Indian Eros

            On Tuesday I tried to install my copy of Word 2000 on my latest laptop, but an error message popped up to inform me that the installation couldn’t be completed because the file setup.dll was missing from the system. I wondered if that was going to stop all installations. I bought the Microsoft Works pack in 2001 and have had no problem installing it on any computers I’ve had since then, including my previous laptop. After a couple of more unsuccessful tries I decided to download Microsoft Office, but didn’t have time to see if I could get that set up. If I get the same error message I guess I will have to reinstall Windows and I don’t feel confident to do that myself, so that would be another expense, because I think my one month warranty only covers the hardware, even though Modcom must have put the copy of Windows 7 onto the machine.

            I transferred my front and back flashers from the Phoenix bike to the Cushing 2000 and then headed for class. The bike gets me where I need to go but I’m not used to riding so slow. I would consider beginning to build a bike that’s my size at Bike Pirates, but I’ve got an essay to write over the next four weeks so I can’t spend hours fumbling with machinery until I’ve finished it. Maybe in March I’ll have the time.

            George arrived on time and said something about the course continuing, “unless Mr. Trump starts a short term thermonuclear war.” Before taking roll call he handed me a printout of the poems that I’d emailed to him before Christmas. There were no actual comments but rather checkmarks like the ones he puts beside paragraphs when he marks essays. There were also a few vertical strokes to the right or left of some sets of lines and in one poem he’d underlined parts of three lines. In another poem he’d actually crossed out the words “to get in” and in the margin had written “at skin” as a suggested replacement in the line, “pawing softly to get in so she could grow her claws again”. Finally, I am embarrassed to admit that he’d circled my misuse of “it’s” as a possessive.

            Along with my poems, George had given me another stapled document that I didn’t recognize and that looked like a short story or an essay, beginning with the name “Eliza”. I told him, “I think this belongs to somebody else.” It turned out to be something that Zack had sent him quite a while ago, for similar reasons to mine.

            He also handed out an instructional sheet entitled, “How to Enjoy and Understand a Poem in Seven Easy Steps”.

            George began talking about Armand Garnet Ruffo’s “The Thunderbird Poems”. He said that Ruffo’s work is more accessible than those of Ondaatje and Carson. He admitted that it was less openly intellectually oriented but organic and inspired. He is invested in reading and writing the paintings of Norval Morriseau. He is trying to decolonize Native creativity. It may not be in the interest of the mainstream to recognize the marginalized. Empowerment is Natives taking ownership of one’s own critique and clearing a space to be heard on their own terms. Outsiders may not be informed and one must be careful critiquing work that one does not understand.

            I found that statement a bit confusing because it seemed to imply that outsiders do not have the right to criticize art that is created by indigenous people. George assured me that is not the case but rather that they should also have their own culture of criticism as well.

            I said that do not think that Norval Morriseau was a great painter. I admitted that he was an important painter, an impressive designer of images with good composition, but that his work was cartoonish and he couldn’t even draw hands. George argued that Picasso was cartoonish too but I countered that Picasso was only sometimes deliberately so. George quoted the declaration by French critics that Morriseau was the “Picasso of the north”.

            Ruffo is a professor at Queen’s University in Kingston and George thinks that is important. This book can be seen as part of what John Ralston Saul referred to as “The Comeback”, and the expression of an ongoing cultural revolution. Compare it to the quiet revolution in Quebec when the Quebecois reasserted their own culture and language.

            George recommended the book of poems, “Morning in the Burned House”, about the residential schools, by Louise Bernice Halfe who also writes under the name of “Skydancer”. She intermixes Cree words with English and writes on her own terms.

            Armand Ruffo also wrote a book about Grey Owl, the famous British conman who lived as a Native and convinced most of the world that he was one. Why are people so gullible? For the Native people he was controversial but many accepted him because he seemed to understand them better than most White people.

            Ruffo is saying, “I want you to know what we have to say about ourselves.”

            George declares, “A chill runs down my spine when I read the phrase, ‘Ojibway intellectual traditions!’”

            Patrick brought up the allegations that Norval Morriseau had sexually abused his own son. George responded with the well-known fact that Martin Luther King Junior was a womanizer and asked if it takes away from his heroism. King is still a martyr despite his flaws. He added that his infidelity still puts him far above Donald Trump with his braggadocio about pussy grabbing.

When one comes from a suppressed group one may select heroes who, from a mainstream perspective, were no good. Nat Turner is a hero even though he was also a cold-blooded mass murderer who slaughtered White people, as is depicted in the recent film, “Birth of a Nation”.

Morriseau is a symbol.

As George called a fifteen-minute break, it was already halfway through the class and we had yet to read any of the poetry in “The Thunderbird Poems”.

I asked George what the checkmarks and strokes meant on the copy of my poems he’d given back to me. He answered that it meant those were the parts he’d liked.

So from my poem, “The Princess and the Pea Happy Song”, he liked, “Sometimes I might tumble / through a flaw in some bad masonry / while leaning on the wall / that protects some small society / like this one … to be eaten by your antibodies … emotional toilet seats … almost independent … Oh but then some damned princess comes along.”

From “Recurring Vision of a Myopic Third Eye” he liked, “ … go the roaches and rats … Free fill-up with cremation … look ma, no penitentiaries … High tech sex, let me beam you a cheque …”

For “Hello?” he put a checkmark beside the title, then the lines, “ … to the red phone / in the White House … my penis is always ringing / but whenever I pick it up … at / the other / end.”

From “Spanking the Sabbath” he liked, “ … and my head aches from an argument … in my grinding all their meaning right on down to bite size … spiritual crash helmets … worship / that the first Christian woman … john grinding lady / of the night … fad gone out of style and into stale …Become a Monday spasm on the face of Parkdale.”

From “Paranoiac Utopia” he noted, “A painful shedding of skin today … through a crossfire of uptight cops and frazzled addicts … The paranoia is so thick it can cut you with a knife …”

Beside the title “Victoria” he placed a checkmark, but it seemed odd that it meant that he liked the title. Within the poem he was pleased with, “ … A silencer’s been screwed onto the gun-barrel of night … The whip always slackens / before it can crack … scratching loudly to get out so she could harvest the flesh … after midnight reuniting to renew our dark affair … leave so little time for sex … and this Black Venus, crippled genius / 40 dollar hooker / keeps returning to perform this broken tango with me … like its gutters drink the rain …”

From “Does Cancer Dream?” he indicated “ … I awoke with a tattoo of frost on my spine … and spray its mist to plant the luminous spores / of her worries … If cancer dreams / I would like to be its nightmare.”

I had sent three haiku, but the only one he put a checkmark beside was, “Pretty young woman / shivering in her short dress / won’t let summer go.”

I chatted with George during the break about the pronunciation of the name “Ruffo” It seemed to me that it would be pronounced like “Rough-oh” because two consonants following a vowel would normally shorten it but George and everyone else had been pronouncing it like “Roof-oh”. I looked it up later and found that in Italian, Spanish and Russian they are all right, but that for English it’s the way I thought.

George told me that there are a lot of Black people in Nova Scotia with the last name “States”. He said that it could be that when they were registered the official simply gave them a last name relating to where they said they were from. He said that alternatively it could be a variation on the German name “Statz” and that they’d acquired the name from intermarriage.

I discussed with George my thoughts on the quality of the writing in Ruffo’s book. I told him that I thought the only good poem was the first, while he thought that was one of the weakest poems in the collection.

After the break, George told us that he was proud to say that he is a status Metis. I had always that to be Metis one needed to be part Cree and part French Canadian, but the fact that he has official status proves that is not the case. He said that his maternal grandfather was a Cherokee that had migrated to Nova Scotia.

“The Thunderbird Poems” are ekphrastic, meaning they serve to describe works of art.

Both Zack and I considered “Life Scroll” to be an outstanding poem from the collection. I said I thought the line, “When your dreams find you in the blue lake of your mind / and vibrate to the surface like a speckled trout …” but George thought it was clichéd. I added that I also that “ … the old words drip into the stone bowl of your deafness.” Was very powerful.

George offered that the poems work better when their content is combined with the principles of Post Modern poetry.

The poems are written in English and so we are permitted to engage with them from the point of view of our culture.

We looked at the poem, “White Man’s Curse 1969”. It was written about Morriseau’s time at residential school and his indoctrination into Catholicism. George likes the lines, “St. Joseph Residential School branded / VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV / No No No No No No No No No No No No …” I suggested that the poem should have just eliminated everything but those three lines but Patrick argued that “Sweating like a beer bottle” was pretty good.

            George said that sometimes Ruffo limits the poems by focusing too much on the paintings and that he should have gone crazy. Ondaatje didn’t care at all about objectivity when he wrote, “The Complete Works of Billy the Kid”. I affirmed that was the problem with the whole of Ruffo’s book, but George countered that I was going too far.

            We looked at the poem “Self Portrait. Devoured By His Own Passion”. George “Four Loons, 1968” not only stands out, but jumps off the page and I commented that it was reminiscent of B. P. Nichol. George agreed and enthused that one could almost hear The Four Horsemen performing it, with someone playing bongos.

            I read “Windigo 1979” with my hopefully temporary speech impediment on the “f”s because of my missing front tooth.

            Patrick read the comically ribald poem, “The Other Side of the Shaman, 1979”.

            Then we looked at “Indian Erotic Fantasy”, which George said was not a very strong poem. I agreed, but mentioned that it describes one of my favourite Morriseau paintings.

            George recommended a book called “Red Power” by Janet Rogers, but when I looked her up, the closest book to that title is “Red Erotic”.

            Zack read the poem “Androgyny”, which had multiple languages, including one word in Greek. George thinks the poem is a masterpiece and with the lists of words, it has a Ginsbergian feel to it. It shouts off the page. It’s a poem of enormous energy and it pushes back. He informed us that Garry Thomas Morse also makes strong use of the mixing of languages. The editorial text from the poem Androgyny refers to the “Canadian people”. George assured us that one never hears those two words put together because it contradicts both the First Nations and the French Canadians.

            George was reminded by the poem of Jean Chretien’s famous statement about evidence. I told George that I’d looked that up but found something else, which I couldn’t remember to quote. Looking it up later, I found that Chretien said, “A proof is a proof. What kind of a proof? It’s a proof. A proof is a proof, and when you have a good proof, it’s because it’s proven.”

            The poem also made George recall the “street of fun” in Niagara Falls with all of the features like the Ripley’s Museum, the Wax Museum and the Haunted House. I suggested facetiously that they built the falls as a way of attracting people to the street of fun. People thought that was funny.

            We looked at the poem, “Norval’s Dick Drawings, 1990”. I commented that Native people really like ribald humour and then I told the story of an AA meeting I’d gone to at the Native Canadian Centre in which a guy was giving a testimonial and said that his father used to say to his mother, “The only way you got me is with Indian magic” and she would reply, “The only Indian magic I ever used on you was between my legs!”

            George brought up Drew Hayden Taylor. Something about a heap of words and power.

            The last poem we looked at was “Shaman Traveller to Other Worlds for Blessings”.

            George reminded us as a final note that poets are really telling us about themselves and so in the end all of these poems are about Ruffo.

            Patrick, his girlfriend and I stayed to chat with Zack. He talked about how he’d applying for several Masters programs in the States, as well as Toronto and Montreal. He informed us that the U of T Creative Writing Masters program only accepts seven students but one gets a big grant to pay the rent, plus one automatically becomes a TA and so one gets of course paid for that as well. He said that Albert Moritz is the only instructor for the third year Creative Writing course. I knew that but forgot. Albert had told me he’d get me in eight years ago, even though I was only a first year student, but I didn’t feel academically ready till now. I should probably send him an email to ask if he’ll consider me.

            Zack says he runs his own reading series. He sells tickets online and holds the events in Laundromats.

            He and I are both Woodsworth College alumni and I mentioned that I got an award from them back in 2009. He bragged that he’s getting the really big award from them in February.

            It was snowing with lots already on the ground when Patrick, his girlfriend and I left University College. We chatted a bit on the way to our bikes, though Patrick and her were going to the subway. I rode home in the wet snow, but was pleased to notice that the tires of the Cushing 2000 have much better grip on slippery roads than the Phoenix.