Syllabic Fits of Speech: Cedar Sigos’ “All This Time”

“Sigo is a poet of utter seriousness, one who feels strongly about justice, the revindication of Native American identity, the calling out of cruelty and neglect, and many other pressing social matters. But he comes at the task with a meditative indirection, insisting on approaching these realities in a considered and careful manner.”

The Suquamish poet Cedar Sigo offers a simple, accurate description of his poetics:

“I never let the music of the line dissolve completely, and those edges (though always fading fast) will attach themselves to the next island of words, but without ever dying away completely. Every utterance is overlaid and connected acoustically in performance.”

His influences, as discussed in a series of lectures titled Guard the Mysteries, are myriad, beginning with the Projective Verse poet Charles Olson, whose The Maximus Poems, while ultimately rewarding, can feel like skiing up an icy hill, approaching the level of difficulty of Ezra Pound’s Cantos. Yet Sigo’s poetry, while sometimes elusive and allusive, feels more accessible, like rain droplets in a pond, dispersing the water already present with precipitation that keeps falling, now slower, now faster, a continuous visual and sonic displacement of volume.

His poetry collection All This Time shows Sigo at the peak of these acoustic powers. Such as this verse, from “Surface Waves”:

Larry Eigner’s words
Like golden
flies
stuck in
a loom—made
to fall
with sudden
strumming
they sound, separate
distinct
raining
down upon
pavement.

Sigo is not only a poet of the senses but, ultimately, a political one. He speaks freely of his line of descent from Allen Ginsberg, Diane Di Prima, June Jordan, their revolutionary spirit, and of his own activism around Native American heritage, in the manner of Joy Harjo. But action begins with calling things by their names, cultivating respect for words as words.