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Thomas Hood
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Oil

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lek_(mating_arena)
Lek (mating arena), a type of animal territory in which males of a certain species gather to demonstrate their prowess before or during mating season.

hissing fescue -- the sound growing fescue makes (like corn)

http://www.dnr.state.wi.us/org/land/wil ... rchick.htm
The males gather together each April on traditional "booming grounds" to defend territories, attract females, and perpetuate their species.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakota_people

Tympanuchus cupido -- Greater prairie chicken

roans -- horses of that color.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roan_(color)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam-ondi-Ahman
In Mormon theology, the site in Missouri where Adam and Eve lived after being expelled from the Garden of Eden.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forb
Forbs are herbaceous flowering plants that are not graminoids (grasses, sedges and rushes). The term is frequently used in vegetation ecology, especially in relation to grasslands.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clovis_culture
Clovis Christ -- In Mormon theology, American Indians were remnants (I think) of the Lost 10 Tribes. The Clovis people were possibly non-Indians whom the Indians destroyed.
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Walden, 18.10: "Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."

One theory is that Thoreau is referring to the drumming of the partridge.
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Devin Johnson's Early April

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Post #3

There is a juxtaposition of natural and human or human made/human activity/human culture.

--Scottish fiddle tunes vs. the sound and dance of the prairie chickens
--natural grass lands and the combed furrows
-- modern culture petroleum driven culture: Sinclair's sign & plastic mugs vs. agrarian culture vs. the Lakota Indian culture
-- the poem makes reference to three religions (or I think it does) The Lakota, Catholicism (Clovis is mentioned in the Catholic Encyclopedia) and Mormonism.

Johnson calls up, what seems to be a mix of conflicting images. As I think about his images they sting together like a time line or the movement of time as things changes from one thing to the next. The mating dance of the prairie chicken, to the Lakota Indian dance to early American farming communities now rusting and then? What?
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Nice job of annotating. I like the part where the ecological relationships are said to be more important than taxonomic ones and think Thoreau was maybe the first to understand that. But what the poem "means"? I don't know. I pick up the opening scene in which the men are kind of ersatz with regard to nature: a picture of a dinosuar, metal chairs, plastic mugs, talking about farm machinery and mechanized agriculture. Meanwhile the prairie hens that are hanging on to existence meet in the place that now belongs to tractors.

Early April

Under the Sinclair's brontosaurus sign,

three men collect around a coffee pot

on metal folding chairs. One talks

of rust on a spring-tooth harrow, matters

of cultivation, while the others

ruminate on plastic mugs. Down Route M,

the lek returns to a low ridge

of soy and hissing fescue, booming grounds

abandoned to the long nose of a tractor

where only roans had cast a shadow.


The second part presents something more, well, organic, and perhaps dignified (the formality of the Latin words). The birds once had an importance to a culture, the Lakotas, that a wild animal could not possibly have for the men on the chairs, for whom the dinosaur represents only a commercial product.


Tympanuchus cupido taught Lakotas

how to dance, its throat patch yellow

as egg yokes, its booming glug

of a low tone swallowed, head feathers erect

in practiced threat. Desire's kettle drum.

Theirs is a culture more intractable

than forbs or Scottish fiddle tunes.


Now the really strange third part, which is perhaps a contrast to the first part in which a landscape only means what can be extracted from the ground and has next to no symbolic meaning, only the silly green dinosaur. Whatever we may think of this Mormon fantasy, is it, as Robert Frost might say, at least something? Something of a higher order, something to involve [/i]spirit, at least, even if in a crazy way? The Clovis Christ that they'll have climb a tree if he comes! The Mormons are not unlike the earlier Lakotas in finding the place sacred. "Both live forever until they die" in reference to birds and machine has me stumped.

A county south, at Adam-ondi-Ahman,

Mormons wait in a canvas blind

as fog lifts from combed furrows

for a Clovis Christ to come. If he does,

they'll send him up a tree to scout

what's rushing across the low ridge,

whether prairie chicken or machine.

Both live forever until they die.
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DWill wrote: "Both live forever until they die" in reference to birds and machine has me stumped.
Yes, this is the very problem I am having with the poem. An idea came to me to consider the the title of the poem and the last line together and the fact that the prairie chicken is endanger of becoming extinct. Here is what I've come up with. April is a month that is a transition between winter and summer and often contains days of each -- teasing us, promising us of something to come only to slam us back to winter - April is the cruelest month. Change, I think is the key.

The last line. All things end or die, no matter how "intractable" they seem to us, humans. Hard as it is to imagine, even the sun will burn out someday. Could Johnson be making an observation or comment on how oblivious the men sitting on metal chairs are to the struggle of life to continue and the possible disappearance of another specie (the already extinct dinosaur has been mentioned).
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This form http://www.birdlife.org

Range & population Tympanuchus cupido is restricted to prairie intermixed with cropland, primarily in the mid-western states of the USA. The three recognised subspecies vary dramatically in status: the Heath Hen T. c. cupido is extinct, and the Attwater's Prairie Hen T. c. attwateri is restricted to small portions of south-east Texas (numbering under 1,000 in the mid-1990s2)1. The Greater Prairie-chicken (T. c. pinnatus) is extinct or in danger of extinction in 15 states, but numerous enough to be legally hunted in four states1, with the largest remaining populations in Kansas, Nebraska and South Dakota2. It has been in long-term decline for the last 80 years3, with recent figures suggesting a steep population decline in the period 1989-19974.
I've always found it rather exciting to remember that there is a difference between what we experience and what we think it means.
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From last year's Gathering of Nations

And now for what's new and evolving with respect to dance

I've always found it rather exciting to remember that there is a difference between what we experience and what we think it means.
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When I read this poem I hear talk about the threat of extinction and the chance of cultural/life resurrection. I also hear talk about the conflict between competing groups for the limited resources of land. What makes me think that begins with the following lines:

Theirs is a culture more intractable

than forbs or Scottish fiddle tunes.

"Theirs" refers to the Prairie Chicken and the Sioux. Both are under threat. Their old booming grounds are either gone or going. Yet in pockets the Prairie Chicken still dances and as for Native Americans, well that is why I posted the Hip Hop clip. Traditional moves that have been modified, traditional dance outfits, traditional music that has been twisted up into something new, something that takes into account the world they live in - both the white one and the ancestral one.

And the reference to forbs and Scottish fiddle tunes - two other things that you think you pulled out and just keep coming back. Some things are hardier than a "gardeners" death wish.

Then there are the last few lines of the first stanza. Who is the lek that is returning to the abandoned prairie? And who abandoned it? The poem indicates that what lives there now is abandoned machinery that overlays the shadow cast by the long-gone horse. More White-on-Indian imagery.

Is the lek the returning Prairie Chickens or the Lakota come to dance?

Then after the first stanza we see the dance, hear about the "threat," recognize the desire. Is it simply a desire for bodily continuance? I mean that is the purpose of display dances by males, yes? When a Prairie Chicken dancer displays himself at a PowWow, what is he saying?

Then the poem moves to a sacred spot of the Mormons, having just left what is left of the spot that, if Prairie Chickens had sacred spots, would be sacred to them...and the place where the bird-ancestors dance, where the Sioux were taught what they still practice today, the poem doesn't directly say but could the spot not be held in reverence by the poem's Lakota?

And there they are, the Mormons, hiding in blinds a ridge away from where the Lakota and the Prairie Chicken dance. Waiting for their own lifting up. Waiting for their Christ to come. And a curious Christ he is with his North American history, the miracles here, the embedding of a Middle Eastern set of stories here where Smith found himself and declared this spot (Independence, Missouri in actual fact) to be the future site of the city of Zion. But it didn't take. The locals (those settlers who had chased away the "Lakota" and displaced the Indian's roan horses with their cultivating machines - which now, ironically, are rusting out) felt threatened and went into attack mode and pushed them out.

So there they are in the poem, hidden in the blind waiting for this peculiarly North American version of the Christ to come. And what will they do when he does:

they'll send him up a tree to scout

what's rushing across the low ridge,

whether prairie chicken or machine

They'll send him up a tree to see who is coming over the ridge where the Prairie Chicken and the Lakota dance, and where the machine of the those furious settlers brought their machines and forcibly replaced the roan horses of the Lakota.

What seems intractable is the conflict as much as the particular cultural ways and "shadows." The last line - Both live forever until they die - I read this as 'We cannot kill the Other but we can both die together.'
I've always found it rather exciting to remember that there is a difference between what we experience and what we think it means.
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I want to thank everyone for playing along with me! I have made it a practice to not turn so quickly away from poems that do not immediately unfold for me. Again, thanks for all the help decoding this one.
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What I love best about group analyses like this is that you get little mind-shots of people. How we interpret poetry (or novels, or non-fiction for that matter) says a great deal about the interpreter. We get to see the results of different cultures, different educational backgrounds, different socializations. That's wonderful I think. And the best bit is we all get to be "right."

Of course what we are interpreting matters...that is, the more obscure the poem (or the poet) the more potentially revelatory.

Anyone like Paul Celan?
I've always found it rather exciting to remember that there is a difference between what we experience and what we think it means.
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MaryLupin wrote:What I love best about group analyses like this is that you get little mind-shots of people.
I'll second that.
Anyone like Paul Celan?
I'm not that familiar with Paul Celan, but I like what I've read.
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