REVIEWS : : Beaver's Fire
Western American Literature
Volume 53, Number 2, Summer 2018, pp. 271-274
By Eleanor Berry (Reprinted by permission of the author)
Volume 53, Number 2, Summer 2018, pp. 271-274
By Eleanor Berry (Reprinted by permission of the author)
George Venn, Beaver’s Fire: A Regional Portfolio (1970-2010), La Grande, OR: Redbat Books, 2016. 464 pp. Paper $30.00.
This book is not the usual collection of a literary scholar’s papers, unillustrated essays all about the same length and written for essentially the same academic audience, arranged by subject, updated and somewhat reworked for the new context. Instead, it is a compilation of documents, illustrated texts of widely varying lengths and types, arranged in reverse chronological order, reprinted as previously published, each prefaced by an account of its composition, prior presentation, and reception. It is a big book—in format, in length, and in range.
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An implicit suggestion of how to approach this large and diverse array is given by the first piece—the one from which the book takes its title and the only one not in its place by reverse chronological order. Presented in 2002 as a speech upon acceptance of a Distinguished Faculty Teaching Award from Eastern Oregon University, “Beaver (Tàxcpol) and the Grande Ronde River (Welíwe)” tells the Nez Perce story of how Beaver stole fire from the Pine Trees. The implication of this tale in its placement is that the texts that follow are so many live coals gathered and shared to kindle intellectual fires. It is an apt metaphor.
The “coals” take many forms. There are book reviews, biographical sketches, critical essays, addresses, and transcripts of interviews and symposia. There is even an annotated reading list and, as the penultimate selection, a piece of historical fiction. In these various texts, Venn is often more curator than author. His role has been to seize the live coals—to edit rough transcripts, assert their importance, find publishers for them. Prime instances of this are the World War II photographs and letters of Fred Hill and the 1877 Nez Perce War diary of C.E.S. Wood.
These two instances of recovery reflect both the range of Venn’s interests and the extent to which they are connected to place, especially to the northeast corner of Oregon, where he has lived since coming to teach at Eastern Oregon University in 1970. Fred Hill is a photographer and fellow resident of La Grande, Oregon, now in his mid-nineties, whom Venn met during research on a short WPA stint in La Grande by Minor White, and whose wartime photographic work and personal story he undertook to make known by collaborating with Hill on the book Darkroom Soldier. In the case of the famous literary and public figure C.E.S. Wood, it was controversy over the authenticity of the famous “Surrender Speech” of Nez Perce Chief Joseph, for which Wood’s somewhat varying texts have been the source, that spurred Venn into research on this early soldier-phase of Wood’s career.
Letters and diaries are not the only words of others that share space with Venn’s in Beaver’s Fire. Interviewees—Ursula LeGuin, Carolyn Kizer, and Richard Hugo—have their spirited say, responding to questions not from Venn but from, respectively, a group, Tim Barnes, and Ronald H. Bayes. In the transcript of a 1980 conference on “Northwest Poetry and the Land,” one hears the articulate, mature voices of Hugo, Madeline DeFrees, and William Stafford. There, strikingly, one also hears the young Venn, struggling to formulate his vision of the importance of actual place against Stafford’s forceful statement of the power of the imagination to range and its susceptibility to influences from elsewhere and from other elements besides landscape.
In later, composed pieces of his own, Venn would eloquently convey what that vision implied for any artist living and working in a place remote from cultural capitals and, more specifically, for Oregon-based authors. In the final passage of the 1987 “meditative essay collage” (265) “Marking the Magic Circle,” which became the title piece of a collection that garnered an Oregon Book Award, Venn resonantly declares,
This book is not the usual collection of a literary scholar’s papers, unillustrated essays all about the same length and written for essentially the same academic audience, arranged by subject, updated and somewhat reworked for the new context. Instead, it is a compilation of documents, illustrated texts of widely varying lengths and types, arranged in reverse chronological order, reprinted as previously published, each prefaced by an account of its composition, prior presentation, and reception. It is a big book—in format, in length, and in range.
***
An implicit suggestion of how to approach this large and diverse array is given by the first piece—the one from which the book takes its title and the only one not in its place by reverse chronological order. Presented in 2002 as a speech upon acceptance of a Distinguished Faculty Teaching Award from Eastern Oregon University, “Beaver (Tàxcpol) and the Grande Ronde River (Welíwe)” tells the Nez Perce story of how Beaver stole fire from the Pine Trees. The implication of this tale in its placement is that the texts that follow are so many live coals gathered and shared to kindle intellectual fires. It is an apt metaphor.
The “coals” take many forms. There are book reviews, biographical sketches, critical essays, addresses, and transcripts of interviews and symposia. There is even an annotated reading list and, as the penultimate selection, a piece of historical fiction. In these various texts, Venn is often more curator than author. His role has been to seize the live coals—to edit rough transcripts, assert their importance, find publishers for them. Prime instances of this are the World War II photographs and letters of Fred Hill and the 1877 Nez Perce War diary of C.E.S. Wood.
These two instances of recovery reflect both the range of Venn’s interests and the extent to which they are connected to place, especially to the northeast corner of Oregon, where he has lived since coming to teach at Eastern Oregon University in 1970. Fred Hill is a photographer and fellow resident of La Grande, Oregon, now in his mid-nineties, whom Venn met during research on a short WPA stint in La Grande by Minor White, and whose wartime photographic work and personal story he undertook to make known by collaborating with Hill on the book Darkroom Soldier. In the case of the famous literary and public figure C.E.S. Wood, it was controversy over the authenticity of the famous “Surrender Speech” of Nez Perce Chief Joseph, for which Wood’s somewhat varying texts have been the source, that spurred Venn into research on this early soldier-phase of Wood’s career.
Letters and diaries are not the only words of others that share space with Venn’s in Beaver’s Fire. Interviewees—Ursula LeGuin, Carolyn Kizer, and Richard Hugo—have their spirited say, responding to questions not from Venn but from, respectively, a group, Tim Barnes, and Ronald H. Bayes. In the transcript of a 1980 conference on “Northwest Poetry and the Land,” one hears the articulate, mature voices of Hugo, Madeline DeFrees, and William Stafford. There, strikingly, one also hears the young Venn, struggling to formulate his vision of the importance of actual place against Stafford’s forceful statement of the power of the imagination to range and its susceptibility to influences from elsewhere and from other elements besides landscape.
In later, composed pieces of his own, Venn would eloquently convey what that vision implied for any artist living and working in a place remote from cultural capitals and, more specifically, for Oregon-based authors. In the final passage of the 1987 “meditative essay collage” (265) “Marking the Magic Circle,” which became the title piece of a collection that garnered an Oregon Book Award, Venn resonantly declares,
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An artist who chooses not to live in political or population centers, who chooses not to become an alien to the oldest and most immediate sources of human nurture, who chooses not to become a victim of nationalism—such an artist must assert the region as microcosm—this locust flowering, that hive by the Columbia—and where do you live? (284)
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In the conclusion to a 1995 keynote address to a professional workshop, “Teaching The Oregon Literature Series,” Venn declares the purpose of those six anthologies, each devoted to a particular genre of Oregon literature, for which he had served as General Editor: “They intend to show that Oregon is a complex, beautiful, and authentic place where anyone can leave the trivial surface of stereotype and cliché, achieve depth and complexity, embrace contraries, discover universality in the particular” (195).
In the reviews and commentaries in Beaver’s Fire, literary works and authors that bear out this vision are treated with particular sympathy, insight, and respect. Notable among these are the review of John Haislip’s place-based sequence of poems and prose pieces, Seal Rock, and the tribute to Wallace Stegner.
Underlying this vision is an assumption only rarely and obscurely articulated in Venn’s writings gathered here. It is perhaps most explicit in a subordinate clause near the end of a 1976 essay, “The Search for Sacred Space in American Literature”: “…since literature is, in many ways, a function of space.” For Venn, this assumption has proved immensely productive. It is a thread he has followed in all the diversity of his work as literary scholar, historian, and poet.
In the reviews and commentaries in Beaver’s Fire, literary works and authors that bear out this vision are treated with particular sympathy, insight, and respect. Notable among these are the review of John Haislip’s place-based sequence of poems and prose pieces, Seal Rock, and the tribute to Wallace Stegner.
Underlying this vision is an assumption only rarely and obscurely articulated in Venn’s writings gathered here. It is perhaps most explicit in a subordinate clause near the end of a 1976 essay, “The Search for Sacred Space in American Literature”: “…since literature is, in many ways, a function of space.” For Venn, this assumption has proved immensely productive. It is a thread he has followed in all the diversity of his work as literary scholar, historian, and poet.
Sightings:
Beaver’s Fire: A Regional Portfolio (1970-2010). By George Venn. La Grande, OR: redbat books, 2016.
By Tim Barnes
In the myth of Beaver’s fire, as George Venn tells it, Beaver steals fire from the pine trees and brings it to the other trees—willow, birch, cottonwood. A cedar on a ridge above the confluence of the Grand Ronde and the Snake tells the Ni-Mi-Pu, the Nez Perce, that that’s where Beaver got away, “the wise one who gave our people fire.” Venn tells this story at the beginning of his book to capture what his years of teaching and writing have meant to him. It is a Prometheus story with the gods as pine trees and the fire as literature. He places his retelling of the myth in the context of the quest, with a departure, initiation, and return with a gift that “makes life accessible and possible in the world of suffering people and animals” and so “the wise one becomes the vehicle of illumination.”
Beaver’s Fire, which collects an impressive variety of work that Venn has done over forty years—literary biographies, interviews, reviews, poems, translations, editing, and essays (personal, cultural, historical)—is a vehicle of illumination. Working backwards in time from 2010 to 1970, this collection/anthology/portfolio is a history of Northwest literature, based on the premise of the region as microcosm rather than province. To borrow a phrase from Venn, Beaver’s Fire marks a magic circle. Among the writers, artists, and historical figures encircled are Ellen Waterston, Fred Hill, Minor White, Charles Erskine Scott Wood, Wallace Stegner, Ursula Le Guin, Carolyn Kizer, Richard Hugo, Nard Jones, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, John Haislip, Lisa Steinman, Kim Stafford, Chief Joseph, Madeline DeFrees, John Witte, Theodore Roethke, Bernard Malamud, Leslie Fiedler, Gary Snyder, Robinson Jeffers, Kenneth O. Hanson, Vi Gale, and William Stafford. We find here in Venn’s story of carrying the fire some penetrating glances into William Stafford doing the same. There are twenty-six pieces in the book and seven of them touch on Stafford, two focusing mainly on him, a review of Down in My Heart and “William Stafford in Northwest Literature,” an essay first published in Oregon English in 1997. George Venn is one of our most distinguished and learned writers, literary scholars, thinkers, and cultural documentarians. He is a gifted poet, essayist, editor, historian, and teacher and if you don’t believe me, his praises go on for four pages at the beginning of the book, including some from 1976 in which Stafford calls Venn’s writing “direct, clear, and cogent” and characterizes him as “a self-motivated scholar with great ability and authority.” Stafford got that right, as the reader will discover.
Beaver’s Fire is an important, if not essential, contribution to Northwest literary and cultural history. It is also important and vital in understanding William Stafford’s work and his place in Northwest literature. I begin with the two pieces that focus primarily on Stafford. In 1998 Oregon State University published a reprint of Down in My Heart, Stafford’s 1947 memoir of his CO experience during World War II, now subtitled, Peace Witness in War Time. In this review, first published in the Oregon Historical Quarterly, Venn focuses on the difference between George, a central character who articulates a number of pacifist and anarchist positions, and the more subdued, observant narrator, unnamed but clearly the writer:
while the narrator’s patience, acceptance, imagination, and passivity have saved him, George has been destroyed by his intelligence, intolerance, conviction, aggression, passion to act. He becomes the narrator’s foil—the pacifist turned rebel, criminal, anarchist.
At the end of Down in My Heart, things do not look good for George. The last the narrator has heard is that George is in solitary, two weeks into a hunger strike, about to be force fed. Venn writes, quoting from Down in My Heart, that George “has been trapped by ‘exhilarations of the outlaw, his personal freedom, and his constant living with rebellion.’” Though the textual evidence for this is inconclusive, Venn writes that “George dies abstracted, isolated, self-destroyed….” I feel somehow a certain connection here with Stafford’s doubts about that noisy and sometimes short-lived bunch, the Beats. In an interview printed in The World’s Hieroglyphic Beauty, he tells Peter Stitt, “I felt the same unrest as those people [the Beats] but preferred different tactics.” I’m reminded of a line from his poem, “Influential Writers,” “Some of them write too loud.” I once asked him if he had had ever run into Neal Cassady; he hadn’t.
There’s another aspect to this that says something about Stafford as an artist, a fictioneer. Memoirs and novels intersect and one of those places is in condensation of conflict and the clarification of it with dramatic consequences. Down in My Heart is a lyrical book and Stafford wrote it during difficult times. It turns out, interestingly enough, that Chuck Worley, the person George is based on, died just last May at the age of ninety-eight. Worley’s book, Out of Bounds: Poems and Letters from Prison by a Conscientious Objector to the Good War, tells of the two years he spent in jail after he walked out of alternative service (See p. 18). It looked grim for Worley when Stafford wrote Down in My Heart, which Worley mentions in his book, telling his wife:
Bill wrote recently. He has just finished writing a book about his CO experiences as his Masters Degree project. I hope he gets it published—it’s probably very cleverly written.
Part of that cleverness may have been Stafford’s dramatization of George’s situation. Venn’s reading of it as a death accentuates Stafford’s concern for Worley’s situation as well as his belief that pacifism was a certain kind of rebellion, not a general one.
There is, clearly, a modestly didactic element to Down in My Heart and Venn finds it when he compares the book to The Journal of John Woolman (1774):
For ten chapters the reader learns how—among four years of other events—one man is saved and another lost—spiritual biography framed by implicit didactic intent in the tradition of Woolman and Aldridge.
Woolman is thought of as a gentle Quaker who became an American saint. He argued for abolition and people having a fair share of the commonwealth.
Stafford took Woolman’s journal with him to the CO camps. In You Must Revise Your Life, he remembers that “within two weeks” after Pearl Harbor, “carrying a copy of The Journal of John Woolman given me by my landlady, I was on my way to a camp for conscientious objectors in Arkansas.” When asked about this in 1991 by Friends Journal, perhaps knowing his audience, he said, “My teacher gave me The Journal of John Woolman and when I read it, I saw.”
Now I don’t want to make too much of this but Woolman was connected, as were Quakers, to Quietism, which has heretical associations, being granted that status in 1687 by Pope Innocent XI, probably because it was closer to contemplation than meditation, too undirected and free to go where it would. George Fox, founder of the Religious Society of Friends, imprisoned five times, also believed that god entered through silence. So did John Woolman, a man of very progressive political beliefs. In the mob scene chapter of Down in My Heart, before the COs are almost lynched, the narrator thinks, “we were in most ways the quiet of the land, and unobserved, we thought.” It’s a phrase he returns to in You Must Revise Your Life:
Imposing myself on language—or on a student, or on the citizens of a country—was not my style. I wanted to disappear as teacher, as writer, as citizen—be “the quiet of the land,” as we used to designate ourselves in CO camps.
Just below this on the page he speaks of his quiet mornings in which, “Something is offering you a guidance available only to those undistracted by anything else.” That’s a Quietist stance to writing, writing as a kind of contemplation. The Quietists believed, according to my Oxford World Encyclopedia that “only in a state of absolute surrender to God was the mind able to receive the saving infusion of grace,”—otherwise known as silence, solitude, quiet, early mornings perhaps.
According to his introduction to “William Stafford in Northwest Literature,” Venn read an early draft of this essay at the meeting of “The Original Stafford Group” that became the Friends of William Stafford. In it he compares Stafford with three other notable writers who came to the Northwest after World War II, the novelist Bernard Malamud (Oregon State University), the poet Theodore Roethke (University of Washington), and the critic Leslie Fiedler (University of Montana). He calls them “ambivalent sojourners” and Stafford “a settler, an insider, a local, an immigrant become native.” (my italics) Malamud and Fiedler eventually returned east and Roethke died in 1965, but Stafford “lived here long enough to make his way through all the psychological phases of immigrant life: initial euphoria, subsequent depression, slow and difficult accommodation, and ultimate acceptance.” This allowed Stafford, in Venn’s judgment, to create the “most inclusive and authentic—poetry we have after World War II.”
In comparing Roethke and Stafford, Venn recalls a 1975 Northwest poetry symposium in which Stafford called Roethke “a great big exotic [who] slowed the Northwest school by being so significant and salient and un-Northwest.” This prompted Richard Hugo, who was in the audience when Stafford said this, to shout, “Thank you, Martin Boorman,” suggesting according to Venn that “Stafford’s denial [of Roethke’s significance for Northwest poetry] was equal to the denials by Hitler’s secretary about Hitler.” Audience members may have been unaware of the allusion and the insult doesn’t seem to have offended Stafford; it does, however, highlight some differences that Stafford had with Hugo and with what is known as Modernism. “Stafford rejected,” Venn observes, “Roethke’s Freudian stereotype of poets as sick people trying to heal themselves.” He refers to an interesting moment in “The Third Time the World Happens: A Dialogue on Writing between Richard Hugo and William Stafford,” published in a 1973 issue of the Northwest Review devoted to Stafford. In it Hugo talks about how poets “play back” their losses and it not being “healthy” but ok because “art isn’t.” Stafford responds that he is “uncomfortable” with that idea because he thinks “art is a healthy process.” This is a key point about Stafford’s approach—a poetic response to the world, to being, is natural, not a tortured reaction to psychic wounds. I am reminded of his response to the question of when he became a poet—most everyone else stopped. This is, as readers probably know, a tenet of the Romantics. Wordsworth wrote in “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” “Trailing clouds of glory do we come…Heaven lies about us in our infancy!” “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist when we grow up,” is an aphorism attributed to Picasso.
“Stafford reminded readers over and over again,” Venn reminds us, that, among other things, “writers should not let modernism—or any other literary precedent—determine what anyone else might want to say.” A modernist perspective holds that human progress is self-evident, reason is superior to inspiration or intuition, nature is separate from culture, and art should be judged by modern criteria. “Theodore Roethke,” Venn writes, “imported literary modernism—emotional volatility, outward aggression and inward division, self dramatization, confession, metrical lyricism” to the Northwest. Stafford, though, was doubtful about taking on the voice of literary modernism, as poets like Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Dylan Thomas, and Anne Sexton, were not. This issue can be connected to the heresy of Quietism. Venn points out that “Stafford’s pedagogy respected the silence at the center of all things, did not intend to dominate, or try to impose a whole universe.” In his introduction to The Darkness Around Us Is Deep, Robert Bly remembers why Stafford was not invited back to the Bread Loaf Writers Conference:
The staff emphasized “finding your voice,” which turned out to be a study of what the poetry establishment wanted at the moment. Every teacher gave one craft lecture. Stafford began, “I want to say that I don’t agree with anything that has been said here this week. You already have a voice and don’t need to find one.”
Bread Loaf was, in a sense, advocating students meditate on finding a voice based on the current style, immediate standards; Stafford seems to be recommending contemplating what the quiet might leave the poet alone with—a good question. “In writing,” Stafford said in one of his aphorisms collected in Sound of the Ax, “the trick is to give yourself good assignments.”
In We Have Never Been Modern, the French philosopher Bruno Latour asks if in questioning modernism, “Will a different democracy become necessary? A democracy extended to things?” Latour asserts that one of modernism’s essential dichotomies is the separation of nonhumans/nature from humans/culture. If Stafford believed that dichotomy, he couldn’t have written, “I could hear the wilderness listen.” Nor could he calmly personify over and over again as he did or write “At the Un-National Monument along the Canadian Border.”
One of the finest and most significant pieces in Beaver’s Fire supports the point just made. In “The Search for Sacred Space in Western American Literature,” Venn discusses the work of a number of writers essential to that notion: Robinson Jeffers, Gary Snyder, Frank Waters, Vi Gale, and Stafford. Venn speaks of Stafford’s “search for sacred relationships with space” in which he is
conscious of the poet’s similarity to the mythopoetic predecessors in the West who not only saw ravens as birds, but who went far beyond the literal in establishing qualitative facts about the human spirit with Raven.
This line of thought or imaginative expansion of connection reminds me that Native Americans often referred to birds as cousins, that totem animals were part of their spiritual tradition, and they told stories about deer woman and the woman who married a bear. Personification creates a connection and the three Stafford poems Venn uses to illustrate Stafford’s “sacralization of space,” “Starting with Little Things,” “Weeds,” and “Bring the North,” all animate the human bond with the nonhuman world; the latter poem, for example, has these lines:
One way to find your place is like
the rain, a million requests
for lodging, one that wins, finds
your cheek: you find your home,
a storm that walks the waves.
The rain “requests” lodging and a storm “walks” the waves. This is a world in which the human and the nonhuman intertwine, live together. This poem, from Someday, Maybe, leads into the poem “Report to Crazy Horse,” which is about one of the “mythopoetic predecessors in the West” who seemed to have felt, as Venn says Stafford does, “a unity with things around him.” This is one of the great satisfactions of reading Stafford’s poetry and a sensibility sorely lacking in important places these days, it would appear.
Venn concludes this 1976 essay, first published in the Portland Review with these words: “If the voices of writers like Jeffers, Stafford, Abbey, Stegner, Snyder, and Waters are heard, their search for sacred space will become the headwaters for a future in both literature and society.” That subordinating conjunction at the beginning of the previous sentence hangs in the air rather resonantly these days, though the beaver’s fire in each of the names mentioned is carried glowing to us in this rather profound and important essay.
I would mention at this point that I was an advisory editor at the Portland Review when “The Search for Sacred Space in Western American Literature” was first published. I was also one of the seven readers who juried the selections for the contents of Beaver’s Fire and have a laudatory but not inaccurate blurb in the front and back matter of the book. An interview I did with Carolyn Kizer, edited by Venn for Oregon East, appears in Beaver’s Fire. And, finally, George and I share an interest in Charles Erskine Scott Wood (1852-1944), a poet, soldier, lawyer, artist and art patron, man of letters, and pacifist, who lived in Portland between 1884 and 1918. I co-wrote a book published by Oregon State University Press in 1997 called Wood Works: The Life and Writings of Charles Erskine Scott Wood. Venn has two pieces on Wood in Beaver’s Fire, “Soldier to Advocate: C.E.S. Wood’s 1877 Legacy” and “Chief Joseph’s ‘Surrender Speech’ as Literary Text.” Both pieces are literary biography of the first order—riveting, insightful, and diligently researched. The latter, an essay on the origins of probably the most famous item of Indian oratory in American history, is ended by Venn with a quote from Stafford: “Poetry is finally subversive.” I will leave the interested reader to discover why Venn chose this ending except to say that CES Wood was the man who put the speech down on paper and became a friend of Chief Joseph’s, sending his eldest son to spend two teenage summers with Joseph at the Nez Perce reservation in Colville, Washington. Wood was one of the very few men to call our wagon’s west romance what it also was, a “vivisection,” an imperialist devastation. It might be worth remembering that the Osama Bin Laden mission was code named Geronimo, the chief of the last free-roaming Native Americans in the United States; the second-to-last were the Nez Perce.
I would also mention another connection between Venn and this editor. I was on the board of the Oregon Council of Teachers of English (the OCTE) when Venn accomplished one of the most difficult, important, and beautiful tasks of editing in Oregon literary history, the six-volume Oregon Literature Series, completed in 1994. FWS board member Jim Scheppke, just appointed the state librarian, sponsored a celebration with Norma Paulus, the Superintendent of Public Instruction, and Governor Barbara Roberts to celebrate the event. I won’t go on about the Series, but it should be on the shelf of anyone interested in Oregon literature and/or Oregon life. I suspect it’s a collector’s item even now.
As Beaver’s Fire comes to a close, and Venn’s literary and professorial career begin, there are two pieces that include Stafford and, interestingly enough, that other pillar of Northwest poetry in the seventies and eighties, Richard Hugo. Venn includes the transcript of a taped interview between Hugo and Ronald Bayes (see issue 19.2, p. 4), then teaching at Eastern Oregon University. In it Hugo says this of Stafford’s creative process: “Stafford works two hours every morning from 4 to 6 a.m., finishes about five poems a week, does not rewrite any of them, and simply has the mails flooded with them all the time.” This is the legend of how Stafford carried the fire. I heard, years ago, that he had ten batches of ten poems, one hundred poems, circulating at any given time. Ron Talney says it was 250 (See p. 22). Kim says in Early Morning it was “generally” fifty to one hundred. That he didn’t revise, of course, is Hugo hyperbole and is reflective of their other divergence—poetry as healthy, a spontaneous overflow, versus poetry as the healing of the wounded soul. Here, Hugo seems to be equating revision with suffering and, as Stafford’s manuscripts clearly show (Go to the archives and see!), misleads people about Stafford’s process, about how beaver carried the fire.
“Northwest Poetry and the Land,” the second piece at the end of the book and beginning of Venn’s career, a panel discussion featuring Stafford, Hugo, Madeline DeFrees, Venn, and Kim Stafford, among others, contains thoughts on the role of place in the making of poems, a question important to establishing the unique quality of Northwest literature. Responding to this statement by Hugo, “I believe that where something happened is just as important as what happens there,” Stafford says, “Perception is selective. We create a background for ourselves: legends, stories, a way of seeing things…. once Hugo moved to Montana, Montana changed. I mean for me it changed.” Writers and literature create places: Thoreau’s Walden, Jeffers’ Big Sur, Hugo’s Montana. Other imaginations influence us, how we see.
Beaver’s Fire is also a selection of perceptions, of legends and stories, the literary and cultural vision of George Venn. It sees and creates a country, a glowing microcosm of space, the Pacific Northwest. It is his story of how he carried the fire of literature as a writer and scholar, a teacher and a student, for more than four decades. His story enlightens other stories, other fires—that of William Stafford. Stafford’s legacy, which Venn thinks might be “the pacifist as heroic settler of conscience arrayed against any form of empire.” He was a peaceable man and peace enjoys the quiet in which to write, to be. That’s one William Stafford I find here. Beaver’s Fire: A Regional Portfolio, is our return on a forty year investment made by George Venn carrying the fire of literature and is, to use a word borrowed from myth, a boon, a great boon, and if opened and read, warmed by your hands and eyes, will bring you the gift of light as it is found in literature, our literature
Beaver’s Fire: A Regional Portfolio (1970-2010). By George Venn. La Grande, OR: redbat books, 2016.
By Tim Barnes
In the myth of Beaver’s fire, as George Venn tells it, Beaver steals fire from the pine trees and brings it to the other trees—willow, birch, cottonwood. A cedar on a ridge above the confluence of the Grand Ronde and the Snake tells the Ni-Mi-Pu, the Nez Perce, that that’s where Beaver got away, “the wise one who gave our people fire.” Venn tells this story at the beginning of his book to capture what his years of teaching and writing have meant to him. It is a Prometheus story with the gods as pine trees and the fire as literature. He places his retelling of the myth in the context of the quest, with a departure, initiation, and return with a gift that “makes life accessible and possible in the world of suffering people and animals” and so “the wise one becomes the vehicle of illumination.”
Beaver’s Fire, which collects an impressive variety of work that Venn has done over forty years—literary biographies, interviews, reviews, poems, translations, editing, and essays (personal, cultural, historical)—is a vehicle of illumination. Working backwards in time from 2010 to 1970, this collection/anthology/portfolio is a history of Northwest literature, based on the premise of the region as microcosm rather than province. To borrow a phrase from Venn, Beaver’s Fire marks a magic circle. Among the writers, artists, and historical figures encircled are Ellen Waterston, Fred Hill, Minor White, Charles Erskine Scott Wood, Wallace Stegner, Ursula Le Guin, Carolyn Kizer, Richard Hugo, Nard Jones, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, John Haislip, Lisa Steinman, Kim Stafford, Chief Joseph, Madeline DeFrees, John Witte, Theodore Roethke, Bernard Malamud, Leslie Fiedler, Gary Snyder, Robinson Jeffers, Kenneth O. Hanson, Vi Gale, and William Stafford. We find here in Venn’s story of carrying the fire some penetrating glances into William Stafford doing the same. There are twenty-six pieces in the book and seven of them touch on Stafford, two focusing mainly on him, a review of Down in My Heart and “William Stafford in Northwest Literature,” an essay first published in Oregon English in 1997. George Venn is one of our most distinguished and learned writers, literary scholars, thinkers, and cultural documentarians. He is a gifted poet, essayist, editor, historian, and teacher and if you don’t believe me, his praises go on for four pages at the beginning of the book, including some from 1976 in which Stafford calls Venn’s writing “direct, clear, and cogent” and characterizes him as “a self-motivated scholar with great ability and authority.” Stafford got that right, as the reader will discover.
Beaver’s Fire is an important, if not essential, contribution to Northwest literary and cultural history. It is also important and vital in understanding William Stafford’s work and his place in Northwest literature. I begin with the two pieces that focus primarily on Stafford. In 1998 Oregon State University published a reprint of Down in My Heart, Stafford’s 1947 memoir of his CO experience during World War II, now subtitled, Peace Witness in War Time. In this review, first published in the Oregon Historical Quarterly, Venn focuses on the difference between George, a central character who articulates a number of pacifist and anarchist positions, and the more subdued, observant narrator, unnamed but clearly the writer:
while the narrator’s patience, acceptance, imagination, and passivity have saved him, George has been destroyed by his intelligence, intolerance, conviction, aggression, passion to act. He becomes the narrator’s foil—the pacifist turned rebel, criminal, anarchist.
At the end of Down in My Heart, things do not look good for George. The last the narrator has heard is that George is in solitary, two weeks into a hunger strike, about to be force fed. Venn writes, quoting from Down in My Heart, that George “has been trapped by ‘exhilarations of the outlaw, his personal freedom, and his constant living with rebellion.’” Though the textual evidence for this is inconclusive, Venn writes that “George dies abstracted, isolated, self-destroyed….” I feel somehow a certain connection here with Stafford’s doubts about that noisy and sometimes short-lived bunch, the Beats. In an interview printed in The World’s Hieroglyphic Beauty, he tells Peter Stitt, “I felt the same unrest as those people [the Beats] but preferred different tactics.” I’m reminded of a line from his poem, “Influential Writers,” “Some of them write too loud.” I once asked him if he had had ever run into Neal Cassady; he hadn’t.
There’s another aspect to this that says something about Stafford as an artist, a fictioneer. Memoirs and novels intersect and one of those places is in condensation of conflict and the clarification of it with dramatic consequences. Down in My Heart is a lyrical book and Stafford wrote it during difficult times. It turns out, interestingly enough, that Chuck Worley, the person George is based on, died just last May at the age of ninety-eight. Worley’s book, Out of Bounds: Poems and Letters from Prison by a Conscientious Objector to the Good War, tells of the two years he spent in jail after he walked out of alternative service (See p. 18). It looked grim for Worley when Stafford wrote Down in My Heart, which Worley mentions in his book, telling his wife:
Bill wrote recently. He has just finished writing a book about his CO experiences as his Masters Degree project. I hope he gets it published—it’s probably very cleverly written.
Part of that cleverness may have been Stafford’s dramatization of George’s situation. Venn’s reading of it as a death accentuates Stafford’s concern for Worley’s situation as well as his belief that pacifism was a certain kind of rebellion, not a general one.
There is, clearly, a modestly didactic element to Down in My Heart and Venn finds it when he compares the book to The Journal of John Woolman (1774):
For ten chapters the reader learns how—among four years of other events—one man is saved and another lost—spiritual biography framed by implicit didactic intent in the tradition of Woolman and Aldridge.
Woolman is thought of as a gentle Quaker who became an American saint. He argued for abolition and people having a fair share of the commonwealth.
Stafford took Woolman’s journal with him to the CO camps. In You Must Revise Your Life, he remembers that “within two weeks” after Pearl Harbor, “carrying a copy of The Journal of John Woolman given me by my landlady, I was on my way to a camp for conscientious objectors in Arkansas.” When asked about this in 1991 by Friends Journal, perhaps knowing his audience, he said, “My teacher gave me The Journal of John Woolman and when I read it, I saw.”
Now I don’t want to make too much of this but Woolman was connected, as were Quakers, to Quietism, which has heretical associations, being granted that status in 1687 by Pope Innocent XI, probably because it was closer to contemplation than meditation, too undirected and free to go where it would. George Fox, founder of the Religious Society of Friends, imprisoned five times, also believed that god entered through silence. So did John Woolman, a man of very progressive political beliefs. In the mob scene chapter of Down in My Heart, before the COs are almost lynched, the narrator thinks, “we were in most ways the quiet of the land, and unobserved, we thought.” It’s a phrase he returns to in You Must Revise Your Life:
Imposing myself on language—or on a student, or on the citizens of a country—was not my style. I wanted to disappear as teacher, as writer, as citizen—be “the quiet of the land,” as we used to designate ourselves in CO camps.
Just below this on the page he speaks of his quiet mornings in which, “Something is offering you a guidance available only to those undistracted by anything else.” That’s a Quietist stance to writing, writing as a kind of contemplation. The Quietists believed, according to my Oxford World Encyclopedia that “only in a state of absolute surrender to God was the mind able to receive the saving infusion of grace,”—otherwise known as silence, solitude, quiet, early mornings perhaps.
According to his introduction to “William Stafford in Northwest Literature,” Venn read an early draft of this essay at the meeting of “The Original Stafford Group” that became the Friends of William Stafford. In it he compares Stafford with three other notable writers who came to the Northwest after World War II, the novelist Bernard Malamud (Oregon State University), the poet Theodore Roethke (University of Washington), and the critic Leslie Fiedler (University of Montana). He calls them “ambivalent sojourners” and Stafford “a settler, an insider, a local, an immigrant become native.” (my italics) Malamud and Fiedler eventually returned east and Roethke died in 1965, but Stafford “lived here long enough to make his way through all the psychological phases of immigrant life: initial euphoria, subsequent depression, slow and difficult accommodation, and ultimate acceptance.” This allowed Stafford, in Venn’s judgment, to create the “most inclusive and authentic—poetry we have after World War II.”
In comparing Roethke and Stafford, Venn recalls a 1975 Northwest poetry symposium in which Stafford called Roethke “a great big exotic [who] slowed the Northwest school by being so significant and salient and un-Northwest.” This prompted Richard Hugo, who was in the audience when Stafford said this, to shout, “Thank you, Martin Boorman,” suggesting according to Venn that “Stafford’s denial [of Roethke’s significance for Northwest poetry] was equal to the denials by Hitler’s secretary about Hitler.” Audience members may have been unaware of the allusion and the insult doesn’t seem to have offended Stafford; it does, however, highlight some differences that Stafford had with Hugo and with what is known as Modernism. “Stafford rejected,” Venn observes, “Roethke’s Freudian stereotype of poets as sick people trying to heal themselves.” He refers to an interesting moment in “The Third Time the World Happens: A Dialogue on Writing between Richard Hugo and William Stafford,” published in a 1973 issue of the Northwest Review devoted to Stafford. In it Hugo talks about how poets “play back” their losses and it not being “healthy” but ok because “art isn’t.” Stafford responds that he is “uncomfortable” with that idea because he thinks “art is a healthy process.” This is a key point about Stafford’s approach—a poetic response to the world, to being, is natural, not a tortured reaction to psychic wounds. I am reminded of his response to the question of when he became a poet—most everyone else stopped. This is, as readers probably know, a tenet of the Romantics. Wordsworth wrote in “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” “Trailing clouds of glory do we come…Heaven lies about us in our infancy!” “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist when we grow up,” is an aphorism attributed to Picasso.
“Stafford reminded readers over and over again,” Venn reminds us, that, among other things, “writers should not let modernism—or any other literary precedent—determine what anyone else might want to say.” A modernist perspective holds that human progress is self-evident, reason is superior to inspiration or intuition, nature is separate from culture, and art should be judged by modern criteria. “Theodore Roethke,” Venn writes, “imported literary modernism—emotional volatility, outward aggression and inward division, self dramatization, confession, metrical lyricism” to the Northwest. Stafford, though, was doubtful about taking on the voice of literary modernism, as poets like Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Dylan Thomas, and Anne Sexton, were not. This issue can be connected to the heresy of Quietism. Venn points out that “Stafford’s pedagogy respected the silence at the center of all things, did not intend to dominate, or try to impose a whole universe.” In his introduction to The Darkness Around Us Is Deep, Robert Bly remembers why Stafford was not invited back to the Bread Loaf Writers Conference:
The staff emphasized “finding your voice,” which turned out to be a study of what the poetry establishment wanted at the moment. Every teacher gave one craft lecture. Stafford began, “I want to say that I don’t agree with anything that has been said here this week. You already have a voice and don’t need to find one.”
Bread Loaf was, in a sense, advocating students meditate on finding a voice based on the current style, immediate standards; Stafford seems to be recommending contemplating what the quiet might leave the poet alone with—a good question. “In writing,” Stafford said in one of his aphorisms collected in Sound of the Ax, “the trick is to give yourself good assignments.”
In We Have Never Been Modern, the French philosopher Bruno Latour asks if in questioning modernism, “Will a different democracy become necessary? A democracy extended to things?” Latour asserts that one of modernism’s essential dichotomies is the separation of nonhumans/nature from humans/culture. If Stafford believed that dichotomy, he couldn’t have written, “I could hear the wilderness listen.” Nor could he calmly personify over and over again as he did or write “At the Un-National Monument along the Canadian Border.”
One of the finest and most significant pieces in Beaver’s Fire supports the point just made. In “The Search for Sacred Space in Western American Literature,” Venn discusses the work of a number of writers essential to that notion: Robinson Jeffers, Gary Snyder, Frank Waters, Vi Gale, and Stafford. Venn speaks of Stafford’s “search for sacred relationships with space” in which he is
conscious of the poet’s similarity to the mythopoetic predecessors in the West who not only saw ravens as birds, but who went far beyond the literal in establishing qualitative facts about the human spirit with Raven.
This line of thought or imaginative expansion of connection reminds me that Native Americans often referred to birds as cousins, that totem animals were part of their spiritual tradition, and they told stories about deer woman and the woman who married a bear. Personification creates a connection and the three Stafford poems Venn uses to illustrate Stafford’s “sacralization of space,” “Starting with Little Things,” “Weeds,” and “Bring the North,” all animate the human bond with the nonhuman world; the latter poem, for example, has these lines:
One way to find your place is like
the rain, a million requests
for lodging, one that wins, finds
your cheek: you find your home,
a storm that walks the waves.
The rain “requests” lodging and a storm “walks” the waves. This is a world in which the human and the nonhuman intertwine, live together. This poem, from Someday, Maybe, leads into the poem “Report to Crazy Horse,” which is about one of the “mythopoetic predecessors in the West” who seemed to have felt, as Venn says Stafford does, “a unity with things around him.” This is one of the great satisfactions of reading Stafford’s poetry and a sensibility sorely lacking in important places these days, it would appear.
Venn concludes this 1976 essay, first published in the Portland Review with these words: “If the voices of writers like Jeffers, Stafford, Abbey, Stegner, Snyder, and Waters are heard, their search for sacred space will become the headwaters for a future in both literature and society.” That subordinating conjunction at the beginning of the previous sentence hangs in the air rather resonantly these days, though the beaver’s fire in each of the names mentioned is carried glowing to us in this rather profound and important essay.
I would mention at this point that I was an advisory editor at the Portland Review when “The Search for Sacred Space in Western American Literature” was first published. I was also one of the seven readers who juried the selections for the contents of Beaver’s Fire and have a laudatory but not inaccurate blurb in the front and back matter of the book. An interview I did with Carolyn Kizer, edited by Venn for Oregon East, appears in Beaver’s Fire. And, finally, George and I share an interest in Charles Erskine Scott Wood (1852-1944), a poet, soldier, lawyer, artist and art patron, man of letters, and pacifist, who lived in Portland between 1884 and 1918. I co-wrote a book published by Oregon State University Press in 1997 called Wood Works: The Life and Writings of Charles Erskine Scott Wood. Venn has two pieces on Wood in Beaver’s Fire, “Soldier to Advocate: C.E.S. Wood’s 1877 Legacy” and “Chief Joseph’s ‘Surrender Speech’ as Literary Text.” Both pieces are literary biography of the first order—riveting, insightful, and diligently researched. The latter, an essay on the origins of probably the most famous item of Indian oratory in American history, is ended by Venn with a quote from Stafford: “Poetry is finally subversive.” I will leave the interested reader to discover why Venn chose this ending except to say that CES Wood was the man who put the speech down on paper and became a friend of Chief Joseph’s, sending his eldest son to spend two teenage summers with Joseph at the Nez Perce reservation in Colville, Washington. Wood was one of the very few men to call our wagon’s west romance what it also was, a “vivisection,” an imperialist devastation. It might be worth remembering that the Osama Bin Laden mission was code named Geronimo, the chief of the last free-roaming Native Americans in the United States; the second-to-last were the Nez Perce.
I would also mention another connection between Venn and this editor. I was on the board of the Oregon Council of Teachers of English (the OCTE) when Venn accomplished one of the most difficult, important, and beautiful tasks of editing in Oregon literary history, the six-volume Oregon Literature Series, completed in 1994. FWS board member Jim Scheppke, just appointed the state librarian, sponsored a celebration with Norma Paulus, the Superintendent of Public Instruction, and Governor Barbara Roberts to celebrate the event. I won’t go on about the Series, but it should be on the shelf of anyone interested in Oregon literature and/or Oregon life. I suspect it’s a collector’s item even now.
As Beaver’s Fire comes to a close, and Venn’s literary and professorial career begin, there are two pieces that include Stafford and, interestingly enough, that other pillar of Northwest poetry in the seventies and eighties, Richard Hugo. Venn includes the transcript of a taped interview between Hugo and Ronald Bayes (see issue 19.2, p. 4), then teaching at Eastern Oregon University. In it Hugo says this of Stafford’s creative process: “Stafford works two hours every morning from 4 to 6 a.m., finishes about five poems a week, does not rewrite any of them, and simply has the mails flooded with them all the time.” This is the legend of how Stafford carried the fire. I heard, years ago, that he had ten batches of ten poems, one hundred poems, circulating at any given time. Ron Talney says it was 250 (See p. 22). Kim says in Early Morning it was “generally” fifty to one hundred. That he didn’t revise, of course, is Hugo hyperbole and is reflective of their other divergence—poetry as healthy, a spontaneous overflow, versus poetry as the healing of the wounded soul. Here, Hugo seems to be equating revision with suffering and, as Stafford’s manuscripts clearly show (Go to the archives and see!), misleads people about Stafford’s process, about how beaver carried the fire.
“Northwest Poetry and the Land,” the second piece at the end of the book and beginning of Venn’s career, a panel discussion featuring Stafford, Hugo, Madeline DeFrees, Venn, and Kim Stafford, among others, contains thoughts on the role of place in the making of poems, a question important to establishing the unique quality of Northwest literature. Responding to this statement by Hugo, “I believe that where something happened is just as important as what happens there,” Stafford says, “Perception is selective. We create a background for ourselves: legends, stories, a way of seeing things…. once Hugo moved to Montana, Montana changed. I mean for me it changed.” Writers and literature create places: Thoreau’s Walden, Jeffers’ Big Sur, Hugo’s Montana. Other imaginations influence us, how we see.
Beaver’s Fire is also a selection of perceptions, of legends and stories, the literary and cultural vision of George Venn. It sees and creates a country, a glowing microcosm of space, the Pacific Northwest. It is his story of how he carried the fire of literature as a writer and scholar, a teacher and a student, for more than four decades. His story enlightens other stories, other fires—that of William Stafford. Stafford’s legacy, which Venn thinks might be “the pacifist as heroic settler of conscience arrayed against any form of empire.” He was a peaceable man and peace enjoys the quiet in which to write, to be. That’s one William Stafford I find here. Beaver’s Fire: A Regional Portfolio, is our return on a forty year investment made by George Venn carrying the fire of literature and is, to use a word borrowed from myth, a boon, a great boon, and if opened and read, warmed by your hands and eyes, will bring you the gift of light as it is found in literature, our literature
LOCAL WRITER CREATES PORTRAIT OF OREGON
GO! Magazine, March 2, 2017
By Rose Peacock, technician at Cook Memorial Library (La Grande)
My first impression of George Venn’s book, Beaver’s Fire, was one of a depth and range that encompasses more than its ostensible scope of a portfolio of the region’s past four decades.
Poetry, fiction, non-fiction and photography intermingle to produce a portrait of Eastern Oregon and the Northwest through a literary lens. Venn is involved in many of these pieces as writer, editor, researcher or participant in some fashion, and his style and aesthetic permeate the collection.
The title refers to a Nez Perce myth about beavers stealing fire from the Pine Trees and gifting it to all the other trees. And so, with this volume, Venn gives the fire of the literary spirit of the Northwest to its readers, writers and artists. Each piece draws the reader more deeply into a contemplation of space, place and the way in which writers (poets in particular, it seems), seek to represent that space, their experience and relationship to it, and the experiences of those who have lived there, past and present.
The collected pieces are organized in reverse order by date of publication. The topics move through time and around the globe while firmly rooted in the Northwest, a region Venn defines as Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana. Fred Hill’s photography and letters take us to World War II and the Philippines, C.E.S. Woods’ diary takes us to the 1880s from Sitka, Alaska, to Montana, and author interviews, workshops and symposiums range throughout Oregon. The collection is also a reminder of how personal documents, letters and diaries may become historical records and literary treasures.
Not only a collection of pieces from the Northwest, the works themselves reflect on the writing and state of literature in the Northwest. They reinforce the notion that literature is about, “the relationships between people and the space around them,” according to a 1976 essay, “The Search for Sacred Space in Western American Literature.”
The works continually contribute to and reinforce Venn’s premise that regional is not “provincial” but a “microcosm.” One of the final pieces in the collection, St. John’s essay emphasizes Venn’s argument, “we seem to equate cultural achievement only with large populations.” This repetition indicates to me that Venn believes these issues are relevant 40 years later.
The power of a regional collection, as a native Oregonian, has an emotional as well as an intellectual effect. Marsha Hill keeping Fred’s hundreds of letters, Wood’s disgust with the violence of the Nez Perce war and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn’s passion for free speech were deeply moving. This link also revealed my own biases about Oregon literature and history: It’s not interesting, it doesn’t really exist outside of Ursula Le Guin, I’m sick of reading about the Oregon Trail.
This portfolio is a reminder of the scope of Oregon literature, of the collections already in existence, and of the ongoing need to tend to both past and future writers and creators. My to-read list has expanded.
Many of the pieces noted the lack of representation of Northwest writers in national collections, while remembering that William Stafford was the most-read poet of his day.
This tendency grew a bit wearisome, and made me wonder if emphasizing the past neglect of Northwest literary contributions, especially those of Eastern Oregon, promotes the creation of more, or is it simply a tantrum? Where do we look forward, to what current and recent and future writers and works do we look to continue our journey in this place we call home?
Do we still suffer from the tendency Venn describes as “outsiders must praise regional artists before their own people will claim them,” as was the case in his 1973 lecture, “The Literature of Eastern Oregon?”
Of the six pieces from the 2000s, only two were on contemporary works, and one of those was a symposium. The other four focused on historical figures or myths, but I felt there was a lack of recently created works.
My curiosity has been piqued. Perhaps then, Venn has accomplished his goal: I want to read more of the texts referenced in this portfolio, I want to seek out newer regional works, and I have a deeper appreciation for the literature and history of where I live. This is a wonderful collection to which one may return again and again.
Please note, I received a free copy of this book from the author in exchange for an honest review.
GO! Magazine, March 2, 2017
By Rose Peacock, technician at Cook Memorial Library (La Grande)
My first impression of George Venn’s book, Beaver’s Fire, was one of a depth and range that encompasses more than its ostensible scope of a portfolio of the region’s past four decades.
Poetry, fiction, non-fiction and photography intermingle to produce a portrait of Eastern Oregon and the Northwest through a literary lens. Venn is involved in many of these pieces as writer, editor, researcher or participant in some fashion, and his style and aesthetic permeate the collection.
The title refers to a Nez Perce myth about beavers stealing fire from the Pine Trees and gifting it to all the other trees. And so, with this volume, Venn gives the fire of the literary spirit of the Northwest to its readers, writers and artists. Each piece draws the reader more deeply into a contemplation of space, place and the way in which writers (poets in particular, it seems), seek to represent that space, their experience and relationship to it, and the experiences of those who have lived there, past and present.
The collected pieces are organized in reverse order by date of publication. The topics move through time and around the globe while firmly rooted in the Northwest, a region Venn defines as Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana. Fred Hill’s photography and letters take us to World War II and the Philippines, C.E.S. Woods’ diary takes us to the 1880s from Sitka, Alaska, to Montana, and author interviews, workshops and symposiums range throughout Oregon. The collection is also a reminder of how personal documents, letters and diaries may become historical records and literary treasures.
Not only a collection of pieces from the Northwest, the works themselves reflect on the writing and state of literature in the Northwest. They reinforce the notion that literature is about, “the relationships between people and the space around them,” according to a 1976 essay, “The Search for Sacred Space in Western American Literature.”
The works continually contribute to and reinforce Venn’s premise that regional is not “provincial” but a “microcosm.” One of the final pieces in the collection, St. John’s essay emphasizes Venn’s argument, “we seem to equate cultural achievement only with large populations.” This repetition indicates to me that Venn believes these issues are relevant 40 years later.
The power of a regional collection, as a native Oregonian, has an emotional as well as an intellectual effect. Marsha Hill keeping Fred’s hundreds of letters, Wood’s disgust with the violence of the Nez Perce war and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn’s passion for free speech were deeply moving. This link also revealed my own biases about Oregon literature and history: It’s not interesting, it doesn’t really exist outside of Ursula Le Guin, I’m sick of reading about the Oregon Trail.
This portfolio is a reminder of the scope of Oregon literature, of the collections already in existence, and of the ongoing need to tend to both past and future writers and creators. My to-read list has expanded.
Many of the pieces noted the lack of representation of Northwest writers in national collections, while remembering that William Stafford was the most-read poet of his day.
This tendency grew a bit wearisome, and made me wonder if emphasizing the past neglect of Northwest literary contributions, especially those of Eastern Oregon, promotes the creation of more, or is it simply a tantrum? Where do we look forward, to what current and recent and future writers and works do we look to continue our journey in this place we call home?
Do we still suffer from the tendency Venn describes as “outsiders must praise regional artists before their own people will claim them,” as was the case in his 1973 lecture, “The Literature of Eastern Oregon?”
Of the six pieces from the 2000s, only two were on contemporary works, and one of those was a symposium. The other four focused on historical figures or myths, but I felt there was a lack of recently created works.
My curiosity has been piqued. Perhaps then, Venn has accomplished his goal: I want to read more of the texts referenced in this portfolio, I want to seek out newer regional works, and I have a deeper appreciation for the literature and history of where I live. This is a wonderful collection to which one may return again and again.
Please note, I received a free copy of this book from the author in exchange for an honest review.
NOTES FROM The Oregonian/OregonLive's BOOKS DESK
September 17, 2016
By Amy Wang | The Oregonian/OregonLive
https://www.oregonlive.com/books/2016/09/bookmarks_landfall_roland_smit.html
George Venn: The Eastern Oregon writer, whom former Oregonian/OregonLive book critic Jeff Baker once described as "the bard of La Grande," has a new collection of work, published this month: "Beaver's Fire: A Regional Portfolio (1970-2010)" (Redbat Books, 444 pages, $30). Part of a Pacific Northwest Writers Series, the book contains 26 nonfiction texts—reviews, interviews, lectures, essays and more—that essentially serve as a record of what Venn calls "the Northwest literary ecosystem."
September 17, 2016
By Amy Wang | The Oregonian/OregonLive
https://www.oregonlive.com/books/2016/09/bookmarks_landfall_roland_smit.html
George Venn: The Eastern Oregon writer, whom former Oregonian/OregonLive book critic Jeff Baker once described as "the bard of La Grande," has a new collection of work, published this month: "Beaver's Fire: A Regional Portfolio (1970-2010)" (Redbat Books, 444 pages, $30). Part of a Pacific Northwest Writers Series, the book contains 26 nonfiction texts—reviews, interviews, lectures, essays and more—that essentially serve as a record of what Venn calls "the Northwest literary ecosystem."