James Welch Essay - James Welch Poetry: American Poets Analysis

I have benefitted materially from being an Indian poet, James Welch wrote in a brief piece for the
South Dakota Review in 1973, but I just hope that in twenty or thirty years people will take me
seriously as a poet. Most students of Native American writing would agree that Welchs hopes have
been realized. In his observations, Welch noted that while he likes to use the legends, the traditions,
and the myths of his people, he also likes to write contemporary poetry about whats going on in
the reservations today. He suggested that he did not intend for his poems to be bitter or angry, but
that they do end up being very intense.
The fifty-nine poems in Riding the Earthboy Fortythe title refers to the forty acres leased by a
family named Earthboy that lived next to Welchs parents in northern Montanarange from eight to
thirty-five lines; nearly half of the poems run under twenty lines. The influence of the poems,
however, has little to do with their bulk or critical mass. Appearing as they did just two years after the
occupation of Alcatraz by the Indians of All Tribes in 1969 and two years before the siege at Wounded
Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in 1973, involving members of the American
Indian movement, Riding the Earthboy Forty might be regarded as propitiously timed: It was the right
book of poems at the right moment. Just three years earlier, in 1968, N. Scott Momaday had made a
notable impression on the literary establishment when his novel, House Made of Dawn, was awarded
a Pulitzer Prize.Various critics, including Alan R. Velie in Four American Indian Literary Masters: N.
Scott Momaday, James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Gerald Vizenor (1982), have traced the
surreal or deep imagery that dominates some of Welchs poems in the techniques of Peruvian poet
Cesar Vallejo. In Understanding James Welch (2000), Ron McFarland traces the apparent influences
of Welchs mentor and friend Richard Hugo on several of the poems. The poems vary considerably in
voice and accessibility. Some of the shortest and sparest poems, like the opening poem, Magic Fox,
which runs just eighteen clipped lines (the longest come to just six words), will mystify with their
dreamlike images that appear to have neither a narrative nor a cause-effect organization. Other poems,
such as Grandmas Man, which is composed in thirty relatively long lines, tend toward narrative,
and still others, such as In My First Hard Spring, depict characters from the reservation, described
usually from a first-person point of view.
When asked why he did not write poetry anymore, Kathryn W. Shanley writes in her introduction to
a special memorial issue of Studies in American Indian Literatures (fall, 2006) devoted to James
Welch, Jim often commented that he would like to believe poetry resides within his prose. Most
readers of Welchs novels would likely assent. However, this is not to devalue the achievement of his
single volume of poems. Philip H. Round describes Riding the Earthboy Forty as a watershed in
American poetry that has made a...
Harlem, Montana: Just Off the Reservation Themes
In Welchs narrative poem Harlem, Montana: Just Off the Reservation, he paints a dismal picture of
the reservation town of Harlem, Montana. His portrayal of the hopeless inhabitants of Harlem who are
steeped in a world of alcohol and bigotry serves to make readers aware of the plight that many other
Native American communities struggle with as they seek to establish healthier environments that will
provide hope for future members of North Americas Indian tribes.
The narrator himself appears to be saying goodbye to the uncomfortable memories that he associates
with his days of living on or near the reservation: Goodbye, goodbye, Harlem on the rocks,/ So
bigoted, you forget the latest joke. Welch carefully describes the underlying bigotry that is a large
part of life as he sees it in Harlem. He traces the way in which the whites in the community survive by
running for office and how the outsiders he calls the Turks seek to reap the financial benefits of
Harlem by fleecing the town that does not know how to take care of its own people. Welch further
labels the many outsiders to the community as nice. However, the people of Harlem eventually
learn to hate them as well, because their money and their lifestyles become visible signs that suggest
these outsiders have superior lifestyles. The Hutterites, who are tough and who are well respected
by the community for their skills as farmers, are labeled nice, but the narrator goes on to say, we
hate them.

Welchs poem seems to come from the heart of a man who is both angry and ashamed of the impact
that the reservation town of Harlem has had and continues to have on the narrators life. The
consistant use of the pronoun we suggests that the poet fully realizes he is in many ways still a
member of the Harlem community and furthermore that Harlem will probably outlive all its
inhabitants, who have tried to escape the hold that the town has had on their lives: When you die, if
you die. . . . Although Harlem is filled with bigoted people who are half-dead from the effects of
alcohol, the reservation town will survive and Harlem will remain ambivalent to the destructive social
conditions that define the town and sustain its identity.
James Welch 1940-2003
American poet, novelist, and nonfiction writer.
Acknowledged as one of the most prominent writers of Native American heritage, Welch focused his
literary output on themes related to his rich ancestral culture. His poetry is often compared to that of
authors Richard Hugo, Cesar Vallejo, James Wright, and Robert Bly. Riding the Earthboy 40 (1971),
Welch's first published work and only volume of poetry, has received significant critical attention for
its imagery, which combines surrealist motifs and traditional American Indian symbols. Moreover,
critics consider Welch's treatment of the Native American experience within this volume to have been
a major step toward modernizing the subject of the American West.
Biographical Information
Welch was born in Browning, Montana, on the Blackfeet reservation near Glacier National Park.
Enrolled as a member of the Blackfeet tribe in the tradition of his father, Welch was also half Gros
Ventre on his mother's side. Subsequent to studying on the Blackfeet and Fort Belknap reservations as
a boy, Welch graduated from Washburn High School in Minnesota. After attending the University of
Minnesota and Northern Montana College, Welch transferred to the University of Montana, where he
graduated in 1965. While pursuing an M.F.A. at Montana, he met the poet Richard Hugo. Heavily
influenced by Hugo, Welch published Riding the Earthboy 40 in 1971, a volume of poetry centered on
the Native American experience. Welch's first novel, Winter in the Blood (1974), continued to explore
this theme, as would the remainder of his life's work. While teaching creative writing and
contemporary Native American literature at Cornell University, Welch composed the novel Fools
Crow (1986), which earned the American Book Award, the Pacific Northwest Book Award, and the
Los Angeles Times Book Prize. In 1997, Welch received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the
Native Writers Circle. His novel The Heartsong of Charging Elk (2000) brought him another Pacific
Northwest Book Award in 2001. Welch died of a heart attack in Missoula, Montana, on August 4,
2003.
Major Poetic Works
Drawing upon his Blackfeet and Gros Ventre background, Welch employed simple language and
laconic phrasing to impart complex messages about the plight of tribal people in contemporary
society. Welch expressed a sense of dislocation and disenchantment in the poems of Riding the
Earthboy 40. While some poems are straightforward in approach and realistic in detail, others adopt
an abstract and surrealistic style. In the section of the volume entitled Knives, Welch utilized ironic
humor and the illogical language characteristic of the European surrealist method to highlight the
absurdity of reservation cultureliving concurrently within, and apart from, American society at
large. In contrast, Welch used a more direct approach in Plea to Those Who Matter, candidly
addressing white society in order to satirize incorrect assumptions about Native Americans. In
Going to Remake the World, Welch applied straightforward, conversational speech to describe a
scene in a small town, but interjected fragmented and puzzling lines to produce a dream-like anxiety,
demonstrating an intermingling of complexity and simplicity. The eponymous poem Riding the
Earthboy 40, the language of which presents an exemplary combination of simplicity, mythological
suggestion, and absurd humor, exhibits Welch's thematic concern with the relationship of Native
Americans to the land. The title of Welch's poetry collection refers to the property adjacent to his
childhood home on the Blackfeet reservationa forty-acre parcel owned by the Earthboy family.
Critical Reception

Welch is consistently cited as a seminal figure in the history of Native American poetry. While
occasionally derided for an overuse of surrealistic language and cryptic imagery, critics often praise
Welch's ability to abstain from overtly political messages. By avoiding such tendencies, Welch's verse
is lauded for its universality. Although Welch's poetry is strongly associated with the American West,
the work of a poet as talented, as diverse, and as complex as James Welch, declares critic Peter
Wild, fortunately resists categorizing.