Sherman Alexie's Crazy Horse Poetry

reviewed by Kent Chadwick

And he is receiving proper recognition. In 1990 the Washington State Arts Commission awarded him a $5,000 Artist Fellowship Award. In 1992, the year his first great book, The Business of Fancydancing: Stories and Poems , was published, Alexie was one of 90 writers nationwide who received a $20,000 National Endowment for the Arts creative writing fellowship.

His second book, Old Shirts & New Skins , has just been released, and a major New York publishing house will bring out a short story collection of his in the fall. All this and he turns just 27 this year.

The Business of Fancydancing and Old Shirts & New Skins are companion collections, which introduce Alexie's broad skill, incandescent style and moral vision. These are Alexie's first two works, the sure foundation of a significant addition to American literature.

Through a brilliant use of interlocking characters, themes and phrases, Alexie crafts The Business of Fancydancing's 40 poems and five stories into a seamless, searing tribute to the people of the Spokane and Coeur d'Alene reservations.

Alexie's writing builds upon the naked realism and ironic wonder of Blackfeet/Gros Ventre writer James Welch. In his seminal poem "Harlem, Montana: Just Off the Reservation," Welch simultaneously raged and laughed at the sorry town's whites and Indians:

We need no runners here. Booze is law

Alexie adds a surrealist twist to convey comparable irony in his poem "Evolution":

Buffalo Bill opens a pawn shop on the reservation

By the end of the poem, Buffalo Bill has taken "everything the Indians have to offer" and then changes the shop's sign from pawn dealer to "THE MUSEUM OF NATIVE AMERICAN CULTURES."

It is not just Indian culture that is endangered, but Indians' very lives. In the story "Pawn Shop" Alexie's character wonders "where all the Skins disappeared to, and after a while, I leave, searching the streets, searching storefronts, until I walk into a pawn shop, find a single heart beating under glass, and I know who it used to belong to, I know all of them."

Alexie unflinchingly documents the "halfway" existence the reservation offers. In the story "Gravity" he notes that it is to the reservation "The Indian, no matter how far he travels away, must come back, repeating, joining the reverse exodus." Yet the speaker in his poem "Native Hero" knows "I can never call the reservation home ..." Then there is this recognition in "Traveling": "I wasn't there when the old Indian man from Worley said it, but I know it must be true: Every highway in the world crosses some reservation, cuts it in half."

Comedy abounds, though, in the survival responses of Alexie's characters. In logic that Jorge Luis Borges would be proud of, Thomas Builds-the-Fire loses control of his daily story in "Special Delivery," the very story that has bored everyone on the reservation for 23 years. Circumstances, including a pickup driven only in reverse, a toppling utility pole, a dog named Buffalo Bill, and the politics of time, drive Thomas to hold the object of his affection, Postmistress Eve Ford, hostage for eight hours with the idea of a gun.

Then there's love, if not exactly then approximately, and Alexie knows both. He can write the impudent "Reservation Love Song:"

I can meet you

Alexie reaches his deepest and most complex emotions when the father appears in the poems and stories. In the poem "Love Hard," the speaker wants to know why, "my wild pony of a father never died, never left to chase the tail of some Crazy Horse dream?" Hookum answers

'Your father always knew how to love hard,'

In the title poem, "The Business of Fancydancing," Alexie makes striking use of the classical sestina form of Dante and the French Provencal troubadours, in which the end words are repeated in different orders through the stanzas. Alexie turns the sestina to hard-edged purposes, to cut away romanticism from the powwow dances and reveal the young men's hunger and hope. They travel with their friend who can fancydance, who is money in their pockets. "It's business, a fancydance to fill where it's empty."

Old Shirts & New Skin is all poems, some prose poems, but none of the short stories that The Business of Fancydancing includes.

In this second book, Alexie continues to create a Crazy Horse poetry, a poetry built of anger and imagination. Realize that the dean of the American pastoral poem, Robert Frost, described his own poetic feeling as parallel to anger. Frost said that a poem rose up in him the way animus did when he saw someone he disliked.

Alexie's Crazy Horse poetry is a view of America from the grave, a grave that can't hold the dead. Crazy Horse keeps coming back to life. "How do you explain the survival of all of us who were never meant to survive?" Alexie asks in the final, crescendoing poem "Shoes." Crazy Horse stood when Custer fell; Native Americans have survived, but Alexie knows that they are just "extras" without billing in the film that is America.

That distance gives pain and clarity. In "Horses," an incantatory poem our grandchildren will be reading in their school literary anthologies, Alexie measures the pain in ponies: 1,000 ponies of the Spokane Indians shot by the US Cavalry and only one survived, survived to bear a colt who won the Kentucky Derby with the stolen name, Spokane. In "Texas Chainsaw Massacre," a wonderful double exposure of horror film and horrible history, Alexie rends with clarity:

I have seen it

This poetry speaks with a bleeding tongue because, as Crazy Horse says, "your language cuts / tears holes in my tongue." Alexie explores how the English he uses, the English that supplanted the language the old women spoke, has always been a weapon of war. He knows how far to trust it: "Because you gave something a name / does not mean your name is important."

Crazy Horse poetry battles with the idolized biographies that pass for American history. Columbus keeps sending postcards to Lester FallsApart, and he gets a few in return. George Armstrong Custer indicts himself when given the chance to speak, envisioning himself almost Christ chasing his twin, his "dark-skinned Lucifer," Crazy Horse, across the plains.

Crazy Horse poetry doesn't pander to sensitive, liberal readers. Alexie's "Nature Poem" answers its epigraph - "If you're an Indian, why don't you write nature poetry?" - with terse lines describing doomed Indian fire fighters caught in a burning stand of pines. You want earth poetry? This is all that Alexie will provide:

she, who once was my sister

Kent Chadwick's NORTHWEST BOOKS is a regular column about writers and books from the states and provinces of the Northwest. Kent lives on Bainbridge Island with his wife Kathy and their son Luke.

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Contents on this page were published in the May, 1993 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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