Shaman of the Desert, Keith Wilson's Collected Poems

Keith Wilson’s Shaman of the Desert, Collected Poems (1965-2001) is a massive volume of over 1100 pages containing works from at least a couple dozen of his published books . . .

I can’t begin to be in any way comprehensive about this incredibly moving and extensive achievement, but I can bring together here two reviews I did of two of his books, Lion’s Gate, 1986 and Graves Registry, 1992.

Here also are a couple short statements about the importance of Keith’s work to me. We were born about a hundred miles apart and he was only eight years older than me but he was always my New Mexican elder. Finally I include the poem I wrote after his death: Keith.

I’ve had this fragment of a poem on my study wall, now almost unreadable from paper disintegration, the last three lines central in many ways:

. . .

“& all the time,

Nuestro Senor,

there was this song

all about me

it had only to open

my mouth to sing.”

                                    Keith Wilson

And from last line of “New Mexico: Paso Por Aqui”

            “All men are visitors here.”

Lion’s Gate, Selected Poems 1963-1986, Keith Wilson, 1986,
86 pages. Cinco Puntos Press, El Paso: here is the back cover of the book followed by my youthful review.

Keith Wilson: New Mexico's Leading Poet 1988

Lion’s Gate, Selected Poems 1963-1986, Keith Wilson, 1986, 86 pages, Cinco Puntos Press, El Paso.

This review first appeared in Southwstern Discoveries, June-August 1988, Todd G. Dickson, editor, Albuquerque, NM, in Larry Goodell’s column Backfire.

Lion's Gate roars in the face of the Yuppie invasion of New Mexico as the Peugeots and Saabs pull up to the Post Office and people lock their cars there for the first time in history. The wind hits the coiffures and business suits and that, simply, in Spring, is New Mexico reclaiming its history. The wind hits hard: death, the odd, the tough, the ghosts, the desert is hard.

These are "stories." Call them "poems" if you like. Stories make up the history of this man's art which is poetry. You can theorize poetry to death, break it up into compartments and whisk it away. Or make an icon of it and install it in the University to assure you and your buddies of a job. You can be a non-language poet, a langoiterage poet, a New American Regionalist poet: all these things are a crock, because anything with strength and individuality transcends borders, definitions, crocks.

Lion's Gate is real, real-ler than a dozen Milagro Beanfield Wars in substance and song and authenticity. Would that Keith Wilson could be touted and read as much, but not adored beyond reason and eaten up in the American Video Machine.

A poem is an utterance of a new-old: the language older, the voice of the poet the newer. And to read Lion's Gate from cover to cover is hearing a man revealed. There's the mother, the father, the relatives. “The Arrival of My Mother" is the archetypal Western Expansion poem to me. And there is in Wilson the place in a way that stomps through Western reruns and strangles everything to get to the source: that is, the immaterial, the second rate, the bullshit falls off like dross: the Western in original dressing is revealed.

There's an encounter with deja vu, more than that, reincarnation actuallized as we travel instantly back in “The Minaret At Constanta" to a lion's gate in Rumania– the Western Expansion retraced through the intense darkness and voice of the Poet Deluxe.

There is the reinvigorated power of the revealed poet. Layers come off and I don't mean clothes, the history sings through verse, through the energy that mouths sing and have sung, told, laid down and storyized, where all is never all told: gaps create the poem’s imagination, the reader/listener is vitalized in reenacting the real poet, as Keith Wilson is.

Among the many works as "Midwatch," “Seacaptain,” and "Chantey," there are perhaps the best Korean War poems that have come to light: the section from Graves Registry.They make you think of Wilfred Owen’s First World War atrocities, and Viet Nam revealed by Larry Rottman in Winning Hearts and Minds, and the many that have followed him. But the sea and war travel return to "know that my desert is a condition of soul / not topography. It is where one wrestles with devils / and knows they are oneself."

                                                            – from "Chantey”

larry goodell / placitas, new mexico

In 1988 I added this to “Teachers,” a series of short poems

Keith Wilson–

he was the old voice

the bear voice in newest everyday now,

he taught me to bear with it and it

will tell the story.

Note:  you can see all of these here: Portraits & Teachers


Graves Registry, Keith Wilson. Clark City Press
Post Office Box 1358, Livingston, Montana 59047, cloth $23.95, paper $13.95, 1992.

This review appeared in Blue Mesa Review, Number Five, Spring 1993, University of New Mexico.

            This collection, a Keith Wilson magnum opus, brings together what Grove Press did in 1969 (Graves Registry and Other Poems) and what Sumac Press did in 1972 (Midwatch), and adds about 50 pieces to make up a handsome 216 page edition from Clark City Press in Montana. Things have been clarified: poems that were just numbered before are now entitled, there are certain additions and restorations, but the major parts have remained as Keith Wilson wrote them, in high heat. You have the obvious proportions of an epic on war, a book poem that allows the poet to play out the human species' obsession with war. You could say it's Keith Wilson's obsession, but when you reach the end and pass through "the battlefields of galaxies" you realize the truth of his hammering and the shield of this book becomes timeless, Homeric, and present. Look at what's happening, now, 1993: war is part of us.

            Graves Registry is a poem. (The cover of this beautiful publication erringly refers to the work as "poems.") The most graphic parts come at the very beginning in "Korea-Japan, 1950-53," and echo the much earlier poet Wilfred Owen in their depictions of death. Subsequent sections are like shock waves recalling those things experienced in action. The Young Lieutenant seems to be the poet's persona, antipathetic to the Sea Captain, who figures strongly as the poem progresses.

            I think of Dante's Inferno, but more of the conversations through space of Milton's Paradise Lost. I think of Wilfred Owen, and especially Benjamin Britten's War Requiem: I can hear it backing Owen's genius depiction of death & that lie "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori." These are evoked in me, reading Graves Registry. But mostly, I think of the great Charles Olson's Maximus Poems. For instance here is the beginning of Olson's "Maximus, to Himself,"

            I have had to learn the simplest things

            last. Which made for difficulties.

            Even at sea I was slow, to get the hand out, or to cross

            a wet deck.

                                    The sea was not, finally, my trade.

            But even my trade, at it, I stood estranged

            from that which was most familiar.

            Here is a piece from "A Masque for the Warriors, Home," the last part of Wilson's Graves Registry.

Antistrophe

All the voices spin down, lost

beyond whatever recall the memories

of lives lived and died, held briefly

to glints of moonlight, crowns that crumble.

There is left the counting of graves.

The slash of swordblade an epitaph

shudder of cannon in circling echoes

the bones rot within the ring,

boys’ faces kiss shadow girls

rings rings around Saturn or Mars

            Graves Registry is a grandiose work, unnerving, troubling, obsessive, powerful, relentless, visionary, comprehensive, bold and musical. It is an immense and tragic poem that both includes and transcends boundaries of space and time. It ultimately succeeds, and what a pleasure that New Mexico's greatest poet has not only received the Governor's Award for excellence in the arts, but now has this important work at last available from Clark City Press in Montana. What I and many others regret is that our own University of New Mexico Press stubbornly refuses to publish the rich store of New Mexico poets. What a miss! Keith Wilson is from Fort Sumner and is a resident of Las Cruces where he has taught and worked for years. His works should be fully available and in print, since this poet is a living treasure of our state and our country.

larry goodell

placitas, new mexico

From my notebook . . . in 2000 . . .

No poet writes with such gristle & grace as Keith Wilson who in Bosque Redondo excites again the pleasure of what it’s like to be a true New Mexican, a voice of this hard land that sings from the depths as well as the shallows. No poet so truthfully evokes the real world that includes the ancients in the gritty day-to-day living in our own home state.

Keith

                                                                                                

Who more than you opens doors to where we live?

and we live here whether Las Cruces, Albuquerque

                        Santa Fe Taos Roswell Fort Sumner,

                                    and where in this so-called Southwest,

who more than you breathes the past with the present?

Who tells the story more than you and

                        punctuates it with a laugh

  or brings the mystery out in the open

  to be pondered and wondered at?

where the multifaceted multi-ethnic trans-animal

            trans-person melt into the specifics

                        of the story of each act

            which is the reality of living here you get at

and release to us to see what is right before our eyes.

Your voice excites the present with place, places

            faces animal and plant and dry presence,

  story after story that comes up out of the arroyos

  and brings the past with it, the ancients

            the voices breaking out of caves

                        or from their graves

to face us in your family land, your love 

of this earth here you articulate father mother

son daughters wife friends strangers

to introduce us, amused, carried on in words

            your voice brings me face to face

                        with where I live.

for Keith Wilson 1927-2009

/25Mar from Foxhole Prayers, poems 2009.

Shaman of the Desert is available in hardback, $40, and in paper, $30. Add $5 postage.
Query Heloise Wilson kewilson@zianet.com or email me.   larrygood@comcast.net

Address for Wilson: 1500 South Locust, Las Cruces, NM 88001

larry goodell

placitas, new mexico

8Feb2012 . . . happy Valentine's day to all . . . 

photograph of Heloise and Keith Wilson by Margaret Randall

Here is Drum Hadley's Introduction (immediately preceding his poem) to Shaman of the Desert.

Drum Hadley

AS I have mentioned, this book is available in hardback, $40, and in paper, $30. Add $5 postage. 

Query Heloise Wilson kewilson@zianet.com or email me.   larrygood@comcast.net  

Address: Wilson, 1500 South Locust, Las Cruces, NM 88001

. . . . . .paso por aqui . . . . . .