Sherman Alexie

Sherman Alexie Poetry By Evan

Sherman Alexie •

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Sherman Alexie is one of the best-known Native American authors in the United States. Along with Leslie Marmon Silko, he has been instrumental in raising the profile of Native American writers and drawing attention to the unique plight of the Indian community in the modern city. Alexie was born in 1966, the son of Sherman Joseph and Lillian Agnes Alexie, and he grew up on a Spokane Indian reservation near Washington. He was born with hydrocephalus, a lifethreatening condition involving fluid accumulation in the head. Although doctors managed to save his life, the illness left him with a severely disfigured skull that in turn led to painful playground taunts. As well as this, Alexie had to endure an alcoholic father who was often absent from home for weeks at a time. His mother sewed quilts at the Wellpinit trading post to support her six children.

• Alexie left the reservation as an adolescent to attend high school in Reardon, a town thirty miles Sherman Alexie at away. He excelled at debating and basketball, and won a scholarship to Gonzaga University in the 2007 Texas Book Festival. Spokane. However, while he was at University he began to drink heavily, subsequently dropping out of college and spent the next three years as an alcoholic. In 1987 he was mugged at knifepoint and decided to try and turn his life around. He returned to college, this time at Washington State University, gave up drinking and earned a BA in 1991. At Washington he also began to write poetry, and met Alex Kuo, the creative writing professor who would encourage him to write full-time.

• There are no full-length academic studies on Alexie's work. However, students might find it useful to read other key works by Native American authors, particularly Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko and In the Presence of the Sun by M. Scott Momaday. Alexie's work bears some resemblances to Beat writing, particularly the poetry of Allen Ginsberg and the prose of William Burroughs. He is also influenced by the poetic fables of William Faulkner and John Steinbeck. • World Literature Today has called Alexie 'one of the most promising of the new generation of American writers'. The Patriot Ledger has commented: 'Alexie's humor is enjoyable and poignant and doesn't dull the impact of his scathing critiques of American society.

Alexie’s Poetry

Poverty of Mirrors You wake these mornings alone and nothing can be forgiven; you drink the last swallow of warm beer from the can beside the bed, tell the stranger sleeping on the floor to go home. It's too easy to be no one with nothing to do, only slightly worried about the light bill more concerned with how dark day gets. You walk alone on moist pavement wondering what color rain is in the country. Does the world out there revolve around rooms without doors or windows? Centering the mirror you found in the trash, walls seem closer and you can never find the right way out, so you open the fridge again for a beer, find only rancid milk and drink it whole. This all tastes too familar.

What the Orphan Inherits •

Language

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Alcohol

I dreamed I was digging your grave with my bare heands. I touched your face and skin fell in thin strips to the ground

"For bringing us the horse we could almost forgive you for bringing us whisky."

until only your tongue remained whole. I hung it to smoke with the deer for seven days. It tasted thick and greasy

Time

sinew gripped my tongue tight. I rose to walk naked through the fire. I spoke English. I was not consumed. Names I do not have an Indian name. The wind never spoke to my mother when I was born. My heart was hidden beneath the shells of walnuts switched back and forth. I have to cheat to feel the beating of drums in my chest.

We measure time leaning out car windows shattering beer bottles off road signs. Tradition Indian boys sinewy and doe-eyed frozen in headlights.

I Would Steal Horses •

For Kari for you, if there were any left, give a dozen of the best to your father, the auto mechanic in the small town where you were born and where he will die sometime by dark. I am afraid of his hands, which have rebuilt more of the small parts of this world than I ever will. I would sign treaties for you, take every promise as the last lie, the last point after which we both refuse the exact. I would wrap us both in old blankets hold every disease tight against our skin.

Chicken • • • • • • • •

The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, But shines into the eye and heart of the child. -Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature My wife wanted to give my sons the chance To see my tribe’s powwow with transparent eyes, And maybe fall in love with the chicken dance, But I stayed home. They wouldn’t hear my crazy rants About the powwow bullies who made me cry. My wife wanted to give my sons the chance To enjoy themselves. “Listen, I just can’t Go with you,” I said to my wife, who was unsurprised By my need to spin a different chicken dance. “They can hang with their uncles and aunts,” I said. “And my mother, she’ll be so surprised That my sons have been given the chance To powwow.” And so my wife and sons drove, sans Father, to my rez on a Saturday night And spent hours watching the chicken dance. And, yes, I remembered pissing my pants When I saw the reds of my bullies’ eyes, But my wife gave my sons an aboriginal chance. “Your boys saw joy in their uncles and aunts,” My wife said, “And the pride in your mother’s eyes, So be thankful I gave your sons this chance Because they fell in love with the chicken dance.”

Theme & Motif • Writing as Resistance: By its very existence, Alexie's work is an act of resistance. Even though Alexie is not trying to speak for all Native Americans, he challenges the continuing exploitation of Native Americans. As an act of resistance, his works can be read as a story unto itself and as a metaphor for his experience as an Indian in white America. • Alternative Perspectives: Alexie's artistic identity construction and reconstruction results, in part, from the rewriting of historical events from a Native American perspective.