengthening the power and influence of those voices.
The book’s first section then consists of monologues from the point of view of Bull Head’s wife as she reckons with the problem of the deceitful story passed on to husband, then persuaded by white, governmental officials to kill Sitting Bull, the defensive-minded separatist who famously killed General Custer. It turns out Bull Head was mortally wounded by Sitting Bull, so the poem cycle begins with Bull Head’s wife running to tell her husband the truth: “They divided us—it was against ourselves,” she says. And later, “We’d betrayed our own people. He’d know that soon. It was something I didn’t tell him. We had our different ways to see. I ran until my feet were torn and bruised. I ran eighty miles.” Thus we have entered one of those spaces, the mind of Bull Head’s wife, marginal to a dominate narrative, to construct a model of the genuine that relies heavily upon factual events and likewise the imaginative life that forges an empathetic experience. That said, just as mere reportage has its limits, so too does imagination. There is no empathy without it, and yet it can likewise swallow up its object and foreground its own powers of invention at the expense of the poem as a gift. Diane Glancy works with such precision and passion, and yet restraint, that her poems feel consistently like bestowals, invitations toward greater awakening and compassionate engagement.
One of the more unexpected moves in the poem sequence thus becomes the interjection of two poems referencing Cezanne. In the first we see Cezanne, now visiting America, eating his paint, longing to paint “the crevices of quarry.” And at the end the enigmatic postscript and comment: “Cezanne was never in America. He was in the world of this book.” Without ostentation, the poem gives us the lovely benefit of a meaningful difficulty. The crevice connotes a margin, a recess, an element of the unknown, and so occasions a relatively primary and physical encounter apart from the political interpretive lens suggested by the word America. We are invited to contemplate Cezanne as a kindred spirit. So later, when Bull Head’s Wife visits the National Gallery of Art and mediates upon Cezanne’s painting The Artists’s Father, Reading ‘L’Evenement,’ the former notion of longing to paint the crevices, eating one’s aesthetic medium, resonates as a parable of reading, not only texts, but paintings and landscapes, familial relations. So the end of the poem becomes particularly chilling, as Bull Head’s wife consciously sees her own dilemma and heartbreak made visible:
That betrayal
as if Bull Head was a traitor of this people.
No—it was the dilemma of a man
reading the Event on the wind
and seeing a trail of smoke in the distance
become the pages he read. (13)
I can think of no passage in American poetry more poignant than this in giving image to the political and emotional problem that figures, in part, as a fundamental problem of reading. The smoke, like a text, written on the wind becomes not only a figure of erasure but also a statement in the form of smoke signals. It provides a language for both the abomination of erasure and an affirmation of what is erased. It is in light of the centrality of the above mentioned “dilemma” that Glancy’s work deserves such close attention in our contemporary world. Hers is work that advocates and frames a better story, but also does not satisfy itself with story-telling alone. It brings to the narrative impulse the fullness of a philosophical and imaginative sensibility with the power to look insightfully at the power and dynamics of story-telling. It embodies, more than any poet I know, the wisdom implicit in Croce’s sense of the use of history, what it says about who we are, in light of our values, imaginatively forged, and facts, more vigorously pursued.
Works Cited:
Glancy, Diane. Report to the Department of the Interior. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2015.