Blooms Literary Themes - THE TRICKSTER.pdf - ymerleksi - home

14
Sherman Alexie
you going, brothers and sisters, a buzzing, rattling, weeping, yipping
imagination. Cry so hard you begin to laugh: run so fast you lap your
shadow: dream so hard you can’t sleep: think so hard you startle awake
like a child. “Mafi a gave birth to a wily boy,” the Homeric hymn
begins, “fl attering and cunning, a robber and cattle thief, a bringer of
dreams, awake all night, waiting by the gates of the city—Hermes,
who was soon to earn himself quite a reputation among the gods, who
do not die.” Crossing Ginsberg with Creeley, Hughes’s Crow with
Berryman’s Mistah Bones, Alexie brews a homeboy devil’s own humor.
Th e voice makes junkyard poetry out of broke-down reality, vision out
of delirium tremens, prayer out of laughter. “When my father fi rst
smiled,” the poet recalls, “it scared the shit out of me.”
Look back at “Seattle, 1987” (appendix to chapter three), an early
Alexie poem, fi rst published in Th e Jacaranda Review and tracked to
Old Shirts & New Skins. It sets up in triads, with one-line answering
interstices, but the rhymes are lame (century / lake / it) and the rhythms
scattered, three to seven beats. Th e poet sounds mysteries “beneath” a
lake at the century’s end: “drowned horses snapping turtles cities of
protected bones.” Th e gaps between the old horse-culture icons (sunka
wakan, the Lakota called horses, “holy” or “super dog”), toothy denizens,
and tribal runes space the poem across the page, as a “camera
trick” jump-starts the sun on cable TV. “How the heart changes,” the
poet laments urban strangers, made without totemic “song.” No dance,
no song, Pound said, no poem. No tradition carries, no metaphor
steadies, no structure holds, no tribal village binds. Instead, a clumsy
magician gets a dollar bill in his top hat: the poet falls in love with
street trickster failure and confesses, à la James Wright’s “wasted” life,
“Th ere are so many illusions I need to believe.” Th e tone is fl at, failed
romantic, a touch sardonic, beat. Th is young Indian is holding out
for vision, needing to believe, tricked by MTV and sidewalk magic,
laughing up his sleeve. His is more performance than poem, more attitude
than art, more schtick than aesthetic. Defi nitely talented, deeply
impassioned, hyphenated American-Indian; but to what end?
Indi’n vaudeville, then, stand-up comedy on the edge of despair.
A late-twentieth-century, quasi-visionary clown tells the truth that
hurts and heals in one-liners cheesy as the Marx Brothers, trenchant
as Lenny Bruce, tricky as Charlie Hill’s BIA Halloween “Trick or
Treaty.” Th e stand-up poet marvels in dismay, “Imagine Coyote
accepts / the Oscar for lifetime achievement.” Th ere’s an old trickster-