Rearview Mirrors: Contradance in The Poetry of Gerald Vizenor

Much as Gerald Vizenor has won plaudits for his fiction—the great roster of novels and stories—along with his considerable discursive writing, he has from the outset written poetry. Haiku has been an especial forte. This essay tracks his career as poet and takes bearings on his two recent publications, Almost Ashore: Selected Poems (2006) and Bear Island: The War at Sugar Point (2006). The former carries all his typical tropes, those of trickster and crow, Columbus and Naanabozho. The latter offers a verse chronicle of “The Last Indian War in the States,” the U.S. Third Infantry’s shoot-out with the Anishinaabe Pillager Band in 1898. In both volumes Vizenor offers Native America, its different histories and worldviews, as a species of contradance. His imaginative language acts in concert, an imagery of time and place (his term is “imagistic gaze”) in which the contraries of memory, of consciousness, are brought into coordinated design. This account seeks to elucidate that force of design, a poetry that is full of doublings, helix, Native and non-Native America seen as though in Vizenor’s own rear view mirror.