Seeing the magnificent Christine Nolan’s The Odyssey at the local movie theater got me to thinking about the challenge of actually writing an epic poem. I’ve written two of them. The first was An American Spirit, An American Epic followed decades later by The Weirding Storm, A Dragon Epic.
The Odyssey, written by the blind Greek poet Homer, is defined as a primary epic, originally performed orally rather than written on paper. It has meter and rhyme and all the other arsenal of poetic devices useful to help the poet remember the lines as he works a tale that, when printed, will require hundreds of pages.
Both of the epics I wrote and published were secondary epics, defined by C.S. Lewis in his essay, “A Preface to Paradise Lost”, as a poem created by sophisticated, individual poets who know the existing epic tradition and deliberately build upon it. John Milton’s Paradise Lost and modern epics like Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Odyssey, A Modern Sequel are secondary epics, epics that use all the techniques used by the primary epic poets like Homer or the unknown writer of Beowulf but are written to be read rather than orally recited. Although any true epic is really written with the techniques that make it as powerful when listened to as it is as a book to be read.
In my new book, Beginnings, https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HBF59DWK, I describe my first effort to write An American Spirit. At the time I was struggling, having just then lost a position with the newly created Menominee Indian School District that I had believed was promised to me if I resigned my administrative/teaching position at the Menominee Community School, and was in despair. Inside that despair, I was thinking that I was a poet, so I had to make an extraordinary effort to prove that by writing an extraordinary poem, a formal epic like The Odyssey.
The effort was still born. Naively, I didn’t think an formal American epic following all the epic traditions had ever been written, and I’d read most of the well-known epics written by poets or anonymous poets from around the world by then. Surely if I could write an epic, I could make all my dreams of becoming a famous poet come true!
But writing any epic is not a task anyone should take expecting to produce a masterpiece in a month of hard work. I did write a start to what became An American Spirit, but the design I came up with in my head as I started trying on a project that would take years or work to complete was exceptionally complex. I wanted to write the epic as a series of self-contained individual narrative poems that told multiple stories about multiple characters that slowly came together into a massive story that would explore the essence of the American spirit in all its complexity and diversity.
I did, as time went on, include all the elements of found in The Odyssey, an “Invocation to the Epic Muse, a Nekyia, the ritual journey to the land of death, supernatural elements drawn from Menominee spirituality and Celtic lore, and a hero with human flaws (perhaps more than one hero with human flaws), all told in a tale that builds and builds to a powerful climax.
I built the epic out of the Novitiate takeover by the Menominee Warrior in 1975, which I have firsthand experience with since I was working at the Community School at the time, the rise of the Posse Comitatus right-wing militia, one of the first of those in the country, in Shawano County during the same period, and the cult that built a compound outside of the town of Shawano during those years. I didn’t know as much about the cult as I did either the Warrior Society or the Posse since Gordon Burr, one of my best friends, a Stockbridge-Munsee member, knew several of the Posse leaders as did Jim Knope, the Shawano Country Sherriff, another man I knew from my Menominee years covered in Beginnings.
When I had completed the first draft of An American Spirit writing in long-hand on yellow legal paper, and my daughter Mary had talked her English professor into reading it during his summer vacation, I got really excited. I had spent a couple of years slowly writing one poem after another after my aborted start, and the Professor told me that it took him awhile to get through the typescript I’d produced on my old Olivetti typewriter, but that it had started haunting his dreams as he was reading it.
Then the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point English department invited Ethel and I over to campus for a reading, and the audience seemed excited, which was followed by an extremely positive review in Hepscat Revenge, a small literary magazine that also published a long passage from the poem. I felt I was really on my way to a poetry career.
By then I was the Planning Director for the Menominee Restoration Committee and was deeply involved in the historical movement to reverse the termination era of Indian history and to plant the roots of the self-determination and government to government relationship between tribes and state and federal government. I was busy, but I was excited by the stir that the epic seemed capable of creating.
I didn’t try to published the epic at that point, however. It still seemed to be too long. Demanding that you maintain pretty strict iambic pentameter, make sure you are using syntax that is never awkward or old-fashioned sounding, and describing events that happened and mixing them with scenes when Sitting Crow, the major hero, is caught inside a dance where death whorls around him with powerful visions, then condensing that so that each passage is not a book onto itself, ain’t easy.
It takes sitting down, rewriting this and rewriting that, eliminating lines, condensing language, and still ensuring the flow of every character ends up as a story that blends into the larger epic story. It is difficult, demanding work that I usually had to do after exhausting days of work or time that spent with my family that they deserved and that I didn’t provide enough of.
By the time I wrote The Weirding Storm, perhaps one of the most successful, at least in the use of language, of any of the 15 books I’ve published so far, I had decided that An American Spirit was just simply too complex, although I still valued what I had written.
Ethel and I were living in Continental Divide, NM, by then, and I was working as the Dean of Instruction (later the Provost) at what has become Navajo Technical University. Ethel, of course, is a better poet than I am and a magic artist, and we had discovered the Zuni Mountain Poets and some of the most exciting poets I have even known. We traveled an hour every week to El Morro in the Zuni Mountains to attend sessions run by Jack North, the best teacher of creative writing I have ever known.
During those meeting, over a span of a couple of years, I read out loud each section of The Weirding Storm after I had drafted it at night (usually late) so that I could take to the next meeting. Then the Zuni poets would discuss the draft as we went roundtable around to let each poet present the poem they had written for that week, discussing the substance of the poem, not the flaws (which is what Jack North insisted on).
Later, after our son passed away from cancer in Poughkeepsie, New York, Ethel and I formed fourwindowspress.com, using wordpress orginally and later printing actual books, where I published each section of the epic over a lot of weeks once a week and attached a oral reading of the work to the post. It was after that John Stevens (the poet John Looker) talked to Deborah Bennison, the owner of Bennison Books in Great Britain, and she decided to publish the epic as a book.
The Weirding Storm is a sweeping, became “a contemporary fantasy epic poem written in the grand oral tradition of ancient classics like Beowulf and The Odyssey. The narrative unfolds in a stark, elemental universe torn by historical conflicts between humans and dragons. Its lyrical verses weave a mythic tale of shifting destinies, where divided dragons wage war against each other, manipulative witches alter the threads of fate, and a malevolent spirit bear hungers to claim a human soul. Amidst this chaos of creation and ruin, a powerful love story ignites, positioning transformational love as the fiercest and most volatile magic of all”, as critics have described it.
The Weirding Storm reads like a novel, and those who have purchased and read it have told me that. That’s one of the reasons I believe that it is one of my successful efforts to create a successful book.
I’ve always wondered why, especially being entralled by Nolan’s masterpiece on the screen, why more readers and critics have not discovered it. The writing process itself was demanding, but I remember the nights and the few weekend days I ended up working on it with a great deal of pleasure. It was not as difficult to put it together into a cohesive work as An American Spirit was. I think, since I’ve produced three novels by that time, The Alkali Cliffs, Juniper’s Dragon, and Salt Bear, drafted after I’d mastered the art of putting together an engrossing tale.
The key to the epic as a poetry form is not only the language, though. It is also that the poet is exploring massive themes. In The Odyssey, the driving force of survival, the power of home, and the sacredness of hospitality (xenia); in Paradise Lost, the high cost of disobedience to God and the path to redemption, are among the massive themes woven through the stories.
In The Weirding Storm, love and destruction loom as it treats love not just as an emotion, but as a dangerous, volatile form of magic capable of altering fates, blurring the boundaries of mortal existence, and countering total annihilation as dragons face extinction and humans struggle to become human.
In An American Spirit, the clash of cultural identities and ideologies as well as the mythical synchonocity of Menominee myth and spirituality are put side by side with Christian mythology in an exploration of the essence of spiritual identity and the mean of being an American.
Writing epic poetry is an epic task.
fourwindowspress 