Emeritus Professor of English J.D. Whitney visited the UWMC campus on April 7 to present readings of his poetry. The event concluded UWMC’s Lecture and Fine Arts series for the 2010-2011 academic year and was sponsored by the Student University Fee Allocation Committee.
Whitney’s readings primarily focused on poems from two of his recent books, “Grandmother Says” and “All My Relations,” both of which explore human beings’ understandings of their place among the creatures and energies we call the natural world. “Both these books reflect the heavy and abiding influence of my learning better citizenship with the larger ‘natural’ world and all its fellow creatures and phenomena, and the equally important influence of my engagement with Native peoples and world-views,” said Whitney.
The poetry reading began with a piece well known to Whitney’s students and colleagues, which offered an explanation as to why Ouija boards no longer exist in Merrill, Wis. While teaching a creative writing course at UWMC, Whitney was in need of a prompt. Two young women were talking before class when Whitney overheard the phrase “They used to have Ouija boards in Merrill.” It subsequently became the basis of an often-used writing exercise in his courses.
As Whitney read his poetry, he stopped occasionally to offer points of clarification or background. His style of “doing as much work as possible in as few words as possible” implied that some of his work was difficult to experience upon hearing it for the first time. “The concentrated nature of the language means that if your experience of a poem is just hearing it, [the poem] goes by so fast that you don’t have a chance to move in it.” This barrier to understanding poetry can be intimidating, according to Whitney. He added, “How many of us in school, for example, were made to feel stupid because we didn’t ‘get’ a poem as fast as the teacher thought we should?”
Several selections were presented from “Grandmother Says,” a collection influenced by Whitney’s relationship with Native American cultures and traditions. In the sacred mythology of native people, Whitney came to find answers to questions such as “What does it mean to be a responsible citizen of this planet?” These answers were more convincing than anything Whitney’s culture had given him previously. The poems were not merely a reimagining of native stories, but instead contained allusions to folklore that “represents a worldview and understanding of oneself.” The voice of the poems is that of the mythic Grandmother—a jovial trickster who created and continually reshapes the world.
One such poem was influenced by the adventures of a former UWMC colleague, Catherine Long, while in the northern reaches of Canada. A bear, attempting to eat the meat of a caribou carcass, was repeatedly thumped on the head by the deceased animal’s hooves. As the bear tore into the tendons of the caribou’s shoulder, the muscles contracted, bringing its hoof against the bear’s head until it became increasingly frustrated. The poem suggested that Grandmother, hiding in the caribou, was thumping the bear for her own amusement.
Ducks, ghosts, coyotes, beavers, ravens, thunder, and other phenomena occurred in Whitney’s poems. Grandmother is a force in each of them, guiding the natural world in subtle ways. “Everything in the world has personhood,” said Whitney. This principle is embraced by many native cultures and has greatly informed his writing. Complexity, awareness, and sentience are attributes which extend beyond humans. “This strikes me as a liberating viewpoint, so different from anything I was raised to believe,” Whitney stated. “It’s also a viewpoint that, if believed, has vast ecological and environmental implications for how we respond to other things in the world.” For example, crows that live near homes were once thought of as pests and their usefulness was limited to target practice. “If we begin to see crows as other persons who share the land with us, we must then honor their presence—not just tolerate them, but respect them.”
Personhood was a unifying theme of Whitney’s “All My Relations,” a book of small haiku-like poems, most of them fewer than 20 words. Its title is the English translation of the Lakota “mitakuye oyasin,” a tradition which teaches how all things, living and non-living, are interconnected. Each poem addressed a particular creature, landscape, or natural process.
Poetry is an important component of the liberal arts education, according to Whitney. He thought that poetry, like any form of art, can help people break their logical expectations. “In reading tonight, I made several comments about poems that don’t make any sense,” Whitney stated. “Not making sense is an important kind of making sense. We need more of it.” While formal education might lead one to think they understand the world, art can “pull that rug out from under them,” an action Whitney believed is therapeutic.
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and essayist Gary Snyder has been an important influence on Whitney’s writing. Snyder, a long-time friend of Whitney, is widely considered a central figure of the Beat generation and poet laureate of deep ecology. Other literary influences on his work include Jay Griffiths, Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, and William Carlos Williams.
What advice does Whitney have for young writers looking to get published? “No advice whatsoever,” he replied. “I think publication, which looks so magical, dissipates quickly. … It’s hard to get published and also much too easy to get published, especially in the electronic age where anyone can get something printed if they get their checkbook out. It’s hard to know what publication really means.” Whitney believed that most people who engage in creative work do so for “reasons that have nothing to do with economics.”
Whitney taught composition, creative writing, and literature at UWMC for over 40 years. His teaching career also included high school in Detroit, UW-Platteville, and the College of Menominee Nation. Like many practicing writers, academia provided Whitney with an ideal environment to pursue his career. “I didn’t teach just to pay the bills—I taught because I loved and benefited from the energy I got from students,” said Whitney. He is the author of 17 books of poetry and has received writing fellowships from the Wisconsin Arts Board and the National Endowment for the Arts. Whitney’s work has appeared most recently in Poetry and Orion literary magazines. He attended University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Whitney currently resides in Madison, Wis.
“[Whitney] is an untapped literary field all in his own,” said Senior Lecturer of English Jill Stukenberg. “At faculty and department meetings, or so I’ve heard, he was capable of transforming himself into a giant black bat, rising to a spot directly above the room and out of eyesight where he would flap his enormous wings, slowly and powerfully, the effect cooling and fanning his colleagues who believed him to still be sitting among them.”