Monday, 1:00 p.m.
At 1:00 p.m. we enjoyed a poetry reading by Kim Blaeser. She started out reading "Family Tree" by way of introduction, reading about her grandparents who lived "28 slow horse miles from the village store, about her great-grandfather "who carried his name with humbleness." I had heard her read it in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, a few years ago. It is a good poem, and a good introduction to family and community and what these connections are which bind us together.
Blaeser's father is 93; he is a good story-teller, she says, though she is never sure if they are true. "If he says he played basketball against the Harlem Globe Trotters and won, it is at least possible."
Of her father's plumbing: "This is at least a conversation piece, if not actually an antique, the plumber said."
"Now his taste is all in his talk," she said.
Her father dreams on: "Ah, if only I were forty years younger...."
"I am a poet against the war, as most of us are," Blaeser said.
"You'd be surprised to find how many country-western Indians there are," Blaeser said. She told a story of a group singing and playing guitar in a motel where Michael Bolton was also staying. A guitar string broke. The men said to Blaeser, "Why don't you find Michael Bolton and get us an E-string." She went out, came back later with the E-string. "Never said a man to do a woman's job," she told the fellows.
"For many native people, when you're away from your people, ritual becomes a kind of memory," she said.
The poem "Recite the Names of All the Suicided Indians" makes clear the importance of Indian languages. "Obituaries read like tribal rolls.... So many gone silent like the song.... Keep singing your name like your life...."
She left us thinking of all the "incinerated fragments of breath, bone, and the lost...."
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