Sherman Alexie: Comedy Is Simply a Funny Way of Being Serious [Terence Winch]

 

                        National Museum of the American Indian, July 2005. Photo by Terence Winch

After making my living for many years as a musician and free-lance writer/editor, I got a job with the Smithsonian in 1985, spending my last 17 years there as Head of Publications at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington before retiring in 2009. It was definitely exciting to have had a role in bringing this museum to life, especially during the era leading to the opening of the new building on the National Mall in 2004. It’s a unique place—not without its flaws and problems, of course—that everyone should check out when visiting DC. 

Though I did not become an expert in Native literature, over the years I became familiar with some of the Indian world’s leading writers. Kiowa novelist and poet N. Scott Momaday, who won a Pulitzer in 1969 for House Made of Dawn, was a not infrequent visitor to the museum. We established an excellent Native Writers Series that brought many other luminaries to our building, including Leslie Marmon Silko, Joy Harjo, Gerald Vizenor, Luci Tapahonso, the now-infamous “pretendian” Buffy Sainte-Marie, Susan Power, and the incomparable and alluring Louise Erdrich. Among my personal favorites were two poets—M.L. Smoker and Sherwin Bitsui, rising young stars in the Native literary firmament back then. In 2007, I coproduced a CD of contemporary Native writers for the museum called Pulling Down the Clouds, which I believe is the only such recording out there. My favorite piece from the CD is “How to Make Good Baked Salmon from the River” by Nora Marks Dauenhauen. And I don’t even eat seafood. [Many of the books and CDs that the museum still has on offer were produced by me and my staff, with a few new titles added in the years since.]

But today I want to shine the spotlight on Sherman Alexie, whose work is a complex mix of the formal, yet colloquial, and the funny, yet profound. His brilliance pervades almost everything in Face, a book of poems of his that came out in 2009 from Hanging Loose Press (which has also published a number of my own books). The extraordinary technical virtuosity in the service of Alexie’s sometimes raw honesty and often hilarious self-exposure is the synthesis that makes this book so impressive.

Let me backpedal for a moment. In his 1987 introduction to Harper’s Anthology of 20^th-Century Native American Poetry, the noted poet and scholar Brian Swann writes, “The Native American poet seems to work from a sense of social responsibility to the group as much as from an intense individuality.” I think Swann is correct when it comes to many contemporary Native writers. While Sherman Alexie’s Native identity—he was born and raised on the rez—is never far from the foreground, and provides him with a rich source of subject matter, his writing is less shaped by “a sense of social responsibility” than is the case with many other Native artists. It seems to me that his primary motive is to write really good poems, and if they are also funny, so much the better. In fact, I would argue that the work of many Indian writers can sometimes suffer because of this perceived requirement to speak for the group (but I know that sense of communal responsibility is a very powerful force in the Native universe).

Back to Face. Villanelles. Poems with footnotes which themselves have footnotes. Poems shape-shifting into prose and back again. The personal, political, sexual, physical, spiritual, historical, racial—you get it all in this one amazing book. Some poems, some attitudes, will be irritating to readers, Indian and non. But the energy, velocity, and creative abundance in this book (qualities that also mark his stunning young adult novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, a National Book Award winner) are to be prized. Sherman inhales the inappropriate air of genius and exhales all these unauthorized poems, right in our face.

 

An earlier version of this post appeared on the Best American Poetry blog, 7 July 2009.

Comments on "Sherman Alexie: Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious" 2009

As a former colleague in the museum world, I can speak for many of us who were sad to see Terence leave. However, reading this blog gives me great satisfaction because it's clear that Terence will be energizing the poetry world through the same insightful and humorous lens.

Based on his review of Sherman Alexie, it looks as if Terence has found a like-minded poet, and whether it's Native American or Irish American humor with a sting, it's a shot in the arm that can get the day going.
    Laureen Schipsi | July 06, 2009 at 05:56 PM

Terrific photos, and I couldn't agree more: "Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious": what a felicitous way of putting it.
    DL | July 07, 2009 at 11:36 AM

Some lovely insights here, offered with the lightest touch. Thank you for providing the wonderful reading by Nora Danhauer, and for reminding me to go back and read Alexie's poem in the New Yorker.
    HS | July 09, 2009 at 03:18 PM

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