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Showing posts with label review; poetry; Romanticism; Ramapough; Out of the Furnace. Show all posts
Showing posts with label review; poetry; Romanticism; Ramapough; Out of the Furnace. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 27, 2022

A Review of Kenneth Lumpkin's "Song of Ramapough"

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I first encountered Kenneth Lumpkin on Twitter, through the hashtag #WritingCommunity. He posted a few poems of his that I found simple, elegant, direct, and beautiful in the tradition of William Carlos Williams. After a few friendly interactions, I asked him to recommend one of his books, as I had finally come into some extracurricular fiduciary spice (money), he recommended his most recent. But when I browsed his Amazon author page, I found he had written a book called “Song of Ramapough: A Poetics of Place.” My antennae bristled.

I wrote my PhD dissertation on the ideological representations of white trash in different cultural products including literature, photography, film, television, fashion, and journalism, in high culture and popular culture. This is an eggheady way of saying I explored how the social categories of race and class interact in the meanings made by these representations. For the reason of ever-disappearing horizons of space and time, I had to cut a few of my planned chapters, one of which was an analysis of the film Out of the Furnace, starring Christian Bale, Woody Harrelson and Casey Affleck, which featured a controversial representation of the Ramapough Mountain People, who sued the filmmakers. They are portrayed in the film as brutal meth-addled outlaws.

In fact, the history of the Ramapough Mountain People is fascinating. They are what is known as a tri-racial isolate community. What that means is that in the early colonial history of America, runaway and freed slaves often intermarried with poor whites (sometimes newly released indentured labourers) and Indigenous people driven to remote areas by the process of colonization. While the Bureau of Indian Affairs of the US does not officially recognize the Ramapough Mountain Indians as a federal tribe, the state of New Jersey did recognize them as a tribe descended from the Lenape Delaware, an Algonquin speaking Indigenous group. The Ramapough Mountains consist of a few ridges and valleys on the border of New Jersey and New York, about 40 km from New York City.

Needless to say, I had to buy the book. In the foreword, Kenneth discusses how writing the book was inspired by the place-centred poetry of William Carlos Williams’ brilliant book Paterson and the Maximus poems of Charles Olsen. The foreword, written by Flavia Alaya draws the same comparisons, although my opinion of Lumpkin’s work differs from hers. While she sees more Olsen in Lumpkin, I see an absence of the endearing confusion of Olsen’s poetry, and more the crystalline clarity of Williams’ verse. Lumpkin figures that through a poetic exploration of place, through lenses such as geology, history, and high Romantic wanderings through the wilds of the mountains, he might better come to know the earth itself, a mission I wholeheartedly endorse and aspire to myself. After all, the book is published by Hug the Earth Publishing.

I was eager to read and savour this one because Paterson is my favourite book-length poem aside from Byron’s Don Juan (which I must admit I haven’t read all the way through yet – some day), Shakespeare’s plays, and Anne Carson’s The Autobiography of Red. In it, Williams polished a uniquely polyvocal and American idiom. Song of Ramapough hews closely to these influences, but one can also detect the influence of the encyclopedic-style chapters of Melville’s masterpiece Moby Dick, especially in the parts near the end that rather factually guide the reader through the geological composition and history of the place.

While there are some moments that gave me pause, such as when he discusses the Haudensaunee (the Indigenous group that includes the Six Nations of the Confederacy, whose political structure influenced the United States’ own) stripping all political authority of the women. This contradicts the important role that women played in the politics of the Haudensaunee as caretakers of not only children and the home, but of the land itself. It is possible that Lumpkin is referring to Haudensaunee-Lenape relations that I’m ignorant of, however. There are charming moments in the book, alternating a newspaper’s account of a robbery of a woman homesteader in the area in 1790 with the first buzzing of a yellow jacket experienced by the poet on the next page.

I particularly loved poem 6, which I will reproduce here in full to discuss:

No more a mountain

stronghold or fortress

around me, but lighted

oak is my home

 

flames whisper the dying

secret of the wood,

forgotten grandfathers

are my company

 

teaching me the songs

of the wind, warming the Earth

while speaking the oldest

of languages.

 

The bracing enjambement of this poem draws the reader along its thread, and the line break between the first and second stanza really teases out the doubled meaning of “lighted/oak is my home.” One thinks of a wooded mountain side in the tradition of Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” being pierced by straight-lined shafts of evening light. However, the second stanza transforms the “lighted” wood from dappled sunlight to campfire burning. Alternating all the historical data of the book with a phrase like “forgotten grandfathers are my company” really lends the next lines some gravitas in the spirit of receiving wisdom from ancestors. The oldest of languages is of course the interpretation of the earth itself, its animal trails, its grumbles, its tree rings, its soil, where to find water and food, etc.

 

Kenneth Lumpkin now lives in London, Ontario. I highly recommend his work if you love the poetry of the English or American Romantics such as Whitman, or if you love the work of Olsen and especially Williams. His latest book, available on Amazon, is Possum: Tales of the Wood. He has a total of five books available for sale there. Here is a link: Amazon.ca : Kenneth Lumpkin