Frank X. Walker

Some good collections of poetry dazzle the reader with their skill, or the emotional impact; some leave a mark. Walker's collection falls into that second category.

The voices in this collection of persona poems are haunting. From Medgar Evers, his wife Myrlie and brother Charles Evers to his murderer Byron de la Beckwith and his two ex-wives, Willie and Thelma, each poem captures a facet of the assassination and its aftermath.

Each poem also captures a facet of the fear that pervaded Mississippi. Walker pulls no punches. In a poem titled "The N-Word" from Charles' pov, "Hearing that word . . . / brings back the smell/of German shepherd breath/ of fresh gasoline/ and sulfur air.

It would be the easy way out to paint Beckwith's evil in a stereotypical way, focus on the hate speech and the hood, but Walker explores his fear. In "Harriet Tubman as Villian: A Ghost Story" Beckwith's persona imagines a narrative where Tubman succeeded in freeing all slaves, referring to the owners as "the poor old farmer and his wife" who after working their own fields were found "frozen to a cotton bush, fingers and hands cut up / and still bleeding after working themselves to death." Walker demonstrates the way a story that would signify hope for some, twists like a knife in the mind a person obsessed with the fear of seeing everything that represents order disappear, who will hold on to it with a white knuckled grip.

But it is the voice of Myrlie that is the conscience behind the story, opening and closing with the importance of not forgetting, "When people talk /about the movement as if it started in '64 . . . /It means he lived and died for nothing. / And that's worse than killing him again."

There are 49 gems in this collection, as important for the technical skill of Walker's lines as for their ability to make certain emotions, fear, hate, grief, resolve, consolation == palpable.… (mehr)

Luis Alberto Urrea, in his keynote lecture for The Big Read last fall, recommended in an offhand way Frank X. Walker as an author and Buffalo Dance: The Journey of York as a book that had been influential for him. Never one to turn down a recommendation, I whipped out my phone and used Suggest an Item to place a hold (the WPL didn't own it at the time) right there in the auditorium while Urrea was still talking.

Buffalo Dance is the fictionalized experience of York, William Clark's slave, told through Frank X. Walker's poetry of what the journey might have been like for the slave accompanying the Lewis and Clark expedition. York's experience must be fictionalized because he, though present, has been objectified by history as nothing more than a pack mule. Buffalo Dance has the feeling that York is talking to himself more than to us. He seems to be telling himself his own stories because no one else has asked to hear them. But those stories are well worth listening to and have the potential to make traditional understandings of this bit of history a little bit broader. I wish I was teaching a high school history or English class so I could include this in the curriculum.

… (mehr)

Subtitled: The Ascension of York

This book of poetry is a sequel to Walker's book Buffalo Dance. Both are poems focusing on the experience of York, the only black/slave member of the Lewis and Clark expedition. As such, this volume was doubly interesting to me because I'm a fan of the Corps of Discovery and had wondered in the past how it could be rendered in poetry. I have to say that in the end I valued it more as marginalia to the history and literature of that expedition than as a book of poetry.

Walker is to be commended on the broad approach he takes to giving voice to those who did not leave their own personal record of that expedition. He has been very sensitive to the Native American perspective and includes the voices of York's father and mother, York's slave wife and his Nez Perce wife, and Sacagawea. He also has poems from the perspectives of York's hunting shirt, hatchet, and knife. The variety of views and voices, as well as the narrative arc, gives the book forward momentum.

The poems at the beginning of the book make him seem a bit too bigger-than-life. It felt like overcompensating. However, this is partly to express his new-found self-esteem, to show how different life with the expedition and among the Indians was from being immersed in the system of slavery.

The second half of the book deals more with York's flaws as a person and the awful time he had upon returning to "civilization." Walker has done what he can to base his poems on historical fact. York asked for his freedom and Clark refused to grant it. Eventually, York disappeared from known records. Walker represents the conventional view, taken from an interview with Clark, that York remained in the east, in the later part of his life lived independently (presumably free), but was not successful and died of cholera. He does not pursue the notion that York returned to live with Indians.

I found the poetry rather dry and preferred the voices of Rose, York's mother, to the other voices in the book. From "Too Many Wives and None":

She was a lil' foolish fo' choosin' him,
but a good wife is what she was, too good
fo' his heavy hands an pigheaded ways.
After she gone, maybe he'll 'preciate
what he had. He did his share a knockin'
an' now he gettin' his on both ends.

My favorite poem is "Wordsmith," which is told by York but is about Drewyer, one of the Frenchmen that join the expedition and knows the sign language used between Indian nations.

He could make his body say buffalo or dear or bear.

His hands could be a great bald eagle or a hummingbird.
His arms and neck could call up a snake or a river.

Sometimes 'round the fire we ask him to sign us a story
just for the pleasure of seeing him make the words move.

I'll keep this book and keep an eye out for the first one. But only because the Corps of Discovery fascinates me, not because of the poetry.… (mehr)