Native American/First Nations Woman Writer of the Week
ROBERTA HILL
This week, we introduce you all to Roberta Jean Hill, formerly Roberta Hill Whiteman, a poet and educator native to Wisconsin! Born in 1947 near Green Bay, Roberta Hill grew up among the Oneida Indigenous peoples of Wisconsin, a rich heritage that enlightens her work as a poet and has driven her scholastic career. In her third poetry collection, Cicadas: New & Selected Poems, published by the Holy Cow! Press in 2013, Hill writes:
To the people, beings and places I love, named or unnamed, met and imagined. May they continue to inspire us to live and keep loving earth and her beings for all eternity.
UW-Milwaukee Special Collections preserves four signed presentation copies of Hill’s poetry books, all published by Jim Pearlman, founder and editor of Holy Cow! Press in Duluth, Minnesota, which is dedicated to publishing writers who live in the American Midwest and focuses on publishing Native American authors and thematic anthologies.
UWM Special Collections holds two copies of Hill’s first collection of poetry,Star Quilt, originally published in 1984 with foreword by poet, editor, professor, translator, and human rights advocate,Carolyn Forché. One is a first printing from 1984, signed in 2013 to our library, while the other is a second printing, illustrated and republished by the Holy Cow! Press in 1985, which is signed to Milwaukee poet and educator DeWitt Clinton.
The illustrations for both printings of Star Quilt were done by Hill’s husband, artist, director of First Nations Film and Video Festival, Inc, and member of theNorthernArapaho tribe,Ernest Whiteman. The cover art for the book is a portrait of a woman facing four ways, hinting at Roberta’s use of the four cardinal directions throughout the book that portray the separation and displacement that the Oneida peoples have experienced in a long history of forced migration by the U.S. government. Throughout the collection, Hill internalizes this feeling of loss and separation, utilizing an extended metaphor of dust in the winds returning to the Earth, from where the peoples are said to have come. The poem above, “I’uni Kwi Athi? Hiatho,” uses Hill’s father’s name, the meaning of which Hill says he never revealed.
In the glossary for Star Quilt, Hill tells the history of quilt making by Plains Indian women, which are designed with a central star for their children and grandchildren, stating, “it is a valuable possession, connecting the generations to one another and the earth.” Hill dedicates this collection to those who inspired her writing, “In Memory of Our Parents John Atlee and Eva Mae Whiteman and Charles Allen and Eleanor Smith Hill”.
Roberta Hill’s second collection, Philadelphia Flowers: Poems, published in 1996, carries many individual poems to and for family and friends, dedicating the collection to her three children, Jacob, Heather, and Melissa. The cover painting and illustrations for Philadelphia Flowers are again by Ernest Whiteman. Hill’s final and most recent collection, published in 2013, Cicadas: New & Selected Poems, reprints poems selected from Star QuiltandPhiladelphia Flowers and acts as a follow-up to her recent life experiences; including a longer individual poem dedicated to Hill’s late brother-in-law, “Ernie” Whiteman.
After graduating with a BA from the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, Hill earned an MA in fine arts from the University of Montana, and completed her PhD in American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota. Hill’s doctoral thesis honors the work of her paternal grandmother,Dr. Lillie Rosa Minoka-Hill, through a biographical study of her life as the second American Indian woman to earn an M.D.in the U.S. Roberta Hill has held several academic positions and is Professor Emerita of English and American Indian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
–Isabelle, Special Collections Undergraduate Writing Intern
We acknowledge that in Milwaukee we live and work on traditional Potawatomi, Ho-Chunk, and Menominee homelands along the southwest shores of Michigami, part of North America’s largest system of freshwater lakes, where the Milwaukee, Menominee, and Kinnickinnic rivers meet and the people of Wisconsin’s sovereign Anishinaabe, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Oneida, and Mohican nations remain present.
To celebrate National Poetry Month and Maya Angelou’s birthday, you can hear Angelou’s sublime poem “A Brave and Startling Truth,” which flew to space aboard NASA’s Orion — “a timeless cosmic clarion call to humanity, inspired by Carl Sagan.”
A Brave and Startling Truth
We, this people, on a small and lonely planet
Traveling through casual space
Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns
To a destination where all signs tell us
It is possible and imperative that we learn
A brave and startling truth
And when we come to it
To the day of peacemaking
When we release our fingers
From fists of hostility
And allow the pure air to cool our palms
When we come to it
When the curtain falls on the minstrel show of hate
And faces sooted with scorn are scrubbed clean
When battlefields and coliseum
No longer rake our unique and particular sons and daughters
Up with the bruised and bloody grass
To lie in identical plots in foreign soil
When the rapacious storming of the churches
The screaming racket in the temples have ceased
When the pennants are waving gaily
When the banners of the world tremble
Stoutly in the good, clean breeze
When we come to it
When we let the rifles fall from our shoulders
And children dress their dolls in flags of truce
When land mines of death have been removed
And the aged can walk into evenings of peace
When religious ritual is not perfumed
By the incense of burning flesh
And childhood dreams are not kicked awake
By nightmares of abuse
When we come to it
Then we will confess that not the Pyramids
With their stones set in mysterious perfection
Nor the Gardens of Babylon
Hanging as eternal beauty
In our collective memory
Not the Grand Canyon
Kindled into delicious color
By Western sunsets
Nor the Danube, flowing its blue soul into Europe
Not the sacred peak of Mount Fuji
Stretching to the Rising Sun
Neither Father Amazon nor Mother Mississippi who, without favor,
Nurture all creatures in the depths and on the shores
These are not the only wonders of the world
When we come to it
We, this people, on this minuscule and kithless globe
Who reach daily for the bomb, the blade and the dagger
Yet who petition in the dark for tokens of peace
We, this people on this mote of matter
In whose mouths abide cankerous words
Which challenge our very existence
Yet out of those same mouths
Come songs of such exquisite sweetness
That the heart falters in its labor
And the body is quieted into awe
We, this people, on this small and drifting planet
Whose hands can strike with such abandon
That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living
Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness
That the haughty neck is happy to bow
And the proud back is glad to bend
Out of such chaos, of such contradiction
We learn that we are neither devils nor divines
When we come to it
We, this people, on this wayward, floating body
Created on this earth, of this earth
Have the power to fashion for this earth
A climate where every man and every woman
Can live freely without sanctimonious piety
Without crippling fear
When we come to it
We must confess that we are the possible
We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world
Three days now the mold has advanced across the face of the peach I caught with one hand like Willie Mays, saving it from the sidewalk and its army of black shoes and how could it happen that my peach turned into Castro, the young one who regularly baptized the microphone and the first row of sleepy workers with his spit and anger and love. What is love if not a commitment to fatigues and I wonder if he wears sea green trunks to the beach or olive pajamas with padded feet? I have to know if mold lives in his crisper too, and does it goosestep even in that temple of cleanliness before which he kneels and hunts the last rebellious grape unwilling to bear the tyranny of vines. This morning I am the one kneeling and praying in the kitchen over the beard of my communist peach, how it’s a second cousin of the hacky sack, albeit spongier, like a meatball, which reminds me the letter M is for Marx, and for moon shot, and for miracle. And sooner or later, M is also for mercy, mercy we have beauty, mercy we can’t live forever, mercy we have time and rot to work our stubborn flesh away from the bald, pale soul that screams with joy when it pops up and free toward the first night of October in Indian summer.
Look at it, cold and wet like a newborn calf. I want to tell it everything—how we struggled, how we tore out our hair and thumbed through rusted nails just to stand for its birth. I want to say: look how far we’ve come. Promise our resolutions.
But what does a baby care for oaths and pledges? It only wants to live.
==
Hi. How are you? Shall we do this thing?
As a reminder, you can get a daily poem emailed to you in April by signing up here. Or catch it via Twitter, this Tumblr, or RSS. I’m glad you’re here.
Imagine you raise a glass of iced water to your lips, and, feeling a strange touch, you look into the glass to find a dead gnat floating at the surface. You see, there are metaphors everywhere about the presence of evil. But metaphors are misread. We discover later in life, too late to change it, that evil is not signified by the gnat (the gnat is the casualty), but by the water, which we raise to our lips every single day.
Lord, I confess I want the clarity of catastrophe but not the catastrophe. Like everyone else, I want a storm I can dance in. I want an excuse to change my life.
The day A. died, the sun was brighter than any sun. I answered the phone, and a channel opened between my stupid head and heaven, or what was left of it. The blankness stared back; and I made sound after sound with my blood-wet gullet. O unsayable—O tender and divine unsayable, I knew you then: you line straight to the planet’s calamitous core; you moment moment moment; you intimate abyss I called sister for a good reason.
When the Bad Thing happened, I saw every blade. And every year I find out what they’ve done to us, I shed another skin. I get closer to open air; true north.
Lord, if I say Bless the cold water you throw on my face, does that make me a costume party. Am I greedy for comfort if I ask you not to kill my friends; if I beg you to press your heel against my throat—not enough to ruin me, but just so—just so I can almost see your face—
Miss you. Would like to take a walk with you. Gabrielle Calvocoressi
Do not care if you just arrive in your skeleton. Would love to take a walk with you. Miss you. Would love to make you shrimp saganaki. Like you used to make me when you were alive. Love to feed you. Sit over steaming bowls of pilaf. Little roasted tomatoes covered in pepper and nutmeg. Miss you. Would love to walk to the post office with you. Bring the ghost dog. We’ll walk past the waterfall and you can tell me about the after. Wish you. Wish you would come back for a while. Don’t even need to bring your skin sack. I’ll know you. I know you will know me even though. I’m bigger now. Grayer. I’ll show you my garden. I’d like to hop in the leaf pile you raked but if you want to jump in? I’ll rake it for you. Miss you standing looking out at the river with your rake in your hand. Miss you in your puffy blue jacket. They’re hip now. I can bring you a new one if you’ll only come by. Know I told you it was okay to go. Know I told you it was okay to leave me. Why’d you believe me? You always believed me. Wish you would come back so we could talk about truth. Miss you. Wish you would walk through my door. Stare out from the mirror. Come through the pipes.
Maybe the trees won’t impress someone looking for June or a new lover. There are people ahead carrying flowers, unaware of our many mistakes. Let me imagine you now in your house surrounded by worst-case scenarios and rehearsed practicality. What other animal plans their own funeral? What animal makes room for death like we do? My friend believes the Brontë sisters didn’t carry umbrellas since their characters walked the moors without them. I would like to agree. I would like to walk the moors without anyone. And open the window to ask for rain. And I love the rain.
Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor. He played a few chords then he sang some more— "I got the Weary Blues And I can’t be satisfied. Got the Weary Blues And can’t be satisfied— I ain’t happy no mo’ And I wish that I had died.“ And far into the night he crooned that tune. The stars went out and so did the moon. The singer stopped playing and went to bed While the Weary Blues echoed through his head. He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.
Here, in the golden haze of the late slant sun, Let us walk, with the light in our eyes, To a single bench from the outset predetermined. Look: there are seagulls in these city skies, Kindled against the blue. But I do not think of the seagulls, I think of you.
Your eyes, with the late sun in them, Are like blue pools dazzled with yellow petals. This pale green suits them well. Here is your finger, with an emerald on it: The one I gave you. I say these things politely– But what I think beneath them, who can tell?
They flee from me that sometime did me seek With naked foot stalking in my chamber. I have seen them gentle tame and meek That now are wild and do not remember…
Twilights that are deathless I walk in my garden, Knowing that I die. The great iron idols Are dark and breathless And stand a little higher When I walk straight by…
…Twilights that are deathless, With a body that dies, I walk in my garden Higher than the sun. Beautiful flowers there: I pick none.
Excerpts from “The City Takes a Woman” Kenneth Fearing
In the second installment of Word: Collected PoetryTrace DePass contemplates how poetry can entrap, rather than release, past traumas and hardships. Filmed on location at Kenkeleba House Garden in the East Village.
[[Video: An exploration of the Kenkeleba House Garden, an outdoor green space in New York City filled with sculptures by African-American artists, the film begins by coming through the front gate and panning around to view a person (Trace DePass) sitting in the garden, then at the various installations in it. This happens throughout the film, interspersed with shots of the life happening in the neighborhood outside the garden and Trace interacting with the space. The film returns several times to a realistic metal sculpture of a man standing, his next straining to one side and a more abstract sculpture of a figure made out of metal and blue glass.]]
Thank you for reading and listening and watching—for being part of our community—throughout this month. With final good wishes for the health of all, here is Frank O'Hara (1926-1966), one of the presiding spirits of Knopf Poetry for his generosity on the page, his pursuit of beauty in its myriad forms, his boundless sense of adventure and of literature’s possibilities. May soft banks enfold you until we meet again over a poem.
River
Whole days would go by, and later their years, while I thought of nothing but its darkness drifting like a bridge against the sky. Day after day I dreamily sought its melancholy, its searchings, its soft banks enfolded me, and upon my lengthening neck its kiss was murmuring like a wound. My very life became the inhalation of its weedy ponderings and sometimes in the sunlight my eyes, walled in water, would glimpse the pathway to the great sea. For it was there I was being borne. Then for a moment my strengthening arms would cry out upon the leafy crest of the air like whitecaps, and lightning, swift as pain, would go through me on its way to the forest, and I’d sink back upon that brutal tenderness that bore me on, that held me like a slave in its liquid distances of eyes, and one day, though weeping for my caresses, would abandon me, moment of infinitely salty air! sun fluttering like a signal! upon the open flesh of the world.
More on this book and author:
Learn more about Selected Poems by Frank O'Hara, edited by Mark Ford
Today we present a preview of a major new biography of Sylvia Plath, Red Comet, coming this fall. Through committed investigative scholarship, Heather Clark is able to offer the most extensively researched and nuanced view yet of a poet whose influence grows with each new generation of readers. Clark is the first biographer to draw upon all of Plath’s surviving letters, including fourteen newly discovered letters Plath sent to her psychiatrist in 1961-63, and to draw extensively on her unpublished diaries, calendars, and poetry manuscripts. She is also the first to have had full, unfettered access to Ted Hughes’s unpublished diaries and poetry manuscripts, allowing her to present a balanced and humane view of this remarkable creative marriage (and its unravelling) from both sides. She is able to present significant new findings about Plath’s whereabouts and her state of health on the weekend leading up to her death. With these and many other “firsts,” Clark’s approach to Plath is to chart the course of this brilliant poet’s development, highlighting her literary and intellectual growth rather than her undoing. Here, we offer a passage from Clark’s prologue to the biography, followed by lines from one of Plath’s celebrated “bee poems.”
fromRed Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath
The Oxford professor Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf’s biographer, has written, “Women writers whose lives involved abuse, mental-illness, self-harm, suicide, have often been treated, biographically, as victims or psychological case-histories first and as professional writers second.” This is especially true of Sylvia Plath, who has become cultural shorthand for female hysteria. When we see a female character reading The Bell Jar in a movie, we know she will make trouble. As the critic Maggie Nelson reminds us, “to be called the Sylvia Plath of anything is a bad thing.” Nelson reminds us, too, that a woman who explores depression in her art isn’t perceived as “a shamanistic voyager to the dark side, but a ‘madwoman in the attic,’ an abject spectacle.” Perhaps this is why Woody Allen teased Diane Keaton for reading Plath’s seminal collection Ariel in Annie Hall. Or why, in the 1980s, a prominent reviewer cracked his favorite Plath joke as he reviewed Plath’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Collected Poems: “ ‘Why did SP cross the road?’ ‘To be struck by an oncoming vehicle.’ ” Male writers who kill themselves are rarely subject to such black humor: there are no dinner-party jokes about David Foster Wallace.
Since her suicide in 1963, Sylvia Plath has become a paradoxical symbol of female power and helplessness whose life has been subsumed by her afterlife. Caught in the limbo between icon and cliché, she has been mythologized and pathologized in movies, television, and biographies as a high priestess of poetry, obsessed with death. These distortions gained momentum in the 1960s when Ariel was published. Most reviewers didn’t know what to make of the burning, pulsating metaphors in poems like “Lady Lazarus” or the chilly imagery of “Edge.” Time called the book a “jet of flame from a literary dragon who in the last months of her life breathed a burning river of bale across the literary landscape.” The Washington Post dubbed Plath a “snake lady of misery” in an article entitled “The Cult of Plath.” Robert Lowell, in his introduction to Ariel, characterized Plath as Medea, hurtling toward her own destruction.
Recent scholarship has deepened our understanding of Plath as a master of performance and irony. Yet the critical work done on Plath has not sufficiently altered her popular, clichéd image as the Marilyn Monroe of the literati. Melodramatic portraits of Plath as a crazed poetic priestess are still with us. Her most recent biographer called her “a sorceress who had the power to attract men with a flash of her intense eyes, a tortured soul whose only destiny was death by her own hand.” He wrote that she “aspired to transform herself into a psychotic deity.” These caricatures have calcified over time into the popular, reductive version of Sylvia Plath we all know: the suicidal writer of The Bell Jar whose cultish devotees are black-clad young women. (“Sylvia Plath: The Muse of Teen Angst,” reads the title of a 2003 article in Psychology Today.) Plath thought herself a different kind of “sorceress”: “I am a damn good high priestess of the intellect,” she wrote her friend Mel Woody in July 1954.
Elizabeth Hardwick once wrote of Sylvia Plath, “when the curtain goes down, it is her own dead body there on the stage, sacrificed to her own plot.” Yet to suggest that Plath’s suicide was some sort of grand finale only perpetuates the Plath myth that simplifies our understanding of her work and her life. Sylvia Plath was one of the most highly educated women of her generation, an academic superstar and perennial prizewinner. Even after a suicide attempt and several months at McLean Hospital, she still managed to graduate from Smith College summa cum laude. She was accepted to graduate programs in English at Columbia, Oxford, and Radcliffe and won a Fulbright Fellowship to Cambridge, where she graduated with high honors. She was so brilliant that Smith asked her to return to teach in their English department without a PhD. Her mastery of English literature’s past and present intimidated her students and even her fellow poets. In Robert Lowell’s 1959 creative writing seminar, Plath’s peers remembered how easily she picked up on obscure literary allusions. “ ‘It reminds me of Empson,’ Sylvia would say … ‘It reminds me of Herbert.’ ‘Perhaps the early Marianne Moore?’ ” Later, Plath made small talk with T. S. Eliot and Stephen Spender at London cocktail parties, where she was the model of wit and decorum.
Very few friends realized that she struggled with depression, which revealed itself episodically. In college, she aced her exams, drank in moderation, dressed sharply, and dated men from Yale and Amherst. She struck most as the proverbial golden girl. But when severe depression struck, she saw no way out. In 1953, a depressive episode led to botched electroshock therapy sessions at a notorious asylum. Plath told her friend Ellie Friedman that she had been led to the shock room and “electrocuted.” “She told me that it was like being murdered, it was the most horrific thing in the world for her. She said, ‘If this should ever happen to me again, I will kill myself.’ ” Plath attempted suicide rather than endure further tortures.
In 1963, the stressors were different. A looming divorce, single motherhood, loneliness, illness, and a brutally cold winter fueled the final depression that would take her life. Plath had been a victim of psychiatric mismanagement and negligence at age twenty, and she was terrified of depression’s “cures,” as she wrote in her last letter to her psychiatrist—shock treatment, insulin injections, institutionalization, “a mental hospital, lobotomies.” It is no accident that Plath killed herself on the day she was supposed to enter a British psychiatric ward.
Sylvia Plath did not think of herself as a depressive. She considered herself strong, passionate, intelligent, determined, and brave, like a character in a D. H. Lawrence novel. She was tough-minded and filled her journal with exhortations to work harder—evidence, others have said, of her pathological, neurotic perfectionism. Another interpretation is that she was—like many male writers—simply ambitious, eager to make her mark on the world. She knew that depression was her greatest adversary, the one thing that could hold her back. She distrusted psychiatry—especially male psychiatrists—and tried to understand her own depression intellectually through the work of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Mann, Erich Fromm, and others. Self-medication, for Plath, meant analyzing the idea of a schizoid self in her honors thesis on The Brothers Karamazov.
Bitter experience taught her how to accommodate depression—exploit it, even—in her art. “There is an increasing market for mental-hospital stuff. I am a fool if I don’t relive, or recreate it,” she wrote in her journal. The remark sounds trite, but her writing on depression was profound. Her own immigrant family background and experience at McLean gave her insight into the lives of the outcast. Plath would fill her late work, sometimes controversially, with the disenfranchised—women, the mentally ill, refugees, political dissidents, Jews, prisoners, divorcées, mothers. As she matured, she became more determined to speak out on their behalf. In The Bell Jar, one of the greatest protest novels of the twentieth century, she probed the link between insanity and repression. Like Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, the novel exposed a repressive Cold War America that could drive even the “best minds” of a generation crazy. Are you really sick, Plath asks, or has your society made you so? She never romanticized depression and death; she did not swoon into darkness. Rather, she delineated the cold, blank atmospherics of depression, without flinching. Plath’s ability to resurface after her depressive episodes gave her courage to explore, as Ted Hughes put it, “psychological depth, very lucidly focused and lit.” The themes of rebirth and renewal are as central to her poems as depression, rage, and destruction.
“What happens to a dream deferred?” Langston Hughes asked in his poem “Harlem.” Did it “crust and sugar over—/ like a syrupy sweet?” For most women of Plath’s generation, it did. But Plath was determined to follow her literary vocation. She dreaded the condescending label of “lady poet,” and she had no intention of remaining unmarried and childless like Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop. She wanted to be a wife, mother, and poet—a “triple-threat woman,” as she put it to a friend. These spheres hardly ever overlapped in the sexist era in which she was trapped, but for a time, she achieved all three goals.
They thought death was worth it, but I Have a self to recover, a queen. Is she dead, is she sleeping? Where has she been, With her lion-red body, her wings of glass?
Now she is flying More terrible than she ever was, red Scar in the sky, red comet Over the engine that killed her— The mausoleum, the wax house.
Dan Chiasson’s The Math Campers, to come this fall, is a book in part about fatherhood and adolescence—his own, his kids’, and the new freedoms as well as existential threats that shape their world. Today’s poem, from a multipart piece entitled “Over & Over,” is dedicated to his sons.
from “Over & Over”
my awareness seems to extend this day past the trap my body set for me past its small, pitiful adjustments of head here wings here antennae here
what does it matter, the head and wings and antennae if my awareness soars over the tops of the pines with their spiny flowers still green
like a drone flown by a teenage pilot over the rooftops, silent yawp past near meadows over the stop and shop its dragonfly landing gear ready
now it zooms in on the roots which grip the soil and feed on its decay your hand and mine at the same angle you there, in the future, fleeing me
More on this book and author:
Learn more about Dan Chiasson’s forthcoming collection, The Math Campers
In these excerpts from the pages of Robin Robertson’s prize-winning The Long Take, soon to be published in paperback, we see New York City in 1946 through the eyes of Walker, a Nova Scotian D-Day veteran just landing on our shores. The book goes on to tell his story, as he makes his way west to become a journalist in Los Angeles, in the heyday of film noir.
from The Long Take
And there it was: the swell and glitter of it like a standing wave – the fabled, smoking ruin, the new towers rising through the blue, the ranked array of ivory and gold, the glint, the glamour of buried light as the world turned round it very slowly this autumn morning, all amazed.
And it stayed there, watching, as they made toward it, the truck-driver and the young man, under pylons, wires, utility poles, past warehouses, container parks, deserted lots, between the long oily marshes, landfill sites and swamps, before slipping down under the Hudson, and coming up on the other side to find a black wetness of streets trashed and empty and the city gone.
‘Try the docks. They can always use men.’
*
At night, the river rolls and turns like oil under the bridges, in through the slips. He walked for hours – following the glow in the sky uptown he’d been told was the lights of Times Square – his shadow moving with him below the street-lamps: dense, tight, very black and sharp, foreshortened, but already starting to lengthen as he goes, attenuating to a weak stain. Then back in under another streetlight, shadow darkening again, clean and hard. Who he really is, or was, lies somewhere in between.
*
In the last splinter of sunlight allowed between the skyscrapers an old lady is sitting with a book, moving her chair every quarter of an hour a little farther down the alleyway.
