Ellen L. Arnold (Ed.)

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Biographical note:  Ellen L. Arnold is Associate Professor of English at East Carolina University, where she teaches courses in Native American and Ethnic American literatures. She has published critical essays on Leslie Marmon Silko, Linda Hogan, Carter Revard, and Allison Hedge Coke, and edited Conversations with Leslie Marmon Silko (University Press of Mississippi, 2000).

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844710904
ISBN:  9781844710904
Author:  Ellen L. Arnold
Title:  The Salt Companion to Carter Revard
Series:  Salt Companions to Poetry
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CSBH
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  28-Feb-07
Extent:  256pp
Height:  228 mm
Width:  152 mm
Thickness:  15 mm
Weight:  384 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 14.99
Price:  USD 21.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  The Salt Companion to Carter Revard is a groundbreaking collection of critical essays on the poetry and scholarship of one of Native America’s most loved and respected poets. Carter Revard, Osage poet, Rhodes scholar, and professor of medieval English literature, grew up among Osage and Ponca relations on the Osage Reservation in Oklahoma. His complex, elegantly crafted poetry ranges from lyrical evocations of his rural childhood and traditional lifeways to reflections on academic life in Oxford and St. Louis, global politics, and postmodern science; from narrative poems about family bootleggers and AIM activists, tornados and rainbows, to adaptations of Anglo-Saxon riddle poems. In precise and gorgeous language, Revard weaves the varied songs of his multiple heritages and experiences into a symphony of celebration of the large and small miracles of the universe.

Revard’s blending of Western literary and Native oral traditions demand multilayered critical approaches. The thirteen critical essays gathered in this volume, written by leading scholars of Native American literature, explore Revard’s poetry from multiple perspectives, offering biographical and cultural contexts, thematic considerations, and close readings of individual poems. Two essays break exciting new ground by examining interrelationships between Revard’s medieval scholarship and American Indian storytelling traditions. Like Revard’s poems and scholarship, the essays are both erudite and warmly personal, filled with good stories that will appeal to scholars, students, and general readers alike.

Table of contents:
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Norma C. Wilson, “Star Legacies”
Suzanne Evertsen Lundquist, “Carter Revard as Autoethnographer or Wa-thi’-gethon”
Robin Riley Fast, “Going Home with Carter Revard”
Susan Scarberry-Garcia, “‘We Sing As the Birds Do’: Listening for Bird Song in the Work of Carter Revard”
Patrice Hollrah, “‘The Voices Still Are Singing’: Osage/Ponca Continuance in the Poetry of Carter Revard”
Robert M. Nelson, “Ponca War Dancers: Creating a Pan-Indian Circle”
Jerry Harp, “‘Reading That Part of the Past’: Accessing History in the Poetry of Carter Revard”
Robert Bensen, “To Make Their Bodies of Words”
Janet McAdams, “Carter Revard’s Angled Mirrors”
Ellen L. Arnold, “‘Present Myth’: Old Stories and New Sciences in the Poetry of Carter Revard”
Márgara Averbach, “Translating Carter Revard: An Adventure among Mixed and Fertile Words”
Susan Berry Brill de Ramírez and Peter G. Beidler, “Scholarship and Stories, Oxford and Oklahoma, Academe and American Indians: The Relational Words and Worlds of a Native American Bard and Storytelling Medievalist—Carter Revard”
Susanna Fein, “Trail-Tracking the Ludlow Scribe: Carter Revard as Translator-Scholar-Sleuth of Medieval English Poetry”
Author Notes
Index

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Introduction

Carter Revard was born in 1931 in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, of Osage, Ponca, Irish, and Scotch-Irish heritage. He grew up in the Buck Creek Valley on the Osage Reservation, where he worked in the fields, trained greyhounds, and janitored with his twin sister in the one-room schoolhouse where he and his six siblings completed their first eight grades. After graduating from Bartlesville College High School, Revard won a radio quiz scholarship to the University of Tulsa, where he earned his B.A. in 1952. One of the first American Indian Rhodes Scholars, Revard took an M.A. at Oxford in 1954 and a Ph.D. at Yale in 1959. He taught at Amherst College before beginning a distinguished and prolific 36-year career (1961-1997) at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, as a scholar and teacher of medieval English literature specializing in Middle English, history of the English language, and linguistics. (Bibliographies of Revard’s scholarly publications on medieval literature appear in the special issue of Studies in American Indian Literatures [2003] in his honor and in the appendix to Susanna Fein’s essay in this volume.)

The same year Revard graduated from the University of Tulsa and was named Rhodes Scholar, he was given his Osage name, Nompehwahthe (“Fear-Inspiring,” relative of Thunder [1998: 139]) by his grandmother, Mrs. Josephine Jump, in a traditional Osage naming ceremony. As he recalls in the preface to his essay collection Family Matters, Tribal Affairs, it was not until 1973, amidst growing national awareness of American Indian peoples awakened by the political events of the early 1970s—the Trail of Broken Treaties and the takeover of the Bureau of Indian Affairs building in 1972, the Wounded Knee occupation of 1973—that he began to teach courses in American Indian literatures and cultures. Revard became an organizer in the St. Louis Indian community, helped found the American Indian Center of Mid-America, joined a Gourd Dancers group, and began to publish poetry with American Indian themes (1998: xiii-xvi). Two chapbooks—My Right Hand Don’t Leave Me No More (1970) and Nonymosity (1980)—were followed by Ponca War Dancers (1980), Cowboys and Indians, Christmas Shopping (1992), An Eagle Nation (1993), which won the 1994 Oklahoma Book Award, and most recently, How the Songs Come Down: New and Selected Poems (2005), part of Salt Publishing’s Earthworks Series. In addition, Revard has published a collection of essays, Family Matters, Tribal Affairs (1998) and a multi-genre memoir, Winning the Dust Bowl (2001). In 2001 Revard was named Writer of the Year in Autobiography by the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers for Family Matters, Tribal Affairs. In 2005, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas.

Carter Revard’s complex and beautifully crafted poetry has been widely anthologized in collections of American and American Indian literature, and his poems and essays on Native traditions and literatures have inspired two generations of Indian poets and helped to shape contemporary literary theory about Native American literatures. Revard’s interests in languages and storytelling cross multiple cultural traditions and histories in ways that challenge cultural boundaries. In her book The Nature of Native American Poetry (2001), Norma Wilson says of Revard, “No other Native poet demonstrates so thorough a knowledge of British and American poetic traditions…. No other Native poet has been able to so fully articulate in English words the relationship between ancient tribal myth and modern life” (15).

Although there are many accomplished and widely published American Indian poets (Simon Ortiz, Maurice Kenny, Duane Niatum, Joy Harjo, Ofelia Zepeda, Wendy Rose, and Luci Tapahonso, to name a few), in addition to many of the most popular contemporary American Indian fiction writers who are also poets (Leslie Marmon Silko, N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, Louise Erdrich, Linda Hogan, and Sherman Alexie, for example), poetry has for a long time been neglected in critical studies and teaching relative to fiction. Only recently have three important books devoted exclusively to Native American poetry begun to define and focus critical approaches to this large body of work: Robin Riley Fast’s The Heart as a Drum: Continuance and Resistance in American Indian Poetry (1999), Norma Wilson’s The Nature of Native American Poetry (2001), and Dean Rader and Janice Gould’s edited volume of essays, Speak to Me Words: Essays on Contemporary American Indian Poetry (2003). As Norma Wilson points out, poetry as a written form was foreign to American Indians, but it shared similarities with the oral songs and chants that have always been central to their daily lives and spiritual practices; Wilson states, “Contemporary Native poetry has its roots in the land, in the oral tradition, and in history….[W]hen Native poets evoke traditional literature, they are continuing in the oral tradition, drawing from cultural memory the words and images that have sustained their people and sharing parts of their cultural heritage” (2001: ix).

Though Native American literature arises from the vastly diverse languages, traditions, homelands, and histories of several hundred distinct cultural groups, that literature is described by many critics as sharing some essential elements: a rootedness in oral narrative and storytelling traditions; a respect for the sacred power of language both to create and destroy; a deep reverence for the earth and the interconnectedness of human beings with all the living beings and elements of the natural world; a refusal of Western dichotomizing and objectifying epistemologies; and a “reinvention” of the English language, which was imposed on American Indians as a tool of conquest, to empower it to express indigenous worldviews and realities. Though Native poetry shares these characteristics with Native literature in general, Dean Rader and Janice Gould observe that poetry is also distinctly different from other genres. Rader finds that the structure of poetry most effectively “mirrors Native oral potential and Native worldviews” (2003: 11) through its “transform[ation of] the lyric moment into a dynamic narrative event,” its resistance to “linear constraints,” its use of “creative typography to emulate spoken diction” (8), and its fusion of disparate elements, such as “present and past, poetry and prose, the lyric ‘I’ and the communal ‘we’“ (11). Gould argues that many Native poets do in fact work within the constraints of dominant literary forms, and that many of these qualities—storytelling, play with form and typography, etc.—are also found in the work of other American poets; what she finds unique about American Indian poetry is “in the particular truth telling it embodies, in the particular kinds of insights Indians bring to this question of who we are or what we are about as a nation …. [O]ne function of American Indian poetry has been to ‘resist cultural erasure,’ to question the dominant narrative …, to remember our histories,” to “reclaim and rebuild the identities that the Euro-Americans wanted to annihilate,” and to restore balance to Indian people and to a damaged world (10-11).

Unpublished endorsement :  What a pleasure—to have this wide-ranging, beautifully written collection of essays on the brilliant poet-critic Carter Revard. Not only do the essays do justice to Revard’s remarkable career; they also illuminate the whole range of cultural and political issues Revard has addressed.

Cary Nelson

Unpublished endorsement :  Carter Revard's reverence for the special relationship between the Osage and Ponca is articulated in his poetry. His magical prose reveals a world I understand, but it seems more special after his words illuminate the culture I grew up living

Louis Gray, Veteran Osage Writer/Journalist

Unpublished endorsement :  Carter Revard has captured the spirit of the changing world of the Osage — its beauty, its darkness — from the perspective of several generations.

Louis Gray, Veteran Osage Writer/Journalist

Unpublished endorsement :  No one can match Carter Revard's awesome journey! From rural Oklahoma to England to New England to Missouri and to many other places in the world he's been and back to Oklahoma
always! And his trekking from the stories and language of homeland, Indigenous family culture, and community to the scholarly dimensions — and sometimes mysterious ones — of Medieval Literature. What a wonder and delight his creative and scholarly energy, spirit, and heart have wrought! May the insightful and enthralling essays in The Salt Companion to Carter Revard on his work be a totally enjoyable and stimulating guide on your journey with Carter.

Simon J. Ortiz, Author of Beyond the Reach of Time and Change and The Good Rainbow Road

Unpublished endorsement :  Salt Publishing has set an exciting precedent: a symposium
of excellent essays, written from multiple critical
perspectives, devoted to a single Native author. Carter
Revard’s complex works of poetry, memoir, and scholarship more than deserve this close attention, and this volume will appeal equally to scholars and students. Indigenous literary
studies has clearly reached a certain level of maturity. Let
us hope that similar collections soon follow.

Chadwick Allen, Author of Blood Narrative: Indigenous Identity in American Indian and Maori Literary and Activist Texts

Unpublished endorsement :  This impressive collection gathers essays by both emerging and established voices in the field of Native Literary studies, all of which offer a different and fascinating perspective on the poetry of Carter Revard. When we look at Revard’s work through the lucid lenses of The Salt Companion, we better see the contours and contributions of Carter’s poems; we see just how fortunate we are that his many worlds overlap with ours.

Dean Rader, author of Speak to Me Words: Essays on Contemporary American Indian Poetry

Unpublished endorsement :  Reading a Carter Revard book is an experience on many levels. One is the wisdom and insight of the subject. Another is the poetry that always comes through when he starts putting words together. Then there is the voice I hear, the voice I have been privilaged to hear in person. Those elements combine to create an experience I truly enjoy.

Charles H. Red Corn, author of A Pipe for February

Unpublished endorsement :  As an Osage Indian I read this latest work of Carter Revard and understand how it has meaning for people of all races.

Kathryn Red Corn Lynn