Spring Has Begun Here

And each day brings new birds up from Mexico

Boozhoo, indinawemaaganidog! Aaniin! That is to say hello, all of my relatives! Welcome to another edition of An Irritable Métis. I began this newsletter on a very sunny Easter morning with 100% intention to have it in your inboxes not too long after. We all see now how that played out. I’ve only just now finished it! Blame my tardiness on distractions or dismay, or a little bit of both, it’s all the same to me. Just don’t judge me, please. How do we know Jesus didn’t plan to emerge from his cave retreat after two days and when the time came, said, “They can wait….” and went back to sleep or whatever he was doing for another day? We don’t!¹ We all struggle keeping our outward facing lives up to snuff, don’t we? Sometimes we just have to let the interior world have its way with us and not force things.

Now I’m not forcing things here, but remember: a yearly subscription of $50 through the month of April means that $25 of it is going to provide scholarships for this summer’s Freeflow workshop on the Salmon that I’m leading. What a lovely Easter bonanza to bestow on someone! And you’re helping me at the same time too. I’m pretty sure Jesus would happily match funds too if there weren’t a bunch of sputtering money grubbing gatekeepers in front of him who seem to have forgotten what the guy was all about in the first place….

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Words to live up to from the great Métis mystic and revolutionary, Louis Riel.

I woke on Easter morning of March 27, 2016, to the news that the poet Jim Harrison had passed away the night before. I learned this via a post from the writer Benjamin Percy on Twitter. Later I would learn that Harrison died at his desk, pen in hand, writing a poem, another story to pile on the mountain of stories comprising the near-mythical life of the man. That final poem, and a photograph of it from the very page where he was writing it, would appear in the paperback edition of Dead Man’s Float, Harrison’s final collection of poems to be released during his lifetime. So even though the actual date fluctuates based on the cycle of the Moon, I always think of Easter as a day to reflect on Harrison and his work.

I often tell the story of how I didn’t even consider calling myself a poet until other people started calling me one in the wake of One-Sentence Journal coming out in 2018. I took that identity on largely because of Harrison and his decision to identify as a poet above everything else. He was the kind of writer I strive to be: he wrote whatever he wanted to. Fiction, nonfiction, essays … whatever. No way was he ever going to be pigeonholed! But he was first and foremost a poet and I love that. Despite all of his complications, and there are many, he understood Native people better than most white men of his generation and I respect that. I’m happy to stand on his broad shoulders in doing the work that I do.

Though other poets would come to inspire me as much or more than Harrison, it was his poem “I Believe” from the magnificent In Search of Small Gods that opened my mind to the possibilities of what contemporary poetry could be, that it could be for people like me, that it should be, and inspired me to try my hand at it with intention. A review I wrote for the Missoula Independent of Dead Man’s Float also opened the door to friendships with other poets that endure to this day. I’ve even joked, because Harrison’s poetry publisher, Copper Canyon Press, quoted my review² of that book in their catalog, that “I’ve been published by Copper Canyon.”

“Few enough are the books I decide to keep beyond a culling or two. Barring fire or flood, Dead Man’s Float will be in my library for the rest of my life. If it’s the last poetry collection we get from Harrison—and I hope it isn’t—it is as fine an example of his efforts as any.”

– Missoula Independent

We are on the cusp³ of National Poetry Month and I’m thinking about poetry beyond my gratitude to Jim Harrison for pointing me down the path. I’ve written⁴ and read⁵ less poetry over the months since being chosen as Montana poet laureate than I have for any stretch in the last decade or so, just on account of being so damn busy. I’ve also talked about it more than ever before, to hundreds and hundreds of people, all over the state, logging thousands of road miles along the way, which is its own kind of poetry given the magnificent and varied landscapes of this gigantic state. And I’m barely over 25% of the way into my term! If I feel like I’m just getting started it’s because I am.

My affinity for poetry and poets⁶ has never been stronger. It surges and swells within me every day, especially when one of my poet friends shares one with me. It’s funny too because on reflection I’m wondering if I’m not making up for lost time. I was recently having a conversation with another remarkable poet who is only just a little tiny bit younger than me about our relationship to poetry when we were in our 20s, how “uncool” it was to be a poet and how the last thing we wanted to be identified as was such. That could be as much the circles we existed in as anything, but now I am in love with the idea of the world overflowing with poets and poems.

Things aren’t easy for poets, though, and they’ve just gotten tougher. If you pay attention at all to goings-on in the literary world you might have heard the story about Berkeley’s Small Press Distributors. If not, you may get up to speed HERE. I urge you to, in fact.

In a nutshell, for you impatient TL/DR⁷ types, SPD are (were?) a distributor of books published by tiny, independent presses who lack the means to be distributed by larger operations, and they’d been doing it for over half a century. Last week they abruptly shut down, leaving many publishers, and the writers and poets they publish, in a significantly desperate lurch. How will people and bookstores get their books now? It’s devastating in a world where convenience dominates to the point where many people can’t be bothered to click more than once or twice to order a book, or pay a fair amount for what it’s worth.

I’ve faced this dilemma. Just a week or two before I was chosen as Montana poet laureate the publisher of One-Sentence Journal discontinued having the books distributed through a major distributor, which means outlets like Ingram (which many bookstores use to order books) or Bookshop or Amazon can’t get them. Often people inquiring are told such a book is “out of print.” And it’s not. I’ve been keeping OSJ in print single-handedly and supplying stores around Montana myself, and I feel like it’s pretty easy to get if you read this newsletter. I don’t mind doing this too much but it is also a pain in the ass because it’s a lot of extra work. I’ve quipped that I am not so much a writer as a Fully Vertically Integrated Writing System because I largely do everything myself. I dream up the books, write the books, shepherd them through publication, promote them, package them, ship them, etc. I’m not complaining much, and this has all changed with Becoming Little Shell because Milkweed, despite being a smaller indie press, swims with the big fishes. Man, am I grateful for that. And I’m also grateful for the extra distribution hassles that becoming poet laureate has introduced into my life!

A gift from my friends at the Montana Arts Council: PFL means “Poet Fucking Laureate”

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Why Am I Bringing All This Up?

There are countless wonderful books of poetry being written by people every bit as meaningful as those getting all the attention from legacy publishers, published by tiny presses doing the thankless work because they love it. It’s really hard and the demise of SPD is making it worse. So I think what I would like to do is have anyone who reads this newsletter and is a poet, or small press, please share your book and how to get it in the comments of this post. We’ll do it all through April. I’ll add a page to my newsletter and collect them there. Feel free to share this around too! If our collected efforts here can bring attention to anyone at all then by gum let’s make it happen.

Also, if you’ve recently read something lovely, share that (and where to get it) too. But please, let’s avoid those assholes at Amazon unless it’s the only way to get the books. Some small presses make use of Amazon’s print on demand service and I don’t begrudge them that at all. I’ve bought my share published that way. But if these books are available directly from the publisher, let’s get them there if we can.

Don’t be shy, friends. It’s National Poetry Month after all!

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Meanwhile For Those Relatives on the Hi-Line

This is an exciting event I can hardly wait to get rolling. It’s days away! If you are anywhere near Havre, come see Debra. I’ll be there too! I’m also amused that the event is billed as “An Evening of Poetry” yet neither featured book on the poster is poetry. They do shit how they want on the Hi-Line, always have….

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And Finally….

A Jim Harrison poem from Dead Man’s Float, to kick off this month. Isn’t it spellbinding?

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1. And if you’re one of those people who claims to know, get a grip on yourself. You don’t.

2. Sort of.

3. Update: we’ve tipped over into it.

4. None.

5. Hardly any.

6. Little known fact: we are all devastatingly dreamy.

7. “Too Long/Didn’t Read”