Steve Petermeier added a note to the Squawkbox thread a couple of days ago, then sent me a longer version that I thought deserves wider circulation:

 

Ron,

 

I've been reading your blog for a couple of months now.  I first heard of you via some of Samuel Delany's writings, and I am glad to have discovered your blog. It is wonderful to have a regular resource for comments on a wide array of poetry, as well as the other topics you write about.

 

Your comments today on language and Finnish poetry bring me to write a response.  I found it interesting that there is a correlation to the amount of time that Finnish has been a written language with the amount of time that a number of Native American languages have also been written.

 

I live in Minneapolis and over the past few years have been trying to learn more about the history of my city and the people who lived here prior to the settlement by Europeans.   Generally, there is an unacknowledged reality that most Americans are living in an occupied land, using an alien language.  170 years ago Dakota and Ojibwe were the dominant languages in Minnesota. Europeans needed to learn those languages in order to work, trade and live with the majority population. How different would our world be if the majority population in Minnesota still spoke Dakota and Ojibwe and it was the minority populations who spoke English?

 

I am trying to learn more about both Dakota and Ojibwe and have dictionaries for both languages.  I'm currently very fascinated by Ojibwe, in part having been introduced to it by the works and comments of novelist Louise Erdrich and poet Jim Northrup.  On January 30, I went to seminar about Ojibwe by the author Pat M. Ningewance ("Talking Gookom's Language") at Birchbark Books (owned by Louise Erdrich) here in Minneapolis.  One of the interesting things about Ojibwe that Ms. Ningewance mentioned was that many things that are whole sentences in English are said with only one word in Ojibwe.  An example was the sentence "we wanted to try and eat a lot."  There is a single word for that in Ojibwe (though it was too long for me to write down).  At the time, your comments about Geof Huth's "&: an/thology of pwoermds" were fresh in my mind, especially bpNichol's poem:

 

 em ty

 

(bpNichol is one of my favorites)

 

I wish I could have found a way to open up the discussion to this, but I had already asked a couple of questions and wanted to be respectful and not be the white English speaking guy bogarting the seminar. I'll be looking for another opportunity to bring up get this discussion going.

 

So, how do we know there is not already some great poet speaking Ojibwemowin and writing amazing one word poems?  I think the poet would know.  The poet would share their work, and the community would know, just as the community has passed on their culture via the oral tradition.  I think it probably proves more valuable within a small language community than within a large one.  What does it mean to be a great poet in the United States?  How does it impact the society and culture?

 

There are some poets that straddle both of these worlds.  A book I really enjoyed reading recently was Joy Harjo's (http://www.joyharjo.com/) "A Map to the Next World."  In her work she references, her connection to the Mvskoke language, though like many Native American poets she writes in English.  Check her blog entry from February 27: http://www.joyharjo.com/news/

 

I keep imagining what Germany or France would be like if over the past 150 years their people had been relegated to a minority population in their own country and their children had been taken from them and sent to schools where they didn't learn their own languages?  What would German and French poetry be like then?

 

In Diane Glancy's novel "Stone Heart: A Novel of Sacajawea," she imagines Sacajawea observing Lewis & Clark as they scribble notes in their journals, drawing things and naming the animals and rivers, and she imagines Sacajawea wondering how they can give names to things that they don't know, essentially giving them the wrong names, not knowing their real names.  This especially came home to me while my wife & I & our kids were driving back from Seattle via Glacier National Park in northern Montana and crossing the Maria's River, named by Lewis for his cousin Maria.  It struck me: how bizarre is that?

 

This seems to be our lot in life as Americans -- living in a land where we don't know the real names of things, speaking a language that doesn't really belong here, writing & reading & listening to poetry in isolation from the bulk of the community.

 

Keep up the good work.

 

Also, I enjoyed your comments on Dylan and Chronicles. I heard an interview with Spider John Koerner on KFAI radio the other day.  I've seen him play a number of times over the years, mostly before Dave Ray died when he and Ray and Tony Glover played on occasion.  Now, I've got the itch to get down to the Viking Bar on the West Bank one of these Sunday nights to catch Koerner again.

 

I'm gonna try that blog comment thing, too.  Also, your search tool doesn't work too well.  I put in bpNichol and it didn't find anything.¹

 

peace, love and understanding (never give up)

 

 

Steve Petermeier

no man's land

minneapolis, mn

usa

 

 

 

 

¹ The search engine is indeed pathetic, but it might not be the problem in this instance. bp Nichol is one of those poets whom I’ve often thought I would need a year or two of concentrated work to sort through my many different (and fairly inconsistent) threads of thinking before I could write even a paragraph or two.