When We Die We Wake From A Dream

Maybe that's why we have poetry

Boozhoo, indinawemaaganidog! Aaniin! That is to say hello, all of my relatives! Welcome to another edition of An Irritable Métis. Spring is really here, with temperatures flirting now and again with summer-like conditions, though I suspect that might just be the winter-worn body responding to sunlight and the quickening of a new season. I am enjoying it whenever I am able; right now, outside my window, my cherry tree is just beginning to bloom with intoxicating, hot pink flowers. In just a matter of days I think they will explode and I’m grateful that I’m likely to be here to experience it. I don’t have a multi-day trip to take for another week and I expect the timing will be perfect. A couple reminders before I move along:

• Becoming Little Shell has been selected as one of five books shortlisted for the 2025 Reading the West Awards in the Memoir/Biography category. It’s one of those things where the one who gets the most public votes wins. I have mixed feelings about awards but they are a good means to get a story out, which is the entire point of writing books in the first place. If you are so inclined to send a nod my way, you may do so HERE. Regardless, I’m grateful enough people liked BLS to the degree it ended up on the short list in the first place.

• Don’t forget, IndigiPalooza MT is just three months away! A big update is coming soon….

Finally, I know things are tight for many people out there and fear is in the air. The hits keep coming from the clueless class currently lurking in Washington, D.C. It sucks, there’s no way around it. But there are folks working to get around these assaults and I’m part of a little effort that I will be announcing soon. Meanwhile, I would like to remind you that your continued support keeps me out taking it to the people, particularly as new challenges present themselves. You have no idea how much the support I get from this newsletter via paid subscriptions means to me. If you’ve got a spare $50 to throw this way for the next year, or can even scrape off $5/month, it is eminently helpful and appreciated.

---

Golden hour beauty at Council Grove, where the river is up, the trees are leafing out, and so many relatives are flying in from their winter retreats.

I’ve been thinking about the ripples of influence our efforts in the world can make in the lives of others. For good, hopefully, but occasionally not so great as well, despite our best efforts otherwise. One of the things that often happens when I am speaking to groups of people, especially young students, is someone will ask about my tattoos. Specifically the ones on my left forearm, as they are the most striking. They are the animal representatives of the Seven Grandfather Teachings, and they are etched there as a reminder for how I am supposed to live my life. I take the effort seriously even as I stumble along in so many critical ways. I feel like I fail at three or four just about every day, in fact, in one way or another, but I keep trying.

Committing to such an effort is a challenge because, if faced consistently, it is easy to identify the multitude of ways one fails. I am generally free of malice. Not so free of a plethora of issues, though. These are hard truths to face, and it’s probably worth noting that Miskwaadesi, the painted turtle, who represents the teaching of Truth, bears that hard shell. He moves slowly, but inexorably.

For all my stumbles, I truly do my best to be as positive an influence on the people in my life, and those I encounter along the way in living mine, as I can. It isn’t easy but man, I show up whenever I can. As do many, many other people. Which is the point of this newsletter today, this community effort of influence.

When I got around to my emails this morning, I encountered this one from Alaska Quarterly Review. It reads as follows:

We have received the deeply sad news that poet Martha Silano has passed away from ALS. Martha was a wonderful poet and last May, Martha read her poetry on AQR’s YouTube channel. Her reading lasts 10 minutes and we think you will [be] very moved if you watch the reading to the very end.

Watch it here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Martha Silano authored five poetry books, including Gravity Assist (Saturnalia Books, 2019), The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, winner of the 2010 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize and a Washington State Book Award finalist, and Reckless Lovely (Saturnalia Books, 2014). She also co-authored, with Kelli Russell Agodon, of The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice. In addition to AQR, Martha's poems appeared in Poetry, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Paris Review, AGNI, North American Review, American Poetry Review, New Ohio Review, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Kenyon Review Online, Blackbird, Copper Nickel, Mississippi Review. Her poem "Love" appeared in The Best American Poetry 2009. Martha taught at Bellevue College.

This news makes me very sad. I didn’t know Martha at all, though we did exchange correspondence a couple times a few years ago. I don’t really even know her poetry, yet she is one of the most influential poets in my life. I say this because she wrote, along with Kelli Russell Agodon, the wonderful book, The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice (Two Sylvias Press). When it comes to the most important books that have contributed to my ever being appointed poet laureate of Montana in the first place, or ever really taking any meaningful steps as a poet, this is among the top two.¹

After One-Sentence Journal came out and started garnering some local attention, people started introducing me as a poet. When I decided to embrace that identity, I figured I should probably make an effort at being one. I’d never taken any poetry classes or anything², or even considered being “a poet.” Then I happened across a copy of The Daily Poet. I convinced a friend also desiring to invest more energy in their writing to join me in the following challenge: write poetry for ten minutes every day for a year, using the prompts in the book as inspiration.³ Beginning on November 1st, 2019 and all the way until November 1st, 2020, my friend and I did just that. The result for me was fourteen notebooks of poems, which I’m still transcribing and wrestling with today.⁴ A lot of those poems are awful, but some are pretty great too.

It’s no doubt that Martha Silano’s work inspired and taught hundreds of other poets, if not thousands. Additionally, I’ve told this story of my relationship to that book of prompts many times as I’ve traveled around as poet laureate, speaking with poets young and old. So Martha’s efforts echo in whatever influence my efforts have inspired. I’d say it’s a lineage not dissimilar to what the Buddhists describe when it comes to teaching lineages. Martha is a direct influence on my poetry because what I’ve learned about writing it rose from the pages of her book of prompts. Being inspired by them or, just as effectively, ignoring them and writing about something else. But they are the soil the seeds of my life in poetry were planted in. I will be forever grateful to her for that.

This stack of fourteen Field Notes Journals is the physical representation of a small amount of dedicated work for just a few minutes every day.

I spoke to three classes of 8th graders yesterday, and tomorrow I will speak with three classes of 6th, 7th, and 8th graders. Then my schedule as far as visiting schools will be over for the summer. And after tomorrow, when I step next into a classroom next fall, I will be a former poet laureate. It’s weird because I feel like I’ve barely gotten started and now it’s over. I’d be lying if I wasn’t experiencing some deep melancholy when I allow it to seep in because there is so much still to do.

As this school year is wrapping up I’ll also admit to being tired and ready for a break. I’ve talked to a lot of kids and the majority of them didn’t show much interest in what I had to say. That doesn’t bother me. The ones who do linger after everyone else leaves and express connection … well, they are why I, and people like me, show up. This showing up can matter, even if it takes a couple decades to sink in.

That is what is making my reflections on Martha Silano so poignant. Many adults will lament, “Why don’t young people–” this, and “Why don’t young people–” that. I usually ask, “Did you care about this stuff when you were young?” I generally didn’t. I didn’t become the person I am today with the concerns I have and the energy I exert until I’d tried out many other personas. That meandering path made me who I am; narrowed my convictions and identity to the point of being who I was when I collapsed into this desk chair; I’ll be somewhat altered when I stand back up again. Along the way I have had influences and guides and even mentors here and there: adults who showed me by their example how to show up. I think we expect too much of young people because we see in their apparent disinterest our own failings.

Which is to say, to get kids to show up we need to show them what showing up looks like. I think we can do better at that.

When I stopped driving back yesterday from the school I visited I checked my email. I had a wonderful email from the teacher whose classes I visited. She thanked me for coming and then listed all the ways she’d been moved and also the things she was going to try and do differently in her classroom. I was verklempt reading it. These school visits aren’t just for the kids. They are for the teachers too, and how the things we discuss might allow them to create ripples in other lives after I leave. And it is also an opportunity for them to create ripples in my life too. When we show up together, this is the kind of thing that can happen. And others are watching.

---

And Finally….

This is the first poem I ever wrote as part of the poetry prompt challenge. I think the prompt was about “patron saints” or something. The final edit happened while I was sitting on a bench in the little town of Crested Butte, Colorado, where I had a residency in May of 2021.⁵ This poem has never had a dedication. I think from this day forward, I will dedicate it to Martha Silano. Rest in power, poet.

The Patrons


The Patron Saint of Abundant Cigarettes
hunkers down under the cardboard bin
in the alley behind Butterfly Herbs
where offerings are made to them 24/7,
in all kinds of weather, given 
by travelers who make the pilgrimage 
from every point on the compass.

The Patron Saint of the Random Playlist 
spins tunes with abandon,
sometimes to distract, but usually to 
soothe the gathering of poets,
artists and bullshitters
who huddle inside to weave their yarns
on a cold morning in November.

The Touchdown Jesus of Council Grove
really isn’t Jesus at all but is instead the 
Patron Saint of Wandering Great Blue Herons, 
who congregate here year round 
to fish, breed and be majestic
beneath his beneficent arms.

I would like to be known as 
the Patron Saint of Patron Saints,
spreading the word of their existence,
proselytizing for worshipers,
carving and placing icons in their 
images to be stumbled on by those
who need to find them.

---

1. The other being Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry by Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser. It is the direct ancestor of One-Sentence Journal. I wouldn’t be here without having encountered this wonderful little book.

2. My formal education ended when I rolled out of Frenchtown High School in 1985 with my diploma.

3. I’d already been writing my daily sentences for several years prior. This would be an evolution of that: actual poetry written intentionally as poems, which the sentences have never been.

4. I’ve actually hired a university student to help with the transcriptions and they are doing a phenomenal job and I am very grateful to them.

5. I’m headed back there in a week to attend the conference again.