Reading Local Seattle

{ Slaughter }

[ A Time Before Slaughter | Paul Nelson | Apprentice House | $12.95 ] Ten thousand years ago the area that is now Auburn, Washington, was still dripping with the final melting of the Cordilleran Ice Sheet. As drainage from the deglaciated alpine valleys in the Cascade range flowed southward along jagged ice margins and coalesced into meltwater streams that bounced and burbled over a broad moraine of basal till in the lowlands, a deposition of parent material developed into a topsoil of amazing fertility. Forests of western hemlock, Douglas-fir, western red cedar, western white pine and lodgepole pine appeared, shading a rich understory of swordfern, devilsclub, vine maple, western yew, oceanspray, salal and skunk cabbage. Marshy habitats supported a diverse population of raccoon, mink, river otter, muskrat and beaver. Deer, elk, black bear, coyote, mountain lion and bobcat leaped, slept, prowled and hunted the valleys and slopes. Into this teeming array of post-glacial life the first human inhabitants arrived, having descended southward from the Bering Sea land bridge connecting North America to Siberia. They would form a culture in equilibrium with this environment that would last for thousands of years, knit together by a language called Lushootseed, or Whulshootseed, otherwise known as the Salish language system. This is the time before Slaughter, the subject embedded in the title of Paul Nelson’s collection of poetry. Slaughter comes later.

A Time Before Slaughter is rooted in a time and place fraught with conflict, arrogance, subjugation, and traces and glimmers of a sublime beauty that was never completely conquered and whose being sometimes finds life and potential in human language and gesture. It is a rich imagining of a genius loci energized by an inventive and nimble poetry. It is, in many ways, modeled on William Carlos William’s booklength poem Paterson, and to a slightly lesser extent Charles Olson’s Maximus. The structure and affable accessibility of Nelson’s poetry has more in common with William’s variable foot than Olson’s more eccentric, galactic, and disjunctive Maximus. Williams stressed a verse of “swift, uncluttered, functional phrasing” and the Imagist principle of “direct treatment of a thing”, qualities which Nelson’s poetry certainly evince, but most especially William’s pleading for a “rediscovery of a primary impetus, the elementary principles of all art, in the local conditions”. That is the essence of Nelson’s Slaughter.

Auburn was originally incorporated as “Slaughter”, named after Lieutenant William Slaughter, who was killed on December 4th, 1855, between the Green and White rivers during a battle with Native Americans from the Puyallup, Nisqually, and Klickitat tribes under the leadership of Klickitat Chief Kanasket. Slaughter was renamed Auburn in 1893, presumably because a large group of settlers had arrived from Auburn, New York, though another historian claims the town’s name was taken from a line in Oliver Goldsmith’s poem The Deserted Village: “Sweet Auburn, Loveliest village of the plain”.

Auburn’s location and history are chockablock with coincidences that underscore, unintentionally, a history of conflict and greed, coincidences Nelson mines and maximizes to hilarious effect. The Stuck River, for instance, which was dynamited to divert its channel and prevent flooding of the land under cultivation, but remained stuck. It is precisely this sort of thing that so underscores the arrogance and wrong-headedness of the European mindset whenever the monster of profitability rears its ugly head. I do not feel comfortable saying this. It is all too easy to slip into the usual PC, counter-cultural assumptions of a Native American population living in harmony and peace with nature, then tragically colliding with the brutish aggressions of the Europeans. But the truth is, there is no getting around that sad fact. In the mid-nineteenth century, the territories west of the Mississippi River were the Iraq and Afghanistan of their day. Indians were terrorists who killed white people because they hated our freedom. Rivers, and just about everything else in the natural world, were either a nuisance or a resource.

This is the fertile ground Nelson tills with his projective plough. In conversation, and in his writing, Nelson frequently alludes to Olson’s theory of projective verse, and while Nelson’s poetry tends to veer more toward William’s slightly less erratic idiom, it does evince many of the values Olson put forward. Olson hammers down Thor-like on a number of primary concerns, the sparks from his anvil flying into statements of breath and fire: “A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader. Okay. Then the poem itself must, at all points, be a high energy-construct and, at all points, an energy-discharge”.

More to the point, Nelson is passionate about the interplay between biology, human biology in particular, ecology, and the field composition of the poem, i.e. FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT. “… get on with it, keep moving, keep in, speed, the nerves, their speed, the perceptions, theirs, the acts, the split second acts, the whole business, keep it moving as fast as you can, citizen”. What you hear in these words is the man, Charles Olson, a heavy guy, pounding, breathing, declaiming, his blood pulsing through his veins, impassioned about language, history, the immediate environment, consciousness becoming word, word becoming flesh, tree, crocodile, fisherman’s knot, nematode, ode, saddlebag, vital capacity.

And that is one part Nelson, one part half-Nelson. My arm around your neck. Trying to persuade you of something. That Nelson, like his mentor Michael McClure, has used his passion for balance and fairness, compassion and beauty, to create what McClure calls “a lump or bulk of self-perpetuating protoplasm”- the poem as organism. This “is the view that the organism is, in itself, a tissue or veil between itself and the environment. And, it is not only the tissue between itself and the environment—  it is also simultaneously the environment itself”. Clearly, if America’s corporations incorporated a more enlightened view toward the environment, the U.S. would be able to shine at this month’s Copenhagen conference as a world leader in ecological harmony. But, sadly, there exists a troubling number of atrocities committed in the name of profit, many of which are still in practice. I refer, for instance, to the 1.3 million pounds of polycholrinated biphenyls (PCBS) General Electric dumped into the Hudson River; the tonnage of toxic oil waste Texaco (now owned by Chevron) left behind in the rainforests of Ecuador, which has since led to a lawsuit of some 30,000 Ecuadorians suing Chevron for damages in the amount of 27 billion dollars; a U.S. health care system whose ruthless bureaucracy is driven by profit instead of compassion, and whose reform is crippled by powerful corporate lobbies; 390 parts per million carbon dioxide in the atmosphere while no fewer than 614 coal-fired plants in the U.S. continue to compound that mephitic amount with billows of black, ugly smoke.

This is insanity.

And it just the tip of the proverbial (and melting) iceberg.

Nelson sums this dysfunctionality up in a single brilliant image, referencing two more pollutants  -  noise and light  -  in the process:

The step-down structure is a device that Williams uses to great advantage to build a thought, an image, or an idea, and engage the reader with its development by creating an expectation that, in the next image or line, is surprised by a new, unanticipated element. Nelson, as Williams, does this with great wit and delicacy. For example, in the poem “Senryu Sentences,” about the internment of Japanese after the attack on Pearl Harbor (there are many Japanese names on the tombstones in Auburn’s cemetery), Nelson begins with a rich, dance-like arabesque of ideas in his organically developed architecture:

Note the mingled rhymes of “cherry trees” and “Nipponese,” implying the beauty of the rural life the Japanese brought to the area, cherry blossoms in the spring, blossoms in the roads like snow, and the abrupt switch to “The head of the FBI” and that devastating description of J. Edgar Hoover. The lines are tied together in a tragic knot with the two lines “and soon the trees were chopped”, “the internment on”. Were the cherry trees chopped down in revenge? Out of anger? Did someone stage their own Pearl Harbor on a cherry orchard? Were slopes forested to provide wood for the barracks of the internment camps? The way Nelson treats this historical information as a found poem and develops it on the page (one muses also on Mallarmé’s handling of lines in Un Coup De Dés), testifies to his reading of Auburn’s history in all its stratifications. His work is exceptionally inclusive, a drawing in of multiple senses, multiple perspectives. This is certainly one of the more salient ambitions of his project, as it was for William’s Paterson. The history of Slaughter buckles under the weight of its sanguine components. But it also serves to demonstrate another aspect of poetry and its reach for the ineffable in all things. “We are looking”, observes McClure, “for a point that is both inside of ourselves because we are an organism and outside of ourselves because, as organisms, we are created of the environment in an exquisite complex of motions. Another society might say that we were looking for the spirit area from which poetry comes-  or from which it arrives-  or from which verse is energized”.

The warp and woof of Nelson’s loom also includes phrases of Lushootseed, using a font called Fontootseed. Kudos must also go to Nelson’s publisher, Apprentice House, for including this language and typescript.

By the same token, I found Nelson’s repeated use of the “at” sign, @, to be somewhat jarring and inappropriate. To me, it is redolent of e-mail, and corporate culture, but maybe that’s what Nelson intended — that kind of contrast — Salish meets Staples.

Nelson’s book also includes a seemingly unrelated section titled “Nine Sonnets for Pop & other Poems”. They do, upon closer reading, appear to be situated in present day Auburn, though their relation to the body of the work as a whole is intriguingly ambiguous. And they are sonnets; not in the strictest sense of the term with iambic pentameter and a Petrarchan or Shakespearean rhyme scheme, but they do have fourteen lines and are constructed with a formal structure of enjambed, unrhymed quatrains and a couplet. I always enter a sonnet somewhat reluctantly because I never expect them to read as naturally as Shakespeare’s, but these do. These are nice. The sonnets read naturally, fluidly. They combine images of commonplace realism (“The heat more than a large can of salsa/ can take with the two hour ride over the pass”) with images of cosmic significance, such as “Plants and animals/ are migrating towards the poles/ as we set this old spaceship on fire.” There is humor and resignation in that statement, which grows in pathos with the following lines: “Meantime, tortillas, a dip in the Stuck/ tender feet don’t like the feel of rocks/ and Pop breaks down when the tongue/ won’t cooperate with the brain”.

Author: John Olson

John Olson is the author of eight books of poetry and prose poetry, including Backscatter: New and Selected Work, The Night I Dropped Shakespeare on the Cat and the novel Souls of Wind. He has held multiple jobs over the years, including 19 years with a mailing service, and is currently occupied as a free lance writer. Some of his articles and essays have appeared in The Stranger and the Seattle Weekly.

John Olson has written 4 articles for us.