Q5: You talk about the non-Indian being more culturally deprived. How do you see the West?

The West as a landscape is impressive, but in terms of the American mind, in terms of the mentality, it’s not the landscape so much as the imagining of the land and the history. We talk about the American imagination and we wouldn’t have it, as it is, without the Wild West that is so important to Americans—and to Europeans, for that matter. They’re in love with it.

So you look at it as a landscape, and it’s a fantastic landscape—Grand Canyon, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming. But it’s this imagined West, the West of the dime novel that is equally important in our imagination. Of course, the Indian stands right there in the crux. We don’t understand him particularly well. He has thirty thousand years of experience on this continent and that is worth something. What is it worth? When I said the non-Indian is more culturally deprived, that is what I meant. The Indian knows who he is, generally speaking. Not that he doesn’t have a crisis of identity. But he knows who he is to a greater extent than most Americans know who they are. This is part of his ancestral experience. He can look at the land and say It’s been my land. It was my father’s land, and his and his and his and his and his and his and his. Very few contemporary non-Indian Americans can look at the land in that way, and that’s a deprivation.

In order to understand who you are, you have to know something about place and how you invest place. You have to have a sense of roots.
That’s very hard to come by in contemporary America. The Indian can do it. Most of us have a very hard time.

Q6: What are the most important differences between the Indian world and the non-Indian world in terms of language?

The American Indian doesn’t have any written languages. We’re moving in that direction. We now have several orthographies for several languages, but by and large, there is no Indian writing. What there is in its stead is a very powerful oral tradition and an understanding of language that is more fundamental than the written language. All of us, even the non-Indian, have this oral tradition in his background. For example, we can point at Beowulf and Chaucer, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and things like that. In the Bible, the Book of Job is a poem, the spoken word. So there is the wonderful oral tradition but for most Westerners, it’s so far back and remote it doesn’t do us much good. Whereas the Indian has a much more immediate sense of that oral tradition and it’s very much alive.

I’ve spent a large part of my life talking about the two traditions, comparing them. The oral tradition is more vital. It demands more of you. It requires more thinking and feeling than writing does. Writing is terribly important. The invention of writing is a wonderful invention—even though it has cost us something in terms of understanding the importance of language, the magic of language, the intrinsic power of language. It gives us a false security, which you don’t have in the oral tradition. Marks on a page are more permanent in a sense than the spoken word, but they don’t demand the same degree of responsibility in terms of speaking, and hearing, and remembering.

Q7: Do you spend a lot of time out on the landscape for inspiration?

Quite a bit. I’m an amateur photographer. I find taking photographs improves your vision in certain ways. You learn how to compose through the lens and I find that very helpful in poetry. You learn how to see things.

Q8: The photography and the painting, how do they integrate with your writing life?

Well, the thing I want to do most is write, and I want to write poetry. That I do consistently. Writing other kinds of things I do sporadically and painting is sporadic. They all give me satisfaction. They all express my spirit, writing poetry most of all. I view painting as a kind of relaxation. Writing requires a great deal of concentration.

Q9: What does your workday look like?

On a good day, I can go to my computer and my pad and I can work out the skeleton of a poem, usually. The morning is the best. I’m good for about four hours of writing. On my best schedule, I was getting up around five, preparing myself for an hour or two, and sitting down to the typewriter around seven and working until noon.

Q10: You’re always on the move. How do you fit your writing life into such a busy schedule?

I write where I can. I think it’s always good to have a certain place where you become accustomed to the atmosphere and you have the reference books you need around you. I can also write on the road. I think that’s one of the great benefits of writing, you can do it anywhere. When I’m working at a computer, I always have a pad next to me so I can jot things down in longhand and then work it out on the computer.

I have a lot on my plate in the sense that I’m pretty much a full-time caregiver right now. My wife has cancer and requires a lot of attention and I chauffeur her to her doctor and to therapy fairly often. So finding time to write is a little tricky. But there are always pockets in the day where I can get off to myself and sit down and write. I give lectures, maybe 10 a year, and they always involve travel so it’s an investment of time. I can write on a plane and sleep on a plane. I always wake up with an idea.

Q11: What are you working on now that must get done?

I simply want to write the best things that I can in the time I have. I think I can do that by writing poetry. By writing more of it, and trying different ways of writing it. I think my next publication is probably going to be new and selected poems. I have maybe 50 poems that have not been published.

As I grow older, I find more and more people don’t have a sufficient understanding of poetry. Very few people know what it is, or ought to be. When I first went to Russia in the ‘70s, I was amazed at how the Russians regarded poetry. You got on the metro and five people would be reading books of poetry. When a poet gave a reading, why, it was standing room only. Television was just coming into Russia so I’m sure it has had a negative influence on the appreciation of poetry, but I don’t know. I wish we could find five people on a bus reading poetry. It’s not likely.

I’m vitally interested in preserving culture. I have a foundation called The Buffalo Trust and its main purpose is to help indigenous peoples hold on to their culture. We are building an archive at Rainy Mountain in the southwestern part of Oklahoma, which will be a meeting place, a means of preserving documents and photographs and music and such things.

Q12: What are you reading?

I recently read Cormac McCarthy’s, The Road. I thought it was a tour de force, an interesting book on many accounts. Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I’m reading Carlisle vs. Army about the famous football game of 1912. It’s interesting, an easy read.