Poem: Cibola (excerpt) - researching and writing an epic poem

[dave_bonta]

In their kivas at Shiwanna
the medicine priests preserve
their most arcane chants
in a foreign language, songs
attributed to the ancient Founder
of the healing arts: a gambler,
a vagabond chased from town to town
by stone-throwing children,
disappearing at last into the invisible
realm of the spirit animals
in the mountains to the east:
Shipapulima, city of mists.

And the friar Marcos – by all accounts
a man with a wretched ear –
commissioned to search out
the Seven Cities, hears
in answer to his obsessive query
as he forges northeastward from
the Gulf of California: Cí­bola.
A place of great riches, a fabled city
somehow linked to sevenfold
Shiwanna, itself
a site of pilgrimage for Indians
many leagues to the south,
who join his mission in droves:
the act of traversing the land
helps keep it young.

Toss cornmeal out before you,
straight, like every holy intention.
Smoke tobacco so prayers will have
their own road. Follow the sacred
transect running north.

Power is like water:
it flows where you want
only if you make a proper channel.
It has its own ideas.
Plant your prayer sticks
wherever you want it to slow,
wherever you want its fertile blessings
to sink into the parched earth.

--from the (probably much too long) "Beginnings" section of Cibola

In the summer of 2001, my brother Mark -- a cultural geographer and Latin Americanist -- and his family were staying with me for a couple weeks, and one day I happened to read a photocopied paper he had lying on a pile of materials for one of his classes: "The Cross and the Gourd: The Appropriation of Ritual Signs in the Relaciones of Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca and Fray Marcos de Niza," by Maureen Ahern. Cultural contact had always fascinated me, and I was aware of the storyline here because I'd read Cabeza de Vaca's astonishing tale in translation, and because, years earlier, I'd read a novel for young adults focused on Cabeza de Vaca's African companion Esteban, who subsequently was chosen to scout out a route from Mexico City to the fabled city, or seven cities, of Cibola somewhere in what is now northern Arizona in 1539, as a guide to a French friar named (in Spanish) Marcos de Niza. Marcos returned alone a year later, saying that they had found Cibola, and that it was a city of gold, but that the Cibolans had killed Esteban and everyone in his advance entourage. Somehow, reading this academic paper with its focus on the symbolism of the medicine gourds and the cross, I was struck anew by the strangeness of the story, and focused for the first time on the fact that Cibola, whatever else it might have been, is now what we call Zuni, whose people have been described by more than one anthopologist as relatively peaceful. Why did they kill Esteban? Why was Marcos' account so at odds with what Coronado discovered a year later? How in the heck did three Europeans and an African end up as practicing medicine men -- faith healers -- in the first place?

The more I delved into the subject, the more questions arose. Fortunately, Zuni has been intensively studied by anthropologists for well over a century. Some of the other peoples Esteban and company came into contact with, including the Yaqui, who joined his entourage in droves, have also been pretty well studied. His and Marcos' probable route, as reconstructed by a revisionist historian named Daniel Reff, went right through the heart of what is now Tohono O'odham (Papago) country, and was then probably an offshoot of the powerful Hohokam civilization centered in what is now Phoenix. The Tohono and Akimel O'odham have produced an extraordinarily rich oral literature, first translated by Ruth Benedict. Both the Yaqui and O'odham were basically in charge of their own Christianization, which resulted in some fascinating syncretistic beliefs. In pre-modern O'odham belief, a fully native Christ-like figure is killed by an evil sorceror and comes back to life -- it was hard not to imagine a distant echo of Esteban's death at the hands of the Zuni priests.

In general, that part of the U.S. has been fairly intensively written about by archaeologists, anthropologists and naturalists. Talk about an embarassment of riches! And as I'd discovered in college, when I spent a year and a half abroad in the Far East, immersion in the literature and beliefs of deeply foreign cultures can be very stimulating. Fortunately, I live less than 30 miles from Penn State, so had access to a major research library with open stacks and borrowing privileges for any resident of the state. What books and journals they didn't have in their own collection I could get through interlibrary loan or in electronic form, though relatively little was available in that format then. Now, I could do most of that research from home using my Dad's emeritus faculty account. The open web probably also has some of the older texts, especially via Google Books.

I spent a year and a half researching and writing what became a book-length poem, which was probably not enough time. I don't feel I fully mastered the subject, most of all because my research should have included a lengthy reconnaissance of the terrain crossed by Esteban and Marcos. The trouble was that the excitement of everything I was discovering became too great to bear, especially some of the connections I was making -- speculative conclusions that wouldn't pass muster in a scientific paper without corroborating evidence, but were O.K. for a partly fictionalized poem, I thought. The section above, for example, includes a couple such "discoveries," including one I'm kind of proud of: the association between Zuni prayer sticks and the sticks used in what are called check dams, an important innovation in dry lands agriculture which slowed the flow of flash floods over desert washes, making the water drop its fertile silt. Drawing a connection between spiritual power and water seemed like a solid insight. Let me just paste in the notes for this section, which I wrote when I blogged the epic in 2005 on a now-defunct Blogspot site:

chants in a foreign language: Keresan, the language spoken by Zuni’s nearest neighbors to the east, in Acoma and Luguna Pueblos. The Gambler story seems to originate there, as well, and some historical anthropologists see it as a mythologized account of the rise and fall of the Anasazi culture centered in Chaco Canyon, not far to the northeast of Zuni.

mountains to the east: The Sandia mountains, a low, southern extension of the Sangre de Christos, where members of medicine societies are reincarnated as animals of the same species as the tutelary spirit of their society. This is one of several afterlife destinations of Zunis, reflecting perhaps their tribe’s origin as a melting pot of several different cultures. Rain Priests and Bow Priests are reborn as anthropomorphic spirits in the sacred lake of the ancestors, to the west.

Cí­bola: The word first appears in Marcos’ account of his and Esteban’s 1539 journey, and in the writings of contemporaries after Marcos’ return to Mexico City. The suggestion that it might derive from Shipapu(lima), instead of – or in confusion with – Shiwanna, is entirely my own guess. Subsequent explorers, beginning with the conquistator Coronado the following year, applied the name Cí­bola to the Zuni confederation, whether or not that was in fact what Marcos thought he “discovered.”

plant your prayer sticks: The homology between prayer sticks (basically, effigies for the petitioner) and the sticks used to channel flash floods in desert farming is, again, something I came up with on my own. I could be mistaken.

*

At this point, one problem with historical epics about deeply unfamiliar cultures should be obvious: It's kind of hard to know how much to tell the reader, and whether to tell it in the poem or in notes. As I mentioned at the outset, I do think the beginning section is too prolix, and if I ever revise the poem for real publication, I'll probably axe most of it except for the invocation. (Every epic should have an invocation. I'm kind of old-fashioned that way.) I might also move the murder of Esteban to the beginning, both to get it out of the way and to make the point that it is, in part, a murder mystery, though the mystery isn't who did it, but why.

By the way, there are, I think, more interesting passages than the one I chose for this post! You can browse the whole thing at its present location at Via Negativa.

I should add that the book-length narrative poem, while deeply unfashionable these days, does still have some skilled practitioners. I'm particularly fond of George Keithley (The Donner Party and The Starry Messenger, about Galileo), Campbell McGrath (Shannon: a poem of the Lewis and Clark Expedition), and W.S. Merwin (The Folding Cliffs).

Comments

!

[(Anonymous)]

You never cease to surprise me Dave. I never know what you'll write about next.

[lnhammer]

Word, about how much to inclue the reader. The same is true of fantasy epics. (Mythology, you can assume a basic cultural familiarity with the material -- fantasy, you're making it all up.)

Add Seth's The Golden Gate and Burgess's Byrne to that list of good recent ones.

---L.

[dave_bonta]

One sci-fi epic that made a big impression on me was Aniara, by the Swedish poet Harry Martinson. Man, was that depressing, though! Kind of the mirror image of the futurist epic Altazor by Vicente Huidobro, the great Chilean modernist poet, which expressed a much more positive vision of exploring the cosmos. (I don't think either of those works required much research to write, but they are certainly important if you want to understand how 20th-century poets viewed science and technology.)

[lnhammer]

I assume you've read Frederic Turner's The New World and Genesis? The latter especially (an epic about the terraforming of Mars) must have taken a fair load of research.

---L.

[dave_bonta]

No, I haven't! Thanks for the recommendation.

[dave_bonta]

By the way, I should tell you I've really been enjoying your Kokinshu translations -- I added your journal feed to my Google reader subscriptions several weeks ago. (I actually studied classical Japanese a bit in college, though I've forgotten most of it now.)

[lnhammer]

Ah -- thankee. It has been a fun project so far, and it's nice to hear others enjoy it as well.

---L.

[(Anonymous)]

Very cool post. My thesis screenplay in grad school was about the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. I remember that excitement you describe doing the research and discovering this completely alien world and wanting to write immediately, ready or not. Sometimes I fantasize about using the script as a jumping off point for an epic poem.

[(Anonymous)]

--James b

[dave_bonta]

Cool! The Pueblo Revolt was obviously a key event, not only because it helped save the pueblo cultures from complete obliteration (like what happened to the Jumano and the Opata), but because I think it had a huge impact on pueblo and Navajo religion. Several anthropologists I read speculated about that. I guess I'd feel a little weird about taking on such a purely Indian topic, though, as an Anglo poet. Someone like Simon Ortiz, the Acoma poet, should write it.

[dave_bonta]

But that's probably too narrow-minded a way of looking at it. I'm sure the experiences of the missionaries and Spanish settlers would make interesting poetry too, especially interwoven with the secretely unfolding plans for the revolt (what was the name of the charismatic vagabond who organized the whole thing?)...

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, that's how I felt too and so centered the story on a fictional Spanish missionary with the revolt unfolding around him. The "charismatic vagabond" was Pope (with an accent mark on the e) sometimes written as Pohe or Po'pay. Man, I haven't thought about this in 15 years. I should dig all that stuff out some time.

Wow!

[ysabetwordsmith]

This is really cool. I like Native American poetry, and poetry about that branch of history.

I have not written a book-length poem in one piece, but I have written a lot of long poems. I also have poetic series, some of which are starting to add up to book length now. In my pricing for the Poetry Fishbowl, I start epics at 61 lines, charging $.50/line as a standard rate.

The amount of research I do varies. Some series are set in totally different worlds, requiring little or no serious research. Others are set in analogs of this world -- I have historic fantasy versions of Italy, Asia, and now Sweden -- which requires more attention to detail and historic accuracy.

Then there is The Steamsmith series, which is set in a version of Victorian England ... but with science based on alchemy rather than atomic physics. Same scientific principles apply but most of the answers to the questions are different. I have done a lot of research into history and the sciences for this. I finally wound up doubling the price when I realized that these poems were taking me twice as long as usual to write, compared to other poems, just because they required that much research.

Often when I post a poem that has research behind it, I'll include links to some of my references. My readers really enjoy that. They'll go out and look at the linked materials, sometimes come back with further discussions on the subject area. So part of researching epics involves understanding your audience's level of knowledge and what will intrigue them. Then you can include some really fun little eastereggs.