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Morton Marcus: And this is KUSP, community sponsored radio, 88.9 FM on your dial for Santa Cruz, the Monterey Bay, Big Sur, and Salinas. Stay tuned for the introduction of a fine American poet to the Santa Cruz audience, live.

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Bruce Cutler: Older than happiness. That was the year we lived in the other America, in a house we called a hut, in a field of sugarcane we found surrounded by more and greener fields of cane climbing to the lips of an old volcano. It was a

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boat embedded in a hissing sweet Sargasso, and the cane breaks boiled with the light of fireflies. Under the skin of years, a storm of- is running gully washers down the red beds of the roof, the thunder trembles through us, with us.

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Somewhere my eye is reading month-old mail in the long corridor, and the distant monologue of rain is as warm as light. I can feel a shiver of content run from under eaves. In my nights on city streets, I seem sometimes to come to it,

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rising higher, darker than the darkest cane. As I approach, it seems to grow against the arms of stars. In closing light, a single lamp, glow worm in the grasses of the night. And a nerve, older than happiness, seems to tighten, turning

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inwards with the word: alone. Morton Marcus: That was the voice and the poetry of Bruce Cutler, who is our guest tonight. And you could say this is an introductory program, introducing you to Bruce Cutler,

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a new resident in Santa Cruz County, a man who has published more than ten books of poems, and who we will be meeting tonight on the Poetry Show. Morton Marcus: And this is Mort Marcus and the Poetry Show, and

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that was Bruce Cutler. And Bruce, welcome to California. Bruce Cutler: Thanks, Mort. Morton Marcus: It's been wonderful meeting you. I've been reading your poems for years, and now you are a resident of

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poetry central, so to speak. Bruce Cutler: Well, I think so, yeah. It's good to be here. Morton Marcus: Great. Tell us a little bit about about yourself and what you've been doing because you've got a long career

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and a distinguished one. And this is the time to introduce yourself not only to people here in Santa Cruz, but down in Monterey and Salinas and Big Sur, it's a big area and people are listening.

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Bruce Cutler: Well, thank you. It's a long story but I'll make it short. Like you, I was an Iowa poet, except that I think I came some years before you. And I was, you know, like a lot of kids in the United States, I was interested in writing but I

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didn't have the foggiest notion where you went to find out about it, or how you managed to get some kind of experience as a writer. A friend of mine put me on to the Iowa program and I went there and it was one of those kind of turning points in

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life when I discovered there was a whole different world. At the end of World War II, I had no idea that people actually wanted to write books and spent a lot of time learning how to do it- Morton Marcus: And Bruce, let me interrupt. Where are you from?

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Bruce Cutler: Oh, Chicago. Yeah. Morton Marcus: And you were born 1930? Bruce Cutler: That's right. Morton Marcus: Okay.

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Bruce Cutler: And so there I was, and I was learning how to do it. Because of my particular religious beliefs, I was not going to go in the army, so I served four years of alternative service as a Quaker with the American Friends Service

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Committee. That took me to El Salvador in the early 1950s, which was at that time, and still is one of the most interesting and explosive places in Central America, and I worked in a village redevelopment project there, and the poem that

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I read came out of that experience as a matter of fact. And so after that, I went back and got some more education, and eventually became a teacher in a university and started a creative writing program in Wichita State University, which

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twenty-five or thirty years later had an MFA program attached to it and a pretty secure reputation. And after a number of years of that, I discovered that it was time for me to quit and start to write again and here I am.

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Morton Marcus: Well, we certainly want to have you. Bruce has only been out here actually almost thirty-one days. Bruce Cutler: Yeah. Morton Marcus: And Santa Cruzians love to gloat and

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especially with weather that went to seventy-six degrees yesterday. Just describe for us your departure from Mine- actually, Wisconsin. Bruce Cutler: Well, actually from the Twin Cities Airport,

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Minneapolis, St. Paul Airport. The governor was busy closing down the state because the wind chill had gone to sixty-five below zero. And I know it's hard to understand and even to imagine, but those things happened and there was a good

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thing to say goodbye to. Morton Marcus: And when you got here, what was- do you remember what the temperature was here? Bruce Cutler: Oh, I have no idea. Everything seemed so warm.

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It could have been thirty-two and it would have seemed warm. Well, you know, the poem that I read has a companion piece to it because that's- what I read was a view of experience in a tropical climate, but there are a lot of other things that

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happen in tropical climates. And I want to read a poem called, "A Poem You Probably Wish I Hadn't Written," because it comes out of that same experience, but it's quite a different poem. A POEM YOU PROBABLY WISH I HADN'T WRITTEN

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To begin with, Concha was poor and sat not in the market where you have to pay, but on the cobblestones outside where space is free. She sold tortillas, she was young and very pretty, also virtuous. Had enough? No? Read on. So it took longer to sell

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tortillas there where she had to come earlier and stay on later, after families go home and eat and men, who have no family or desire for one, go off and drink seriously, which is in part getting drunk and in larger parts saying how much you are a

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macho, a real macho, saying the same things over and over again, showing the same old anatomy -- saying showing drinking on and on without punctuation -- until an afternoon when they arrived at a transformation of the grammar based on force. And a

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thirty-thirty slug ricocheted off a cobble and cut her in the spine between two vertebrae, which converted her into a pretty, virtuous statue. And the men went on drinking seriously, and if we were to live by statistics alone, most of the

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respondents would vote machismo, and most pragmatic liberals would find themselves unable to articulate a word about evil and death. And you, dear reader, would probably expect the government to handle this. And the myth would remain how

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interesting people get drunk and nice people are sober and boring. But since Concha can't, I'll say it, you're wrong, all wrong. Morton Marcus: Yes, that's a bit of an angry poem and one which

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remains clear in its pers ective. And I love the part abou the the fuzzy liberals, and eing one myself, and also then just the people who expect the overnment will take care of the roblem. It is certainly a situ tion we find ourselves in toda

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, though know this poem was wri ten, what, maybe twenty years a o or something like that? Yeah, well, it's very direct, very powerful poem. The- you Bruce Cutler: Well, yes, this goes back to the 50s. And I

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mean, alcoholism is a problem in what we now call the third and fourth world. I hate thos phrases because it's a way of etting rid of something you don t want to think about. But it s a big problem. And it's a roblem about which good intenti

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ns are not really enough. And t's a very difficult pr blem and it's a very difficul problem between- in family si uations between men and women, a d so there it is. know, your poems really have several themes to them. But what

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I want to ask you is, how did you actually start to write? Well, you know, I started out life as a musician, and probably- I mean there are people who thought I really should have done that, and not done what I did later. I went to

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the Northwestern University music school, in fact, for a while. And there's, you know, maybe underneath of what I do, there's a kind of musical idea. But at a certain point, I didn't feel that what I really wanted to do I was going to be able to

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do as a musician, and that's when I made the change to writing. And I thought at the beginning, I thought that -- like most young people -- that it would be a good idea to write fiction because everybody knows that fiction writers wrote

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wonderful things and got paid a lot of money and became very famous and won big prizes, and so on. I mean, you know, if you don't know any better, that's what you know. And I did write fiction, in fact, I wrote quite a bit of it. But I suppose life

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is a series of things that you do, and what you discover what you can't do, and out of that, you discover what you really want to do. And as time went on, I found that where I was really heading was- as a poet. And this has been a difficult decision

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because you have to leave behind a lot of aspirations that you may have had if you had originally set your sights on being a fiction writer. Morton Marcus: And then this leads me to another question,

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which you wanted me to put in the subjunctive? Bruce Cutler: Yeah, yeah. Morton Marcus: But I wouldn't dare, and that is: what do you hope to accomplish in your writing?

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Bruce Cutler: If you asked me that question several decades ago, I could have given you a nice, brief answer. Morton Marcus: Well, how about two answers: one for several decades ago, one for today?

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Bruce Cutler: Well, you know, several decades ago, I wanted to write the best poem that had ever been written, and I wouldn't say that I don't want to do that, but as time has gone on, it seems to me that all of us -- whether we are well-known

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or not well-known, whether we're starting or whether we've had a lot of experience in the art -- what we're all doing is trying to keep alive and develop an art form. And it's a very complicated art form, it really is, you know. You live a long

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time and you begin to discover all the things that you didn't know and they keep coming up at you. So that I suppose the best thing that I can say is, at this stage in life, is that, yes, I'd like to keep this art form going and try to- because it's

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complicated, and there are lots of corners and genres and types of poetry that you can write, I'd like to try to keep as much of it fresh and so on through my efforts as I can. Morton Marcus: Okay, I was even thinking of something even more

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particular than that, you know, what do you mean by wanting to write the best poem? What did that mean? Bruce Cutler: Ah, yes. Well, you know, in Iowa what that means? Morton Marcus: We've already talked that out.

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Bruce Cutler: Forget that. Well, you know, I started out at a time when- in a formalist period, and a really wonderful poem, you could pretty much say was going to be in a formal construction; it was going to be a sonnet, it was going to be a

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villanelle, it was going to be something that was very carefully articulated and carefully wrought. Dylan Thomas was considered to be the finest poet writing, Robert Lowell was in his early period and he was a great formalist, and that's

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where we were aiming. And it was a game with very, very clear rules, you know, there were things you had to do and you had to do them well, and they had to be done a certain way. That's all changed now, and I think for the better. The way in which we

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come at a poem is quite broad, and there are different ways of coming. And because you can see that, and because I can see that, and act as if it were something that we would like to do, I find it's a much richer kind of activity. And so there

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are many kinds of things I'd like to do and do them well. Morton Marcus: Your early poetry -- I wish we had two examples, I'm going to ask you in twenty seconds for another one -- really deals with the lyric. There are a lot of love poems

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and there are poems in which you talk sometimes in the third person about facing- being protected, or being vulnerable and open to the world, and changing experience. And then you go through a second phase in which you are writing these

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book-length narrative poems. This must be, what, more than the last twelve years or so, I guess? Bruce Cutler: Yeah, actually the first narrative that I published was in 1962. So it's been, you know, thirty-some years, yes,

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there have been several of them. And that's- in a way, people say, well, you know, why would you want to do that in an age when people write good prose fiction and that kind of a narrative has a lot of stature and prestige? But actually, good

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narratives began as poems, and I think are still best written that way and so that's what I still do. Morton Marcus: Let's have you read some more of these lyrical poems because we are going to get on to the narratives.

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Bruce Cutler: Okay, let's try one called, "On the Way." This is a poem, really, that deals with experience itself, it's not set in any particular location. It's not a Latin American poem, it's not a particularly North American poem. It's just set in

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the way we happen to live from day to day, and at this time, it was during the- the thing that you can see in the poem that might give it a date is that the Vietnam War is going on. And the title of the poem is:

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ON THE WAY It is on the road to war, on the way out, or on the way back, or on the way to the bank for a loan to bring it all around, or on the way back. Somewhere it is, he comes upon it. Island in

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the traffic would have been a way of seeing it. Even better, steps, a landing, a couple of battered doors, but all inwardly, where the hand that reaches out touches only chambers of his soul. Anyway, it is known, and how the traffic

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rages at the little concrete bunker with its light where he stands, where a first word may emerge as slow as a chrysalis into air. Don't hurt me, I'm all I've got with a self to lose, bruise, penetrate with steel. Surround it with steel then,

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steel or something, withdraw to the strategic hamlet, cut losses, change the bookkeeping, get a sympathetic executive secretary, make your wife– and yet there are those dark wings folding, unfolding, that sudden overtaking thirst for flight and

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mirror glimpse of stillness deeper than the deepest silence he has known. No words, nothing, not even the sound of his own thinking. Then, the presentness of it, an odor, a warm breeze, light, scents of the yesterday coming toward him, with the day

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before that over his shoulder. So, the distant comes into nearness and memory no longer must remember, and everything can gather and just be. It is not the slave's dream he sees now, the world of bondage with plenty, where the light at the

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end of the tunnel is the light of the oncoming train. It is something so other, it is its supersession, memory longer than city, longer than conversation, longer than seasons of drought and plenty, longer than the dead, longer than their death.

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"I will not," he says, "just be." Asserting so, he begins the ruin of his days, begins the long undoing of all doing as he steps out into the space of his thinking. Morton Marcus: And in many ways from the poems of yours that

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I've read, that is a very seminal poem. It's very representation- representational in theme because it says we must be open to life, we must be open to change of our preconceived notions, and we just cannot protect ourselves. And it seems

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to me that is a very resonant call because it's not just in our personal life, but it's in our public life as well that we have to be that way. Bruce Cutler: Yeah, that's a bit more public kind of a poem.

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There- but that's an area that I got into that I felt strongly drawn to. Sometimes the poems are not pitched at quite that kind of a public theme as that one. I'm going to read a short poem, which has been anthologized. The title of this

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poem is, "Angel." And it's a poem written from the point of view of a man who walks into a room where a woman that he loves is asleep in a bed. ANGEL

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She was asleep when he went in, as if the night had not turned over, or light spilled over its lip like milk. And she said, "Hmmm," as if to say, "Go on" to the night that wasn't there, to her sleep, fleeing the landscape as the shadow of the sun's

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eclipse flees across Dakotas(?) of indifference. And then she turned to the light that had come in place of the dark, with her face still flushed with sleep, as if to say, in spite of it, I am. And as if the night had not turned over, she was

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yawning, and stretched her arm so high over the loosening curls of her hair, that the tender underarm shone like a satin moon beneath the tan of shoulder. And that was the moment when her eyelids opened, and the inner light spilled over them like

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milk, out of her soul, yeastie and sweet. And just for the moment, glad, and shy, and surprised. That, by the way, made its way into an anthology of poems about angels. Not that I had that in mind when I wrote it but,

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anyway, that's where it ended up. Kind of a fleshy angel wouldn't you say? Morton Marcus: Yes, I would, sort of a Lolita angel. Bruce Cutler: Sure.

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Morton Marcus: Okay, read on. [unintelligible] that you're even reading beyond- Bruce Cutler: Well, you mentioned longer, you know, narrative sorts of poems and I want to mention one book that I

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wrote, which is called, "Dark Fire." This is a book, a narrative, about a woman who disappears. And this is a really difficult subject to handle because disappearance is- it's interesting but, of course, it always is followed by an

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explanation. I mean, we can't really live with the idea of people disappearing without there being an explanation. I mean, they either were murdered, or they went off to Los Angeles and got a new social security number, or aliens from another

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planet took them away. I mean, we always have to supply this explanation one way or another. But I've known people who've had children who have disappeared, truly just disappeared, never heard from again, there was never any explanation. In some

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cases, in one family particularly, were quite well-off, hired a team of private investigators to look for this missing child. Because, of course, until recently, the police wouldn't do it unless there was some kind of a crime

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that was suspected. And since you don't know if there's a crime, you just have to do the best you can. Well, at any rate, they just couldn't find anybody that knew anything about it, and it was an enormous burden for them to live with. And that's

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how I got started on this project. And it's about a young woman who's grown up in a small Kansas town and goes away, part of the Sixties generation, and spends a lot of time in California, and then has to go back to Kansas, as many of those

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kids did, eventually, and finds herself teaching drama in the local high school with the burden of this past on her and eventually, she does disappear. And it's partly about her and really quite a bit about the community. What does this small

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town community think of somebody who disappears? And I'll just read a little piece of it because it's the community that I thought was the most interesting part at the end, and that's where I focused. The sheriff of this county is out in

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her trailer going through her effects, trying to find some clue as to what might have happened to her. And she had a lot of pictures. She was a photographer, she had them all over inside of her trailer. And this is what the sheriff calls

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her "picture palace." It starts this way: Twice, the four went through the trailer saying less than the little they had started with, finding nothing a woman might not leave behind -- except her "picture palace," as the sheriff

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came to call it -- and so they gave it up. Turning the key just at the hour when Holly had seen her great mandala in the power lines at the end of Second Street two weeks before and fell into herself. And now she was gone in a way that had gone

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beyond a prank, beyond the obvious, beyond misfortune and its odds into the bizarre. She had to be somewhere, that was what you heard. As time went on, the accent fastened back on had, she had to be, until it passed right out of voice and people

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didn't want to talk about it anymore. But they were waiting. Somehow they knew it was a question of endurance, her and them; life in a small town usually was. It was a way you learned to live with it, this grudge or malice, this taking

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you on. A little later, in an effort to mend the community and bring some kind of peace and closure to the event, the minister gives a sermon in the church. And he's a good-natured fellow by the

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name of Gidding, and in his efforts to make things better he actually makes them worse. Gidding got around to preach about the mystery. It would have been the year after. It was St. Peter's Exhortation turned

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around, that the fact of Holly's disappearance was one good argument pro the resurrection. The fact they had to live with one just ought to make the other clearer now, what holy godly lives we should be living. He tried to fill the void and score

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one for the Lord, and for some, it worked. But others of Gidding's people saw behind the words a jumble in a fire that worsened what they felt of doom. They were republicans and didn't really take to ruthless gods and holocausts, and Gidding's words

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just weren't for them. [Commentary] And actually, nobody ever does achieve closure because this is actually an event which is not solved, and writing about it impressed on me as I worked on it. A lot of

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people got in contact with me; I heard a lot about this. You know, I was living in Kansas at the time and you think of Kansas as that black and white segment of the Wizard of Oz, you know, I mean, where nothing much colorful ever happens. And I was

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amazed to find out how many people disappeared from Kansas, and I got letters from people, and even from sheriffs. I read about their experiences with missing people and these are cases that just never get solved. They just go.

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Morton Marcus: I know that Bly also thinks that people just suddenly explode in their houses. Bruce Cutler: [Laughs] Well, Dickens, you know, he used to write about spontaneous combustion-

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Morton Marcus: Yeah, same thing. Bruce Cutler: -and that's a way of looking at it, but then that's an explanation of- I want, but I- Morton Marcus: You want the mystery.

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Bruce Cutler: Well, if you have to live with a mystery like that, you have to acknowledge that there is such a thing as mystery, and I think it's really hard for Americans to do. I mean, we can do many things, and as long as, you know, we stay

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within the bounds of our tennis game -- which is, you know, our civic life, good intentions, and practicality, and so on -- but to have to say that there are certain things that are true mysteries is a bit terrifying, and it's hard, it's really hard,

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but it may also be the truth, you know? Morton Marcus: Yep. I don't know if you want to- why don't we get on to another short poem or even a short piece from, "Dark Fire?" and then we're going to take our break because, believe it or

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not, a half an hour has gone by already, Bruce. Bruce Cutler: Oh, has it really? Morton Marcus: See, I told you it's fast. You didn't believe me.

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Bruce Cutler: Boy, it's going- yeah, I'll say. I'll read a very short poem. This is a poem I wrote in Switzerland. It's a very- I think of this as a very Swiss poem but I- that's only because I indulge myself that way. The title of this poem is:

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READING YOU THE SHEETS I put these poems on top of the fresh laundry and the wind picked them up. Or rather, it was an exchange: the smell of those linen sheets that swung in the currents of air coming down

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from Sustenpass gave way to the updraft of some one-handed quatrains, and they in turn put some discipline into the flax racks. Actually, the poems wished that they'd been washed and left out in the sun all day, a way of softening up images,

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promoting synesthesia. As for the sheets, they dream of rectangles, beds, pillows, windows, shapes they can stretch toward but only just approximate, so far, so close. Short of sleeping on poems and listening to the crisp complaint

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of linen sheets. I think I'll take you to bed and read you one of them. Morton Marcus: We have been talking, and we'll continue t talk with Bruce Cutler, who i now part of our community an

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who, for years, both started an directed the creative writin workshop in the University o Kansas in Wichita, and has bee in many American anthologies has more than ten books o poetry out. We will return in moment, so stay tuned

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Morton Marcus: And just some announcements, there will be a public radio swap meet at the Louden Nelson Community Center in Santa Cruz on Sunday, February 23rd from 10am to 4pm to benefit the public radio stations around the Monterey

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Bay. Sellers of vinyl, cassettes, CDs, and music memorabilia can reserve space by calling Charlie Lang. That's Charlie -- who was here right before the Poetry Show -- Charlie Lang at 338-4784 because that's the 408 area code. Again,

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that number for anyone who is interested in the public radio swap meet at Louden Nelson on February 23rd, Sunday, 408-338-4784, Charlie Lang, he'll be happy to take your call. Also, this is the Carl Cherry Center for the Arts is

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pleased to announce the 1997 Monterey County High School Poetry Awards. The awards have been established to recognize and promote excellence in high school poets and to develop an interest in creative expression through language. Entries must

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be postmarked by February 21st, so you've got less than a week, and sent to- and here take down this address: to call Cherry Center for the Arts, Post Office Box 863, Carmel, California 93921. Again, the entries for the high school poetry contest

00:34:07.600 - 00:34:29.290

of Monterey County, Carl Cherry at Center for the Arts, Post Office Box 863, Carmel, California 93921. No poem should be over forty lines and there should be no more than three poems per author. There are no restrictions on content, style,

00:34:29.290 - 00:34:50.530

or any metrical device, so there is that. I want to get you ready for Celebration of the Muse, March 7th at Palookaville in Downtown Santa Cruz will start at 8pm. The contact is Lynn Bolay(?) at 457-2273, that's 457-2273, or

00:34:50.530 - 00:35:10.420

423-3660. And Celebration of the Muse is the local women's writers reading now in its fifteenth year; it is the oldest continuous poetic event in Santa Cruz County. This event this year will benefit Woman Care, women's cancer advocacy,

00:35:10.660 - 00:35:26.650

resources and education, women caring for and empowering women with cancer, presented by authors Patrice Vecchione and Amber Coverdale Sumrall. This year's readers will include Gabriella Gutierrez, Adrienne Rich, Maude Meehan, Ellen Bass,

00:35:26.710 - 00:35:43.150

and Claire Braz-Valentine, in all twenty women will read. This is really an annual event, it seems to me to get better every single year. There will probably be a show here next week, I would say, maybe the week after, and there'll be more talk about

00:35:43.150 - 00:35:57.790

this. Again, Celebration of the Muse coming up March 7th at Palookaville in Downtown Santa Cruz at 8pm. And I will announce this again before I go off, but Billie Harris is here already and "Book Before Bedtime' follows the

00:35:57.790 - 00:36:15.820

Poetry Show. Tonight, we'll have Robert Evans reading a short story entitled, Blood One- Blood Wine? "Blodwyn" by Rhys Davies. It is a very Welch story full of color and subdued passion. It gives us two things to think about: to be true to your own

00:36:15.820 - 00:36:34.180

nature when you find out what it is, and don't be surprised if you find love in unexpected places. Well, since it's just getting over the rainbow of Valentine's Day, we'll have to listen to that. So that's right after this program, "Book Before

00:36:34.210 - 00:36:50.620

Bedtime," but right now we are back to our guest of the evening, Bruce Cutler, who, if you've been listening to the first half of the show, you know, has just moved out here to Santa Cruz County, and then will make his home here. The author

00:36:50.620 - 00:37:04.000

of ten books, a distinguished American poet, and we are learning about him, and we've just started to talk about the second kind of poem he does and has become more and more interested in, and that is the long book-length narrative poem.

00:37:04.870 - 00:37:23.020

Bruce Cutler: Yes and actually, I have a new book out which was the most difficult when I think that I wrote this book. Actually, the title is, "The Massacre at Sand Creek," and I started working on this book about thirty years ago. And my

00:37:23.020 - 00:37:34.210

work habits, by the way, Mort, are not the sort you want to teach to your students because- Morton Marcus: I got an impr ssion of that from the disc ssion at dinner, okay.

00:37:34.630 - 00:37:50.320

Bruce Cutler: Decades go by and color is still creeping along. I started this book about thirty years ago and it was not a hard book to think about writing but it was a very hard book to actually do for a variety of reasons, and I got off on a lot

00:37:50.320 - 00:38:11.200

of false starts and various things. But I did make a promise to myself that I was going to do this book. And at one point, I was in Italy and I had a year to work on various things there, and it hadn't gone very well with this book. And so in coming

00:38:11.200 - 00:38:26.980

home, I took the manuscript, I put it in a bag of books that I was sending back by the Italian post office. And I thought, you know, it took the- I took the Lutheran view: if God wanted it to get back to the United States, it would get there. But

00:38:26.980 - 00:38:36.040

if it didn't get there, then it was a sign that I should stop working on this project because the Italian mails are notoriously unreliable. Morton Marcus: But very nice people.

00:38:36.130 - 00:38:39.250

Bruce Cutler: Oh, they're always lovely people- Morton Marcus: And the women are very nice too, as well as the Bruce Cutler: Yes, yes, I married one. But any rate, it men.

00:38:43.680 - 00:38:58.230

went there, and I got back and months passed and there was nothing, and then about Christmas time, this bag was thrown into my office and there was my manuscript, so I know I had to finish it. About a hundred and thirty years ago, at

00:38:58.230 - 00:39:16.410

the very end of the Civil War, there was a massacre of Cheyenne Indians by a contingent of militia, Colorado territorial militia, that were under the command, apparently, of a man who was very ambitious politically, he was a Methodist

00:39:16.410 - 00:39:35.910

minister, actually, by the name of Chivington. And it was truly the last days of the Civil War, and those who were ambitious had to make their reputation because in order to run for office, from that time well on into the very late part of the 19th century,

00:39:35.910 - 00:39:56.040

it was really the Civil War veterans who won. So he managed to cook up this particular attack and it was on a defenseless camp of a group of Cheyennes which had- actually, laying down their arms and had gone to camp on Sand Creek, to

00:39:56.040 - 00:40:16.200

stay out of the way of hostilities. It was a challenge because there were a lot of personalities involved in this, a lot of rather well-known people in Western history, and then of course, there were the Cheyennes. In one of the threads

00:40:16.200 - 00:40:35.190

that I follow through in this book is the Cheyenne thread and I want to read a little piece of this. This is the opening section, it's later. Two Cheyennes, a woman by the name of Ekomina and her husband, Frank Little Wolf, are going

00:40:35.760 - 00:40:54.690

riding across the Montana plains to an encampment of Cheyennes where they're going to celebrate a ceremony called a Massaum ceremony -- which is no longer done but they were among the last to actually do it -- and this is a ceremony in which the

00:40:54.690 - 00:41:15.870

world is recreated. It's very important, it had- in traditional Cheyenne religion. But before they do that, this opening section, she has another thing she wants to do. This is a vow that she's made, and it goe way back to the actual events a

00:41:15.930 - 00:41:34.880

Sand Creek and you'll understan why after I read this They're camped in shortgrass country, but it isn't theirs, in a place that they've been given, if given is what you can't say no to, a place that they would ride through to get to another

00:41:34.880 - 00:41:54.710

place if the whites would let them, to a place where sky and earth connect, where the spirit world can bless and guide the living, where all can know the dead when living and the living when they're dead in peace. Instead, they dig. The man and

00:41:54.710 - 00:42:13.460

woman take turns under a stone-colored sky. Not a tree, not a thing that moves except for the glint of the mattock, rising, falling. There's a bundle at their feet, it's wrapped in grasses and a bolt of flannel tied with thongs. It has

00:42:13.460 - 00:42:30.650

come to her from Oklahoma, from a cousin of a cousin who came on the thing that holds, in a White man store of hand-me-downs. The cousin had known at once, wedged as it was in a corner, in the back of shoes and purses where it lived on, forgotten. It was

00:42:30.650 - 00:42:50.210

tanned and supple and bordered with a casing stitched in red with a French silk drawstring run inside to close it. No need for a second look, she'd known. How could the White man know. What he felt he let pass through his heart, it left him without

00:42:50.210 - 00:43:07.820

memory, in ignorance that spared him from the gall of shame. She thinks, you can ask of all, who were the most on earth, the living or the dead? An owl will say, the dead, and there you are, truth is told on you, say as you will, since when is it

00:43:07.820 - 00:43:29.150

success for anyone to die? For saying that, you betray a heart that doubts the wonder of this world, this place where fear should never light his fire, this place of transformations, deathlessness, miracle. So she asks nothing. This thing that is

00:43:29.150 - 00:43:47.810

now a Bible has passed from hand to hand, relative to relative, has made its way as a stray dog would across the plains until it found her. Cradled by hands, by palms, by fingers, it took on life, came out of its past like a ghost branded with the name of

00:43:47.810 - 00:44:08.600

the man who once had worked it into shape, "Squires, Sand Creek, 1864," and it was truly a child of its maker. So cunning, so aweless, it could stay on a shelf or in back of a drawer for years unless you took it carefully in hand, felt its

00:44:08.600 - 00:44:29.120

surface, traced its contours down to the hard unyielding areola and nipple at the bottom, then you would have known. The cousins, they had known. And now the woman has it, this piece, this bit of pelt that never was the pouch it posed as, that

00:44:29.120 - 00:44:49.340

never served a purpose other than to fit a message to your hand, terrible phylactery of the faith that holds an Indian less than a living soul. Tip bag, soldiers called it. It has come along with wisdom fingers, scalp locks, scrotum stretched into

00:44:49.340 - 00:45:10.160

humidors, the file of body parts that slipped away in pockets, kit bags, trunks, leaving the plains for courthouse squares, banquet halls, museums, and then into the long dark night of dresser drawers, attic trunks, waiting, continuing to be,

00:45:10.940 - 00:45:32.330

biding the time until their time would come again. Today, she's vowed she'll give it burial. She, the woman, Ekomina, granddaughter of Crow Woman that died in the white man's trap at Sandy Creek. She, at work with her husband, Frank Little Wolf,

00:45:32.780 - 00:45:53.570

the two of them pledgers for the mass of them. But first, they must dig a narrow house for the thousandth part of one of them, their people, Tsitsistas. Deep enough, Frank Little Wolf lays down his tools. He spits on his hands then hers. They lay the

00:45:53.570 - 00:46:10.820

bundle in the little deep earth lodge, filling it back up, along with prayers and pledges and scantlings of tobacco. She prays that every bone and every piece of skin and every hair of all their people will have a narrow house like this someday. For the

00:46:10.820 - 00:46:28.760

story is, there wasn't even half of Crow Woman left to bury up when they'd found her after Sandy Creek. Story that was repeated day after week after year, as the Whites had come at them, pushed them onto reservations. They'd broken out,

00:46:29.120 - 00:46:51.020

tried to trek to Canada, but troops had forced them back. A flock of wild geese that straggled from marsh to river, starting up, beaten down, starting up again, their broken bodies blanketing the landscape. Here is the little grave. The

00:46:51.020 - 00:47:10.880

copper-colored clods pressed down and banked, less than a body length, only a few spans wide it seems, just this, the slightest catch of breath in the gritty thorax of plains and sky. Spirit wind, breath sent out from the spirit world, bring

00:47:10.880 - 00:47:28.490

blessing to this place and to this people. She feels the words pass through her soul, enter the air like fledgling eagles, sharp-eyed, craving, catch as catch can, prayers to a stone-colored sky.

00:47:31.940 - 00:47:46.110

Morton Marcus: Now, this is a very beautiful book, and really nicely presented and it's from the University of Oklahoma. And will we be able to get this in Santa Cruz? Bruce Cutler: Oh, yes, yes, it's now in its second printing in a

00:47:46.110 - 00:47:55.100

hardback, and the paperback is coming out shortly. Morton Marcus: When is the paperback coming out? Bruce Cutler: It'll be out by late summer, early fall. Morton Marcus: Great, okay. And I hope we'll have a book signing

00:47:55.100 - 00:48:04.910

of that. Has this been ordered by any of the bookstores? Bruce Cutler: Oh, yes, there's the bookstores downtown and in Capitola. Morton Marcus: And are they carrying it now? I just thought

00:48:04.910 - 00:48:18.590

of it- great. Okay, so you can- people out there, listeners, you can get Bruce Cutler's, "The Massacre at Sand Creek," it's a beautiful book. It's very interesting the way, at least, for the first part, you laid out the poems themselves. I mean,

00:48:18.890 - 00:48:31.170

they're mostly anywhere- they almost look like a form of around twelve lines per page and they are right in the center of the page. Bruce Cutler: Yeah, this is- there's a- this was one of the

00:48:31.170 - 00:48:46.800

problems with- it took so long in writing this book because, on the one hand, you have characters who are English-speaking people, there's Chivington as a character, and then is a regular army officer who, in fact, disobeys orders

00:48:46.800 - 00:49:04.530

and refuses to order his men into fight, that is to say to assassinate these Indians, and whoever is later, himself, assassinated, presumably by Chivington or one of his people for having done that. So you have all of these

00:49:04.530 - 00:49:18.630

English-speaking characters, they have the Cheyenne characters, and it's really- to tell you the truth, I think the hardest thing about writing this book was how do Indians speak? I mean, it's sort of a stupid question because they speak

00:49:18.630 - 00:49:36.600

exactly how they speak, but the Cheyenne language is not like English at all. It's a highly inflected, very compressed language, very terse. I mean, you do a lot of things with a very small number of sounds. And you certainly don't want to end

00:49:36.600 - 00:49:51.150

up having Indians that sound like Longfellow. And you certainly don't want to have any of these that you end up having sound like the Lone Ranger's Tonto. I mean, these are all you know, dreadful things, and nobody would really want to do

00:49:51.150 - 00:50:06.180

that, but then the other question is, well, how do they sound if you were going to give an English rendition of the Cheyenne language? So I had to come up with something that would be as- something like that terseness and that brevity. And

00:50:07.470 - 00:50:24.000

because Cheyenne is a very poetic language, therefore, when a few words are said, it is like a poem. And that has to have its space on the page, and the way in which our words would have a space on a page if we have, of course, more words, and they'd

00:50:24.000 - 00:50:37.800

fill up the space- the page more. So the balance was that I had to come up with a way of presenting this in which everybody had a fair shake on the page with what they were doing, but it wouldn't short-change the Cheyennes, that

00:50:37.800 - 00:50:56.310

the Cheyennes would have a balance and if there were pages in which there was relatively little on them, but it was meant as a poetic statement and it was part of their culture that they would have the same kind of weight as more words would have

00:50:56.310 - 00:51:10.590

from one of our characters. Morton Marcus: Great. And when the Whites do speak in here, these lines are much longer, the pages filled up, and it actually reads a lot like pentameter, though it's not strictly that at

00:51:10.590 - 00:51:26.590

all. Bruce Cutler: You might say that, I couldn't count it. Yes, I know. That leads us into a discussion of, you know, what's a technique for writing verse. And I have to say, honestly,

00:51:26.590 - 00:51:42.790

that when this book was conceived as a publishing project, it was actually with another publisher. And we had a long and very spirited discussion about how this book ought to be presented because, I mean, it's many things. It's a

00:51:42.790 - 00:51:57.760

narrative poem, of course, but it's also a series of voices. There are many characters in this book who do the narrating. I am not God. I mean, I'm not in this book telling you what to think. I mean, these are the voices that are giving you the

00:51:57.760 - 00:52:12.760

experience, and you're to put these things together and decide for yourself. So as a result, I thought it was a good idea just to present this book as, "The Massacre at Sand Creek," with a subtitle, "Narrative Voices," and then just let people find

00:52:12.760 - 00:52:30.460

out for themselves, and that's the way it has been presented. I suppose the highest form of praise was one reviewer, who read the book and really enjoyed it and didn't otherwise say very much about it, accepting that at the very end, after expressing

00:52:30.460 - 00:52:46.920

his appreciation for the book, the last line was, "And at times, it is almost poetic." I took this as praise. Morton Marcus: Yes, definitely. Well, as I said, it's a marvelous book. Why don't we hear more? I mean, it's amazing

00:52:46.920 - 00:53:03.410

how time goes, just look at the clock on the wall and you'll see, we haven't- so how did it go so fast? Bruce Cutler: Okay. Well, there's a character by the name of Silas Soule in this book, he's the officer who does not

00:53:03.500 - 00:53:20.510

order his men to fire. And his progression in this book is one of learning. He goes out, he joins the army, like a lot of young men during the Civil War. He goes out to do what people do when he joined the army and finds that, at the end, what

00:53:20.510 - 00:53:37.370

he's doing is something he never expected to do, which is of course, he's ordered to slaughter a bunch of people that are not armed and are not presenting a danger. He's high spirited, and he likes to joke. And he's also a friend of Walt

00:53:37.370 - 00:53:54.620

Whitman, and he writes letters back to Whitman, who was at that time editing the Brooklyn newspaper, and teases him a little bit about coming out to find out what life is really like on the Western Frontier because, of course, Whitman had

00:53:54.620 - 00:54:04.820

a hard time getting west of the Hudson River, [laughs] that was his idea of the West. So anyway, here's- Morton Marcus: It's a common New York conception of things. [Laughter]

00:54:04.820 - 00:54:17.910

Bruce Cutler: Yeah, so I'll just read this one letter that he writes to Walt Whitman. Dear Walt, when you think you've seen the- all the world and you want to get up another book, first come out second class as

00:54:17.910 - 00:54:32.760

far as Kansas, then head on down the Taos trail, but I don't suppose you'd want to leave your palmy life at Pfaff's Cafe and literary loafing just to watch the buzzards circling overhead and hear them bidding for your brains. Gravely speaking, that's

00:54:32.760 - 00:54:48.180

how it is here. Now, for the lighter side. I haven't told my mother, but I spent the summer of '60 looking for Golconda up in Colorado. What I found was Geneva Gulch. The eve of my arrival we went bare knuckles and one of the boys had his eyes

00:54:48.210 - 00:55:04.770

displaced about a half a knuckle out of socket, where upon we rechristened it as Gouged Eye Gulch. It's one rough spot, the slosher's placer pan or feed a raggedy quartz mill just for grub, talk about fatigue. After a month high in the Rockies

00:55:04.770 - 00:55:20.670

where nothing boils but tempers, anything in this army seems a snap. One day at dusk someone said he wounded an elk that plunged into a gorge and got away. We rode and walked and stalked the blood spore up a ridge, then struck a chasm where

00:55:20.670 - 00:55:38.340

the moon could cast no light and smack, a heavy growl shook the ground. Two balls of fiery eyes, our rifles emptied at the mark, instead of a stately elk, we brought a nine-foot cougar down, his arms were big as mill posts. Here I am in a troop of

00:55:38.340 - 00:55:52.980

volunteers who can't tell elk from cougar. Wait till the war breaks out in earnest, then even French Canadians will be running for their lives. You see when you come out how well us folks will treat you. In any case, I have a lot to say about you

00:55:52.980 - 00:56:08.730

wherever I go, and no, I don't think people realize how long this war may last. They say not long, our union with more than twenty million souls against the piddling five of Rebs, but I'm not fooled. My little rescue party that's sprung old Dr.

00:56:08.730 - 00:56:22.920

Doyle from the St. Joe Jail ran into postmasters, detectives, agents of the Treasury Department, US Attorney's, field commanders, and a web of toffs and toughs all deep inside the borders of a loyal state whose sink or swim would have it that

00:56:22.920 - 00:56:37.890

the rule of slavery will prevail. You know all this from when I saw you back in Gotham, yet, there's more to tell. Then I only mentioned weeks I spent to try and spring John Brown from his cell at Harpers Ferry, but it takes a better nib than

00:56:37.890 - 00:56:50.670

the one surviving in this army pen for that, so I'll wait to tell you next time. Yeah, send your book to me. Us troopers guard the males and almost everything gets through except for apple butter and toilet soap that have a way of getting

00:56:50.670 - 00:57:09.270

sidetracked in Missouri. Your "Leaves of Grass" will make it here for sure. As ever, Si. P.S. your poems will help to save this territory from the plague of verse in vogue, Beautiful Dutch, it's called, here's one. [unintelligible]. He saw over

00:57:09.270 - 00:57:26.060

plaque mid fight spots on, elation to grass on the [unintelligible] his tail, [unintelligible]. No more. Weep, for the muse is spent till payday. Si. Morton Marcus: Now, let me ask you a very, very silly question

00:57:26.060 - 00:57:38.430

-- and you can be, and I can tell that you got a very puckish sense of humor -- did Si actually write Walt Whitman in real history? Bruce Cutler: There is a letter from Silas Soule to Walter

00:57:38.430 - 00:57:50.130

Whitman at- in history, but it is nothing like that, I can assure. You know, they're nice people, but not real interesting, much more interesting when you invent them.

00:57:50.000 - 00:58:06.080

Morton Marcus: Right, right. It's interesting that you conceived this book back in 1962 and as I remember, that was way before George Keithley came out with his long narrative poem, which is conceived of his letters mostly from the Donner

00:58:06.080 - 00:58:11.730

Party. Bruce Cutler: That's right. Morton Marcus: And I know you reviewed the Donner Party. What did you feel when that book came out?

00:58:11.750 - 00:58:25.910

Bruce Cutler: Oh, I was but I was always very pleased when people took on such a project, you know, as- and particularly dealing with parts of American history and experience in the 19th century, because that's a century that came and went and

00:58:25.910 - 00:58:38.930

then not a whole lot of it made it into serious literature. I mean, we think of Melville and Hawthorne, but you know, a lot of things happened that they didn't ever write about, and none of that seems to have a real forum in American

00:58:38.930 - 00:58:48.480

literature. I'm always delighted when somebody does a good job on that. Morton Marcus: Well, this, "Massacre at Sand Creek," is really a marvelous poem, I suggest it to everyone out

00:58:48.480 - 00:59:03.960

there. This sense -- and I think that last letter really gave it to you also -- the sense of real people talking and being involved in them and their personalities. And then there's this almost this elegiac, [unidentified] music, which is

00:59:03.960 - 00:59:18.000

really the story of the Indians, just moving in between them, and it becomes very, very moving and very much like an oratorium. Bruce Cutler: You have to get used to the idea that the 19th century had a lot of people in it who are intelligent and

00:59:18.000 - 00:59:26.050

capable, and knew a lot, but they just never got their stories told. Morton Marcus: And so does that mean that you are getting their stories told?

00:59:26.130 - 00:59:32.130

Bruce Cutler: Well, I'm trying. Morton Marcus: Good. May you be able to do it in a hundred million more books. Bruce Cutler: Thanks.

00:59:33.120 - 00:59:48.630

Morton Marcus: We have been talking to Bruce Cutler. Bruce, do you have a short poem you want to end with? Bruce Cutler: Well, yes, actually, I'm going to read a short poem. This is a poem which those of you in the audience who

00:59:48.630 - 01:00:02.450

have lived in Minnesota will sympathize with. It's called: NEWS FROM THE NORTH It's February and if the birds know where to sit, you bet your butt they do when it's minus twenty-three in Little Norway,

01:00:02.720 - 01:00:19.280

they're landing on our chimney tops and whatever it is they wanted to warble, they whistle a moment, they hit the bricks. And as for flora, the most the oaks can manage as a groan, the sumacs have their stocks spot-welded into the snow, a

01:00:19.280 - 01:00:36.850

sleighty haze of ice crystals fritters sunlight, and the river? Cold, rolled steel. And somewhere underneath? The fish. Fish are where? Morton Marcus: And that was an introduction to Bruce Cutler who

01:00:36.850 - 01:00:53.890

has come and joined our community, distinguished American poet finally found warm weather after years ago being in El Salvador, and we welcome him here, and I hope you have, and look for his books. This is Mort Marcus, I'll be back in around

01:00:53.890 - 01:01:06.340

three weeks, but I want you to stay tuned for "A Book Before Bedtime' hosted by the inimitable Billie Harris. Tonight she brings you Robert Evans reading a short story entitled, "Blodwyn," and she will say again that I

01:01:06.340 - 01:01:25.360

mispronounced that which is fine. A very Welch story by Rhys Davies. This is Mort Marcus saying again, thank you so much for listening. Welcome, Bruce Cutler, and this is KUSP community sponsored radio at 88.9 FM on your dial for Santa

01:01:25.360 - 01:01:31.750

Cruz, the Monterey Bay, Salinas, and Big Sur. Stay tuned for "Book Before Bedtime.