Angry Rain

Maurice Kenny

Description

Maurice Kenny's career as a writer, teacher, publisher, and storyteller spanned more than six decades, during which he published over thirty books and became one of the most prominent voices in American poetry. From the early 1970s onward, he was instrumental in the resurgence of Native American literature through both his celebrated volumes of poetry, such as I Am the Sun and the award-winning The Mama Poems, and his work as an editor and publisher.

Angry Rain, his bittersweet memoir, reveals this rich literary life by recounting its tumultuous "first half…plus a bit," a time during which he moved through a series of worlds that all left their marks on him. Kenny begins with his early years spent among his family in the small northern New York city of Watertown and continues through an adolescence marked by both significant awakenings and grievous traumas. Determined, Kenny sets out to seek his fortunes and find his poetic voice, landing in the Jim Crow-era South, in St. Louis, in Indiana, and finally in New York City, where he becomes part of a motley creative group of performers and poets that offers both fascinating inspiration and disheartening rejection. These recollections end with Kenny's maturation into a poet whose reaffirmed indigenous heritage unified an artistic vision that remained in conversation with a wide range of other themes and traditions until his death in 2016.
Introduction
Preface

1. Boyhood

2.  Life in the North

3. Peonies, Plums, and Passions

4.  Friends and Idols

5.  Sensations, Dreams, Visions

6. Looking for Home

7. To Broadway and Back

8. Horses to Carry Me

9. Alexandria Bay

10. Acting the Part

11. Hitchhiking

12. “That’s All Yer Worth”

13. Brutes

14. Portrait of a Student

15. Convalescence

16. Cathy B.

17. St. Lawrence

18. Amid the Bookshelves

19. My Beautiful Rose

20. Motley and Bogan

21.  More People and Places

22.  Native Consciousness

Coda

Sujets

• Region
• Indigenous peoples
• Regional
• Cultures

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 10 septembre 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438471075
• Langue: English

Extrait

ANGRY RAIN
ANGRY RAIN
a brief memoir
Maurice Kenny
EDITED AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
D EREK C. M AUS
Cover art: original color collage by Anna Neva, used by permission of the artist.
Different versions of portions of this book previously appeared in the following publications:
“Angry Rain: A Brief Autobiographical Memoir from Boyhood to College”
Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series 22. Detroit: Gale, 1995.
On Second Thought . Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995.
Published by
S TATE U NIVERSITY OF N EW Y ORK P RESS , A LBANY
© 2018 The estate of Maurice Kenny
All rights reserved. No portion of this manuscript may be reproduced orally or mechanically without permission of the author’s estate.
Printed in the United States of America
E XCELSIOR E DITIONS IS AN IMPRINT OF S TATE U NIVERSITY OF N EW Y ORK P RESS
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kenny, Maurice, 1929–2016, author. | Maus, Derek C., editor.
Title: Angry rain : a brief memoir / Maurice Kenny; edited and with an introduction by Derek C. Maus.
Description: Albany : Excelsior Editions, an imprint of the State University of New York Press, [2018]
Identifiers: LCCN 2017049448 | ISBN 9781438471068 (paperback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438471075 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Kenny, Maurice, 1929–2016. | Authors, American—20 th century—Biography. | Mohawk Indians—Biography.
Classification: LCC PS3561.E49 Z46 2018 | DDC 818/.5403 [B] —dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017049448
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Lorne Simon …
Whose life was cut short …
Of all the words he stored
In his imagination
Few got to paper in time …
In memory of …
Diane Burns, Diane Decorah, Peter Blue Cloud, Fred Hoch, Mary Dickson, JP, Rose C., Cathy B., Ms. Gertrude, Randy Lewis, Joseph White, Lorraine Wilson, Manny Bernstein, Tim Jock
… and especially my parents, Andy and Doris.
Contents Introduction Preface one Boyhood two Life in the North three Peonies, Plums, and Passions four Friends and Idols five Sensations, Dreams, Visions six Looking for Home seven To Broadway and Back eight Horses to Carry Me nine Alexandria Bay ten Acting the Part eleven Hitchhiking twelve “That’s All Yer Worth” thirteen Brutes fourteen Portrait of a Student fifteen Convalescence sixteen Cathy B. seventeen St. Lawrence eighteen Amid the Bookshelves nineteen My Beautiful Rose twenty Motley and Bogan twenty-one More People and Places twenty-two Native Consciousness Coda
Introduction
As it turns out, Saint Petersburg in July is a great time and place to get editorial work done, especially when one is still dealing with jet lag after a transatlantic flight. I found this out during the summer of 2016 when I took advantage of the famed “White Nights” of that most literary of cities to work on finalizing the manuscript of the book you are holding in your hands. Although New York—a city that Maurice Kenny knew quite well, as you will read in the recollections that follow—was famously called “the city that never sleeps,” Saint Petersburg’s midsummer version has a legitimate claim on the title as well. On each of my visits there, I have marveled that one can make do with only three or four hours of sleep a night.
I was in Saint Petersburg that summer to teach in an international summer-school program—and had plenty of work to keep me busy in that context—but I had also brought the manuscript of Maurice’s memoir with me to work on in my spare time, which is plentiful during the long days of the northern Russian summer. I recall with great fondness a particular sleepless night of editorial work in my rented fifth-floor apartment on Petrogradsky Island. The large windows of my preferred writing room overlooked the rooftops of the quarter both to the east and the west. As I passed a series of midnight hours with a frequently refreshed cup of tea and Maurice’s words displayed on my laptop, I hardly noticed as the twilight streaming through the windows subtly shifted from my left side to my right, dusk almost imperceptibly transforming into dawn. I am very much a night owl and have always enjoyed drifting off to sleep as songbirds greet the rising sun; however, when that phenomenon occurs at three in the morning and is not preceded by a stretch of recognizable night, there is something rather uncanny about it. The indeterminate mood stimulated by my surroundings proved quite fitting for working on a book that swings through a wide arc of emotions, from warmth and joy to recrimination and regret. When I had recited Maurice’s poem “Wild Strawberries” to a group of my Russian students, many of them remarked approvingly about his russkaia dusha— his “Russian soul”—and that somewhat metaphysical association played in my mind as I worked through the pages of his text in my twilit aerie.
Maurice and I had spent a lot of time together since I first made his acquaintance, so a lot of the individual stories that make up this memoir are ones that I had heard from him before reading them again as his editor. Whether performing on a stage, sharing a dinner-table, or riding in a car, Maurice was an ardent and gifted storyteller. In his poetry and prose, he often writes about and adopts the voice of other people, animals, plants, and sometimes even spirits. In his private recollections, though, he generally told stories in which he featured prominently, whether or not he was their protagonist. With many people, such a reflexive focus might seem narcissistic or vain, but Maurice had already amassed seven decades of life experiences by the time I met him, so he legitimately had a lot of tales to tell. And what a life it was! My own gallivanting through the world seemed so tame compared to the multiple cross-continental journeys he took aboard a series of Greyhound buses—he suffered from severe claustrophobia that made flying an emotional ordeal—in order to read his words aloud in small towns and giant cities alike.
In the late summer of 2001, I had just moved to Potsdam, New York, where I had landed my first academic job at SUNY Potsdam. I spent the days before the start of the semester in my new office, unloading books and meeting my colleagues, one of whom turned out to be a Mohawk poet whose name had cropped up here and there during my undergraduate and graduate studies. After a brief initial meeting in the hallway, Maurice started regularly walking the fifty or so feet down from his office to linger at my open door. One wall of my office was adorned with a large poster that featured John Coltrane’s face, and during one of his visits Maurice tipped his chin toward the poster and casually mentioned that “John and Alice used to live close to me when they first met, and I’d talk to them out on the street a lot.” Not long thereafter he told me the story—included in this memoir, of course—of how Orson Welles had whipped him off the running board of a hansom cab in Manhattan. I initially had my doubts about the veracity of some of these yarns, but they dissipated quickly. Although Maurice was certainly not above having a somewhat pliable memory about where, when, and in what order things happened, I learned that he never exaggerated when it came to the people he had met and known in his life—he didn’t need to.
I started to grasp the extent of his notable acquaintances when Maurice invited me to his apartment and showed me—with his characteristic mix of pride and self-consciousness—some of the books that had been inscribed to him warmly and personally by their authors. I learned that Maurice had corresponded with, shared meals with, worked with, traveled with, lived with, and more than once fought with writers, actors, and artists that I had theretofore only known as names in anthologies, credits on a movie screen, or subjects on my doctoral exams. For a while, I would still jokingly chide him about dropping names when he mentioned his relationship with Amiri Baraka or Leslie Marmon Silko or Allen Ginsberg or Wendy Rose or Willard Motley or Simon Ortiz or Paddy Chayefsky or Audre Lorde or … (you get the point, right?). After getting to know him better, though, I realized that he wasn’t putting on airs by listing his famous friends. He spoke with the same vivacity and depth when telling stories about the lesser-known (at least to me …) writers whose work he helped bring forth as a publisher with Contact/II and the Strawberry Press. Tellingly, he reserved some of his greatest enthusiasm for recounting the students with whom he had worked at the University of Oklahoma, at North Country Community College, at SUNY Potsdam, during his various residencies all over the continent, or at impromptu workshops after one of the thousands of readings that he gave during his career as a barnstorming poet. Maurice was not without his anxieties and he certainly was not uncritical in his interactions with other people, but I was quickly struck by the extent to which his relationships with people were marked by a depth