“[Elise] Paschen’s writing give new meaning to the term ‘ethnopoetics,’ taking it outside the boundaries of ‘traditional societies,’ ‘the informant,’ and the outsider who goes in to record ‘pre-literate narratives.'”
The focus of anthropologists on fieldwork in oral history over the past century has been successful in its preservationist aspect regarding the narratives of “pre-literate” cultures. Ethnographers have performed sound recordings and transcriptions that collectively have made available a vast corpus of stories of traditional societies around the world, including ones threatened by disappearance or mutation by means of syncretism, documenting both continuity and change. Often, the focus has been on extracting information to be analyzed, to make sense of a societal configuration. Then, the field of ethnopoetics emerged in the 1960s, led in the United States by such figures as Jerome Rothenberg and Dell Hymes, who shifted some of the focus to performance in itself, thus treating indigenous verbal expressions as art. Yet even after this promising and fertile term—ethnopoetics—emerged as a category of analysis, “narrative” continued to be treated more for its storytelling or essay-equivalent signifying aspects than for its poetics proper. To date, there exists no consistently worked out poetic theory, or set of theories, which focus on form in indigenous verbal performance as a thing in itself. In the area most familiar to me, Alison Krögel has been in the vanguard, with her Musuq Illa Quechua poetics project on the harawi song form, adopted by contemporary Peruvian writers, some urban, many mestizo, who are writing contemporary poetry based on an ancient form.
Researchers such as Dennis Tedlock, with sensitive empathy, linguistic mastery of the Quiché language, and the benefit of long stints of fieldwork among that society, translated skillfully into entertainingly readable English such masterpieces of ancient art as the Mayan epic Popol Vuh and, in doing so, tacitly became a literary translator as well as expert ethnographer. Yet even Tedlock, in “Toward an Oral Poetics,” in speaking of more ancient narratives, asserts that “For the most part, the narrators in primary oral cultures do not sing stories but speak them. They do not memorize stories but remember them.” Yet, in truth, there is much song still to be accounted for in such performances.
Dell Hymes, a leading figure in the emergence of ethnopoetics in the 1970s, opened the door a crack to a more aesthetic mode of contemplation, going so far in his essay “Anthropology and Poetry” as to analyze the minority phenomenon of professional ethnographers who also write poetry:
“I can’t say that poets generally need to be ethnographers, though some obviously have ethnographic gifts. I do think it is clear that some kinds of ethnographic work require poetic gifts. There are several respects in which ‘poetry is a continuation of anthropology by other means.”
Yet it is not until 2013, in Robert Moore’s “Reinventing Ethnopoetics” that the explicit linkage of native oral performance to modern poetry as such is made, allowing the possibility of taking it out of the strict realms of both “pre-literate” cultures and narrative.
“The dialectic between narratable content and rhetorical form that Hymes puts front and center has certainly been central to the development of European and modernist (ethno) poetics and literary culture, as has been the concern with what is going on in the mind of the narrator or literary artist.”
Native informant as autonomous literary artist—what a radically necessary thought! This approach allows one to deemphasize the what and emphasize the how in signifying, valuing formal aesthetic criteria above the search for patterns of information. At the very least, as in literary criticism, this newer focus puts those two values on equal footing. For “informants” come in many forms, and it is too easily forgotten that even “traditional” communities perforce participate in the rituals and consciousness of modern life. Many of their former members reside in urban national spaces or in a diaspora around the world. Global mestizaje and migration have made it ever more complex to segregate for purposes of analysis communities that are constantly reforming and cannot be captured within neat geographical boundaries. Ethnographers such as James Clifford and Clifford Geertz in the 1980s began to shift our understanding, taking the emphasis off tidy, antiquated notions of “native communities,” questioning the one-way relationship between field scholar and informant, and even introducing the idea of self-ethnography.
I can avow from my own extended fieldwork among Quechua speakers in Peru that the scope of storytellers ranged from agriculture-based campesinos in a close-knit ayllu to university educated schoolteachers in the city of Cusco. And some of these interlocutors were simply better storytellers than others, more entertaining, wittier, emphasizing verbal art, timing, vocal intonations, recreating their characters with different voices, displaying mastery over their inherited material and thereby making each story retold into their own.
In this, they are not so different from professional writers who have acquired method and technique through a combination of persistence and practice, acquiring in the process advanced academic degrees, and who participate robustly in cosmopolitan culture. For me, the most “illiterate” campesino, Miguel Wamán—the person who told me more stories than anyone—displayed a self-awareness of his effect on me, his listener, and exercised all his craft in the pursuit of making me laugh at his satirical portraits, or spellbinding me with a metaphysical tale of incest. He had range and he had a particular style. Another, Teodora Paliza, a shopkeeper, was a sly comedian and knew how to modulate her voice and timing to build to a listener’s laugh. Yet she equally reveled in stories of taboo, melancholy terror, and childlike wonder. As someone just beginning to write seriously my own stories and poems, I learned as much from them as I did from William Faulkner and Gustave Flaubert.
Ultimately, my subject here is neither anthropology nor narrative. It is rather to suggest a re-evaluation of both the ethno- and the poetics in the concept of ethnopoetics. In my previous essays, I have been tracing out both the history of lyric form and putting forward the concept of fierce lyricism, which fruitfully plunders literary history while often incorporating the most contemporary experimental modes of writing that came out of postmodernism. So-called ethnic poetry, which I simply define here as poetry written by someone who consciously identifies with one or more particular ethnic groups, has not been sufficiently and accurately contemplated both as ethnic, and simply as a consequence of specific formal developments within written literary history. Timo Muller, for instance, has successfully addressed this issue in his exemplary 2018 book The African American Sonnet: a Literary History, wherein he analyzes how form coincides with particular social and political agendas, as in his chapter “The Vernacular Sonnet and the Afro-Modernist Project.” Some of this general neglect may be—in part—because individual practitioners of poetry either take given categories for granted or else identify with them in different measure, whether that be as part of a movement or a loosely defined group, or as individual practitioners, as merely themselves.
For to be self-proclaimed as ethnic in the United States today (Black, Latinx, Lakota, Irish American, etc.) is often to open oneself up to anthropological and sociological considerations as they apply within contemporary culture, and/or historically. Some poets only want to be perceived and evaluated as sui generis, as their individual selves, or else as willing devotees of (temporary) self-selected mentors, meaning the poets they admire and fashion their art after. As John Stark reminds us in “Borges and His Precursors”:
Jorge Luis Borges once shockingly announced that ‘every writer creates his own precursors.’ That is, like T. S. Eliot, he thinks that a new work, by reminding a reader of similar features in earlier works, necessitates a new conception of literary history. A writer is not an effect of earlier writers; rather, he makes them important in a new way, because of himself.
At a minimum, to be a self-styled, self-declared ethnic poet (or to tacitly advance that view by the nature and themes/forms of one’s own poetic work), is also to be a historian—both social and literary. I discussed this phenomenon in an earlier essay with regard to Janice Harrington’s Yard Show, in which she features African American yard displays of “kitsch” statuary as a vibrant form of cultural self-expression in the face of historical trauma.
The manner of thinking I have described, of reappropriating oral history approaches that were once limited to the recording of natives of somewhat misleadingly named “preliterate cultures” and applying them to our understanding of the work of sophisticated, MFA trained poetic citizens who freely travel within, absorb, and participate in world art and culture, affords a nuanced repurposing of the term ethnopoetics. Already Jerome Rothenberg opened this door in his North American indigenous-focused late 1960s and early 1970s anthologies Technicians of the Sacred and Shaking the Pumpkin. Tacitly and explicitly, the poems contained therein said, simply, “This is poetry, like any other.” Suddenly, hundreds of native poetic texts were taken out of the domain of professional ethnographers and reintroduced in a poetry anthology as products of poetic minds. Even if they were in a sense anonymous, their re-contextualizing set up a fascinating flux between the sense of a collective cultural creation and the work of an individual native “author,” whether or not this person was named. The idea of an “informant” disappeared, replaced by the tantalizing aura of authorship. The fact that each one issued from oral tradition, rather than from “individual talent” did not negate their becoming coeval with, and included in, the vibrancy of modernism. This status was irrespective of when, where, and how the poems first came into being. They ceased to be primarily historical documents. It was a daring move, both respectful to the source material and irreverent in its new mode of presentation. This example spurred many American poets of all ethnicities to enrich their own practice by native example.
As it turns out, Western ears are not the only ones attuned to prosody. In his annotated translation of the Mayan Quiché myth cycle Popol Vuh, written down in the 1550s, the abovementioned translator Tedlock unpacks “one of the most densely poetic passages in the Popol Vuh” as follows:
There do come moments in Quiché poetry when sounds seem to come to the foreground against syntax…The following passage is dense with alliteration and assonance, both inside its words and between them…evoking the sounds of a primordial world that consists only of flat seas and an empty sky.
K’a katz’ininoq, Now it still ripples,
K’a kachamamoq, now it still murmurs
katz’ininik ripples.
One might say something similar of many a Petrarchan-derived sonnet, or other subsequent poems in the Western lyric tradition. Sound and other elements of prosody lead us toward meaning, rather than subordinating itself prosaically to the “information” it contains. The poem’s cultural Mayan-ness does not preempt such considerations. On the contrary, this foundational text of Mayan culture requires them.
In such a roundabout way do we come to a proper consideration of Osage poet Elise Paschen’s extraordinary recent poetry collection, Blood Wolf Moon. Paschen has a storied familial and cultural pedigree, both of which she marshals in service of her poetic quest. She represents a direct familial link to the “Killers of the Flower Moon” era, during which the prospect of headrights to oil motivated scheming white men to marry Osage women and murder them to gain access to those rights. Paschen is also the daughter of Maria Tallchief, considered America’s first major prima ballerina and the first Osage Tribe member to hold the rank. She is also discussed in my earlier essay on Karla Kelsey’s poetry book Blood Feather, in which Tallchief figures as one of three female poetic personae.
Paschen is a telling case in point, demanding a more expansive understanding of what may be called ethnopoetics. She is both Osage and Scotch-Irish, blonde and fair, and a citizen of the world, having been an undergraduate at Harvard, served as the executive director of the Poetry Society of America, and she teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, among many other achievements. She blows apart anyone’s superannuated premises about “native” writing, instead forcing our attention on the complexity of the work itself, and her technical methods of achieving that complexity. At the same time, she is relentlessly focused in Blood Wolf Moon on the reclamation and literary reparation of aspects of an Osage heritage of suffering and the systematic degradation of its integrity. Not to mention that it’s a conflicted homage to her famous and peripatetic mother. This project, highly personal for her, is brilliantly accomplished, not merely by the force of her political passion, but by her highly versatile and sophisticated command of poetics. Rather than simply “representing,” she delves deeply into her own psyche and emotions with great finesse, amplifying the complicated mother-daughter dynamic with a resonant sense of the Osage nation that roundly, if partially, forged both of their artistic and human identities.
While Paschen did not grow up speaking Osage, she is resourceful in using research skills to bring forth what she needs for given poems. In “𐓷𐓘𐓻𐓘𐓻𐓟 /Wahzhazhe/Osage,” she layers in native words from an Osage dictionary that have specific meaning for her, as a way of measuring her distance from, and closeness to, these sources.
The first language
𐓷𐓘𐓻𐓘𐓻𐓟 which Eliza,
her grandmother, spoke.
I try to learn
the words 𐒻𐒷
from a book, a dictionary.
What was my mother taught
as a young girl sitting
on the front stoop
of her grandma’s house
inhabited by half-brothers
she revered. Her favorite,
hunky hand outstretched,
showed her how to catch
the wild horse
𐒼𐒰𐓏𐒰 𐓏𐒰𐓊𐒷𐓐𐒻
unbridled in the pasture.
In this way, Paschen is able to act as an ethnographer, as a participant-observer, after the fact, in a personal and authentic aspect of her mother’s life and relationship with Tallchief, revealing to us how Tallchief’s early experience with her first language helped her form a close and tender bond with her favorite brother. Sometimes these words are not translated for the reader. Rather, they are left to endure in their graphic strangeness, heightening our awareness of Paschen’s own vexed relationship with the hybridity that has left her in a liminal if confident place. Like her mother, she is Osage in a fundamental measure but not in the same way as her mother.
Rather than explain this fact, Paschen inscribes it, giving us a graphic equivalent that serves as an objective correlative for an existential state derived from the fact of ethnicity. To her credit, she does not overstate a personal alienation that is secondary to her poet-researcher need to render the half-imagined, half-documented texture of her mother’s life. Like a poet, she is feeling. Like a researcher, she is objective. At the end of the poem, Paschen does begin to translate certain words, as if to bring us closer, but paradoxically to remind us that we, like her, will always remain at a certain remove, and thus will need this ongoing act of translation.
This language
for throat 𐓈𐓂𐓊𐒷
and tongue 𐓍𐒷𐓒𐒷—
words she learns
to speak but then
forgets. She loosens
𐓏𐒷𐓍𐒻͘ the rope
from the horse’s crest.
The catching of the horse by lassoing its neck is in precise play with the mother learning the very words for throat and tongue, which in the end, were loosened, first for mother, then for daughter, unable to be held for long.
The final three poems offered— “Snare,” Stationery,” and “Typewriter”—are bilingual and bi-graphic: Osage, Osage translation into English alphabet, and English. These compositions go beyond many poems’ representation of ethnic culture as merely a theme and, instead, represent it in its ethnolinguistic manifestation. Unlike us, and unlike even the brilliant anthologist Jerome Rothenberg, or even Dennis Tedlock, who learned the Quiché language, or Krögel, who dwells, thinks and writes Quechua with near-native fluency and authority, Paschen stands several steps innately closer to the source material. Yet she does not simply rely on “blood” as a claim to represent her mother’s native culture or to claim it partially as her own. Instead, she enacts it by means of recensions. She calls out to the graphic dimension of language (stationery, e.g., writing paper, and typewriter, a now antiquated yet historically specific mode of getting typeface impressions onto paper, as many an ethnologist once had to do) rather than to the oral tradition, to give us a lyrical yet accurate sense of where she is situated within this poetic exploration of familial and tribal history. The poems themselves make a beautiful palimpsest of sorts in which we read Paschen’s emotional journey.
Here are the beginning verses of “Snare.”
𐓡𐓪́́ 𐓟𐓤𐓘 / Ho’-e-ga / Snare
| 𐓡𐓪𐓸𐓣͘𐓡𐓘 | hu-xin-ha | Fish scales | |
| 𐓵𐓣𐓜𐓶́ 𐓜𐓶𐓸𐓟 | thi-bthu’-bthu-xe | tremble | |
| 𐓩𐓣 𐓥𐓪𐓡𐓘 | ni-ko-ha | at the edge of the water |
“Typewriter,” which ends the book, first in Osage alphabet, then Osage in Roman alphabet, then English, is an apt poetic summa of Paschen’s reconciliation with her migratory roots. Her offset lines, a technique she not infrequently offers, depict thoroughly her trajectory, one that ends with her self-inclusion in her tribe.
𐓨𐓘́́ 𐓺𐓟 𐓱𐓘́́ 𐓱𐓘𐓺𐓟 / Mą´ze Htáhtaze / Typewriter
𐓬𐓘𐓻𐓘́ 𐓻𐓘𐓤𐓣 pažážaki I zigzag
𐓨𐓘́ ͘ 𐓻𐓘͘ máža into the world
𐓷𐓘𐓤𐓪́ wak ó a woman,
𐓯𐓪́ ͘ 𐓱𐓘͘ šo˛´htą a wolf.
𐓪𐓧𐓣̋ ͘ ol´įį Within my heart
𐓥𐓘́ 𐓷𐓘 𐓷𐓘𐓳𐓟́ 𐓸𐓣 hkáwa wahcéxi an untamed horse,
𐓰𐓘̋͘ 𐓮𐓤𐓘 tą´ąska what-do-you-call-it,
𐓱𐓘̄ 𐓲𐓟́ htaacé the wind.
𐓡𐓪𐓷𐓚𐓤𐓣́ 𐓡𐓘 howaįkíha Which pathway to
𐓨𐓣͘𐓥𐓘́ 𐓤’𐓟 mihkák e that star
𐓨𐓣͘𐓥𐓘𐓤’𐓟 𐓪𐓻𐓘́ ͘ 𐓤𐓟 mihkák e óžąke or the orbit of a star.
𐓪𐓬’𐓘́ ͘ 𐓵𐓘 op ą´ða Vapor rises off standing water.
𐓘́ 𐓨𐓘͘𐓯𐓣 ámąši Upstairs,
𐓣́ 𐓸𐓪𐓬𐓟 íxope tell untruths,
𐓵𐓟̋ 𐓺𐓟 ðéeze that of a tongue.
𐓵𐓟́ 𐓰𐓸𐓘͘ ðétxą Time is just
𐓨𐓘́ ͘ 𐓺𐓟 𐓱𐓘́ 𐓱𐓘𐓺𐓟 mą´ze htáhtaze the ticking noise against metal.
Significantly, there is no rhetoric of ancient wisdom being dispensed here. Paschen the modernist trusts the density of image to convey any “lore” that might be beneficial advice for living. Rather, she self-examines, passionate, engaged, a zigzagging woman-wolf but also a skeptic who can only conceive time as ticking metal. Even the wind is just “what-do-you-call-it,” foregrounding linguistic, cultural, and existential uncertainty. For all we know, the Osage from generations ago held the same skeptical temperament, as they faced the incursions and blood-thinning cultural domination of the white Western world. Yet Paschen here remains discreet, personal, self-focused, and wary about the fact that “the tongue” is liable to “tell untruths.”
Paschen is a contemporary poet motivated by and dexterous at form in the Western lyric tradition. As she comments in an interview with Edward Byrne in Valparaiso Poetry Review, she writes a first draft intuitively, then lets it sit. After which:
I will look at the poem’s shape and then will determine what sort of metrical pattern attempts to emerge. I tend to favor the iambic tetrameter line, for its length, yet also for its tautness and its ability to rein in words. Stanza length will vary—again, I hope the shape of the poem will present itself.
In “After Killers of the Flower Moon,” based on the movie for which her writing served as source material for the screenplay, the poet is just as concerned with meter as with the explosive cultural content she will gradually divulge. Often, she employs iambic pentameter as well, with slight metrical variations.
The actress plays Mollie Burkhart who lived
down the street from Eliza in Fairfax.
and
My mother told me that owls in trees wailed
the windswept night before her father died.
and this one, in which the second line of the couplet breaks down metrically under the stress of outrage.
I stop breathing during the night of film
When a murderer calls Osage women blankets.
This couplet offers an extraordinary meta-poetic moment, in which the author, who was a source for the movie, metrically “stutters” at the shock of a cinematic instant in which she is confronted in a different artistic medium with historical-personal information she already knows. The poetry itself has changed the status of that utterance from information to a painfully personal revelation. When art says something, it is as if one is hearing it for the first time. That is the power of lyric, when the shape of the poem “presents itself,” and Paschen here is working highly intuitively, though perhaps this is one of the instances in which she consciously favored the particular form of each metered couplet in revision precisely “for its tautness.”
Here again we see Paschen’s writing give new meaning to the term “ethnopoetics,” taking it outside the boundaries of “traditional societies,” “the informant,” and the outsider who goes in to record “pre-literate narratives.” Rather, the poet constantly repositions herself variously as witness and as subject, as documentarian and as rhapsode, and as poet of aubades and nocturnes, verbal heiress of John Donne’s 1633 “Aubade” and the nocturnes perfected by Chopin.
“Dahlia Aubade,” in its entirety:
Devil star
fear to die
Growing here
in the crook
Of a sleeve
the blue note
Each one tolls
heavenward
Sky anthem
root to slip
Knot of rope
bell so clear
Wake up now
cut your want
You uproot
tuber bloom
In eight three-syllable couplets, Paschen visually and with pristine images embodies the essence of a bunch of dahlias as they “wake up” in order to “toll heavenward.” Here Paschen is simply saturated with Romantic spirit. Likewise in “Lupine Nocturne,” which features her preferred meter, iambic tetrameter.
A bullseye moon, quixotic sun.
Muscle for place, take out the sky.
My speech grows slow, the grit of sand.
So hard to sleep in wolfsbane light.
In Blood Wolf Moon, Paschen, at the peak of her poetic powers, is matchless in her movement among historical reckoning, personal complaint, and rapturous evocations of the natural world. Whether the theme is unfair traders, as in “Kithawa speaks,” or “Quarrel of Sparrows,” a reverie, the treatment of the theme is always in lyric mode, always with the kind of swift calculations that image, metaphor and meter can make, faster than the mind can make sense of the content of what’s being said.
“Kithawa Speaks” lets the scene of ruin body forth, trusting in the discreet note of the speaker’s voice, the wife of an Osage man caught in a bad bargain.
Silent as fog rising from the marsh, I observe.
The traders barter canoes for our whitewood dugouts.
My husband broods at the prow of the long table,
candles sputtering, reflected between two mirrors.
The end-stops of those first two lines do much to create tension, as if the wife is trying, in future retrospection, to keep herself from uttering the poem’s final line, one that occurs shortly after:
I see blazing greed, our earth parched, my descendants gone.
Paschen is notable for her highly effective combination of verbal restraint and deep emotional strike. The hits, when they come, are quick, and we are blindsided despite a poem’s somber tone, as here, having given us fair forewarning.
This poet draws from all sources that may give her direct inspiration, whether contemporary American or Native American. In the abovementioned interview, she remarks how “[a Vona] Groarke poem, ‘The Riverbed,’ helped chart a path through the maze of writing. I also consulted the Osage Dictionary to discover language as a way of entry into the material.” This is her method, drawing from whatever well she needs, whether it be Icelandic myth or findagrave.com to get where she wants to go. No source is privileged above the other, for Paschen does not eschew the scholarly route, or the route of imitation. Her sources are wide-ranging, which in part accounts for the wide range of lyric effects.
One of my favorite of her poems has no obvious Osage provenance whatsoever, and seems to be the product of pure invention, reminding us that the simple word “poet” best sums up Paschen’s work, after which one may add many adjectives to modify that starkly simple definition of her métier “Quarrel of Sparrows” is timeless and could as easily have been derived from Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Carrion Comfort” or Marianne Moore’s “Black Earth” as from the anonymous Osage author of “Song of Speaks Fluently.” Here is Paschen:
When I take flight
far from the house—
lonely for choirs,
riotous in trees—
a visitation of
wings whirs, arcs
in sky, then lights
on city sidewalk.
With her steely mind, tender heart and unerring ear, Paschen can take us anywhere at any time, from a transatlantic flight where her often-absent prima ballerina mother cradles this daughter’s head in her lap, to the grave of George Braveheart, most likely fed poisoned whisky, most likely doctored by those unscrupulous people who violently and by deceit stole the oil headrights from the Osage. Like the sparrows above, far from the house and riotous in trees, Paschen moves swiftly, sprightly, her words a visitation of wings, out of which she sustains flight.
Johnny Payne is the arts editor at Merion West. Johnny is a poet, novelist, playwright, and essayist. He has worked extensively in Latin American Studies, especially literature under dictatorship and Quechua oral tradition. He directs the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Mount Saint Mary’s University, Los Angeles. He earned his doctorate from Stanford University.
