Harlan Atwater grew up in Wellpinit, Washington, on the Spokane Indian Reservation in eastern Washington State. His work has appeared in Experimental Rice, Seattle Poetry Now!, and The Left Heart of Love. The author of a book of poems, In the Reservation of My Mind, he lives in Seattle and is currently a warehouse supply clerk during the day while writing and performing his poems long into the night.
How did you start writing?
Well, coming from a culture where the oral tradition is so valued, and where storytelling is an everyday and informal part of life, I think I was born and trained to tell stories, in some sense. Of course, this country isn’t just Indian, is it? And it’s certainly the farthest thing from sacred. I am the child and grandchild of poor Indians, and since none of them ever put pen to paper, it never occurred to me I could try to be a poet. I didn’t know any poets or poems. But a few years ago, I took a poetry class with Jenny Shandy. She was on this sort of mission to teach poetry to the working class. She called it “Blue Collars, White Pages, True Stories,” and I was the only one who survived the whole class. There were ten of us when the class started. Ten weeks later, I was the last one. Jenny just kept giving me poetry books to read. I read over a hundred books of poems that year. That was my education. Jenny was white, so she gave me mostly white classical poets to read. I had to go out and find the Indian poets, the black poets, the Chicanos, you know, all the revolutionaries. I loved it all, so I guess I’m trying to combine it all, the white classicism with the dark-skinned rebellion.
How do your poem ideas come to you?
Well, shoot, everything I write is pretty autobiographical, so you could say I’m only interested in the stuff that really happens. There’s been so much junk written about Indians, you know? So much romanticism and stereotyping. I’m just trying to be authentic, you know? If you look at my poems, if you really study them, I think you’re going to find I’m writing the most authentic Indian poems that have ever been written. I’m trying to help people understand Indians. I’m trying to make the world a better place, full of more love and understanding.
How do you know when an idea is worth pursuing?
Well, I don’t mean to sound hokey, but it’s all about the elders, you know? If I think the tribal elders would love the idea, then to me, it’s an idea worth turning into a poem, you know?
What is your process like for working on a poem?
It’s all about ceremony. As an Indian, you learn about these sacred spaces. Sometimes, when you’re lucky and prepared, you find yourself in a sacred space, and the poems come to you. Shoot, I’m putting ink to paper, you could say, but I don’t always feel like I’m the one writing the poem. Sometimes my whole tribe is writing the poem with me. And I feel best about the poems when I look out in the audience and see a bunch of Indian faces. I mean, the best thing to me is when Indians come up to me and say, “Hey, man, that poem was me, that was my life.” That’s when I feel like I’m doing the best work.
What writers have influenced your work, and whom do you admire now?
Well, I could name a dozen writers, a hundred poets, I love and respect. But I guess I am most influenced by the natural rhythms of the world, you know? Late at night, I go outside and listen to the wind. That’s all the wisdom I need. I mean, I love books, but shoot, most of the world’s wisdom is not contained in books.
There is a lot of humor in your poems, often in the face of tragedy. Where does your sense of humor come from?
My grandmother was the funniest person I’ve ever known and the most traditional. She was a sacred person in our tribe and told the dirtiest jokes, you know? So, obviously, I grew up with the idea the sacred and profane are linked, you know? I guess you’d say my sense of humor is genetic.
Do you consider yourself a radical?
I believe in the essential goodness of human beings, and if that’s being radical, then I guess I’m a radical. I believe human beings would rather hop in bed with each other and do tender things to each other than run through the jungle and shoot each other. If that’s a radical thought, then I’m a radical. I believe that poetry can save the world. And shoot, that one has always been a radical thought, I guess. So maybe I am a radical, you know?
What do you think will happen to American Indians in the future?
Well, shoot, my grandfather, he was a shaman, he used to tell me that tribal stories foretold the coming of the white man. “Grandson,” he’d say to me, “we always knew the white man was coming. We knew the exact date. We knew he’d eat all the food in the house and poop on the living room carpet.” My grandfather was so funny, you know? And he’d tell me that the tribal stories also foretold the white man’s leaving. “Grandson,” he’d say, “we always knew the white man was coming, and we’ve always known he was leaving.” So, what’s the future of Indians? Well, someday soon, I think we’re going to have a lot more breathing room.
Corliss was puzzled by the interview. Harlan Atwater seemed to be an immodest poet who claimed to be highly sacred and traditional and connected to his tribe, but his tribe had never heard of him. He seemed peacefully unaware of his arrogance and pretension. Most important, Corliss’s mother had never heard of him. No Spokane Indian had ever known him. Exactly who were this mythical grandmother and grandfather who’d lived on the reservation? Who was Harlan Atwater? And where was he? He must be a fraud, and yet he was funny and hopeful, so maybe he was a funny, hopeful, and self-absorbed fraud.
Corliss kept searching for more information about Atwater. She found him listed in the 1971 edition of Who’s Who Among American Writers. There was a Seattle address and phone number. Corliss picked up the phone and dialed the number. Naturally, it was pointless. That number was thirty-three years old. The phone rang a dozen times. What kind of American doesn’t have an answering machine or voice mail? But after ten more rings, as Corliss wondered why in the hell she let it ring so long, she was surprised to hear somebody answer.
“Hello,” a man said. He was tired or angry or both or didn’t have any phone manners. He sounded exactly like a man who wouldn’t have an answering machine or voice mail.
“Yes, hello, my name is Corliss Joseph, and I—”
“Is this a sales call?”
She knew he’d hang up if she didn’t say the exact right thing.
“Are you in the reservation of your mind?” she asked and heard silence from the other end. He didn’t hang up, so she knew she’d asked the right question. But maybe he was calling the police on another phone line: Hello, Officer, I’m calling to report a poetry stalker. Yes, I’m serious, Officer. I’m completely serious. I am a poet, and a lovely young woman is stalking me. Stop laughing at me, Officer.
“Hello?” she asked. “Are you there?”
“Who are you?” he asked.
“I’m looking for, well, I found this book by a man named Harlan Atwater—”
“Where’d you find this book?”
“In the Washington State University library. I’m a student here.”
“What the hell do you want from me?”
Excited, she spoke quickly. “Well, this used to be Harlan Atwater’s phone number, so I called it.”
“It’s still Harlan Atwater’s phone number,” the man said.
“Wow, are you him?”
“I used that name when I wrote poems.”
Corliss couldn’t believe she was talking to the one and only Harlan Atwater. Once again, she felt she’d been chosen for a special mission. She had so many questions to ask, but she knew she needed to be careful. This mysterious man seemed to be fragile and suspicious of her, and she needed to earn his trust. She couldn’t interrogate him. She couldn’t shine a bright light in his face and ask him if he was a fraud.
“Your poems are very good,” she said, hoping flattery would work. It usually worked.
“Don’t try to flatter me,” he said. “Those poems are mostly crap. I was a young man with more scrotum than common sense.”
“
Well, I think they’re good. Most of them, anyway.”
“Who the hell are you?”
“I’m a Spokane Indian. I’m an English literature major here.”
“Oh, God, you’re an Indian?”
“Well, mostly. Fifteen sixteenths, to be exact.”
“So, fifteen sixteenths of you is studying the literature of the other one sixteenth of you?”
“I suppose that’s one way to put it.”
“Shoot, it’s been a long time since I talked to an Indian.”
“Really? Aren’t you Indian?”
“I’m of the urban variety, bottled in 1947.”
“You’re Spokane, enit?”
“That’s what I was born, but I haven’t been to the rez in thirty years, and you’re the first Spokane I’ve talked to in maybe twenty years. So if I’m still Spokane, I’m not a very good one.”
Self-deprecating and bitter, he certainly talked like an Indian. Corliss liked him.
“I’ve got so many things I want to ask you,” she said. “I don’t even know where to begin.”
“What, you think you’re going to interview me?”
“Well, no, I’m not a journalist or anything. This is just for me.”
“Listen, kid, I’m impressed you found my book of poems. Shoot, I only printed up about three hundred of them, and I lost most of them. Hell, I’m flattered you found me. But I didn’t want to be found. So, listen, I’m really impressed you’re in college. I’m proud of you. I know how tough that is. So, knock them dead, make lots of money, and never call me again, okay?”
He hung up before Corliss could respond. She sat quietly for a moment, wondering why it had ended so abruptly. She’d searched for the man, found him, and didn’t like what had happened. Corliss was confused, hurt, and angry. Long ago, as part of the passage into adulthood, young Indians used to wander into the wilderness in search of a vision, in search of meaning and definition. Who am I? Who am I supposed to be? Ancient questions answered by ancient ceremonies. Maybe Corliss couldn’t climb a mountain and starve herself into self-revealing hallucinations. Maybe she’d never find her spirit animal, her ethereal guide through the material world. Maybe she was only a confused indigenous woman negotiating her way through a colonial maze, but she was one Indian who had good credit and knew how to use her Visa card.
Eighteen hours later, Corliss stepped off the Greyhound in downtown Seattle and stared up at the skyscrapers. Though it was a five-hour drive from Spokane, Corliss had never been to Seattle. She’d never traveled farther than 110 miles from the house where she grew up. The big city felt exciting and dangerous to her. Great things happened in big cities. She could count on one hand the amazing people who’d grown up in Spokane, but hundreds of superheroes had lived in Seattle. Jimi Hendrix! Kurt Cobain! Bruce Lee! What about Paris, Rome, and New York City? You could stand on Houston Street in Lower Manhattan, throw a rock in some random direction, and hit a great poet in the head. If human beings possessed endless possibilities, then cities contained exponential hopes. As she walked away from the bus station through the rainy, musty streets of Seattle, Corliss thought of Homer: “Tell me, O Muse, of that ingenious hero who traveled far and wide after he sacked the famous town of Troy.” She was no Odysseus, and her eight-hour bus ride hardly qualified as an odyssey. But maybe Odysseus wasn’t all that heroic, either, Corliss thought. He was a drug addict and thief who abused the disabled. That giant might have been tall and strong, Corliss thought, but he still had only one eye. It’s easy to elude a monster with poor depth perception. Odysseus cheated on his wife, and disguised himself as a potential lover so he could spy on her, and eventually slaughtered all of her suitors before he identified himself. He was also a romantic fool who believed his wife stayed faithful during the twenty years he was missing and presumed dead. Self-serving and vain, he sacrificed six of his men so he could survive a monster attack. In the very end, when all of his enemies had massed to kill him, Odysseus was saved by the intervention of a god who had a romantic crush on him. If one thought about it, and Corliss had often thought about it, the epic poem was foremost a powerful piece of military propaganda. Homer had transformed a lying colonial asshole into one of the most admired literary figures in human history. So, Corliss asked, what lessons could we learn from Homer? To be considered epic, one needed only to employ an epic biographer. Since Corliss was telling her own story, she decided it was an autobiographical epic. Hell, maybe she was Homer. Maybe she was Odysseus. Maybe everybody was a descendant of Homer and Odysseus. Maybe every human journey was epic.
As she walked and marveled at the architecture, at the depth and breadth and width of the city, Corliss saw a homeless man begging for change outside a McDonald’s and decided he could be epic. He was dirty and had wrapped an old blanket around his shoulders for warmth, but his eyes were bright and impossibly blue, and he stood with a proud and defiant posture. This handsome homeless man was not defeated. He was still fighting his monsters, and maybe he’d someday win. If he won, maybe he’d write an epic poem about his journey back from the darkness. Okay, so maybe I’m romantic, Corliss thought, but somebody is supposed to be romantic. Some warrior is supposed to go to war against the imperial forces of cynicism and irony. I am a sentimental soldier, Corliss thought, and I am going to befriend this homeless man, no matter how crazy he might be.
“Hello,” she said to him.
“Hey,” he said. “You got any spare change?”
“All I’ve got is a credit card and hope,” she said.
“Having a credit card means somebody knows you’re alive. Somebody cares if you keep on living.”
He smelled like five gallons of cheap wine and hard times.
“Listen,” Corliss said. “McDonald’s takes credit cards. I’ll buy you a Super Value Meal if you tell me where I can find this address.”
She showed him the paper on which she’d written down Harlan Atwater’s last known place of residence.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll tell you where that is. You don’t have to buy me no lunch.”
“You give me directions out of the goodness of your heart. And I’ll buy you lunch out of the goodness of my heart.”
“That sounds like a safe and sane human interaction.”
Inside, they both ordered Quarter Pounders, french fries, and chocolate shakes, and shared a small table at the front window. A homeless old man and a romantic young woman! A strange couple, but only if you looked at the surface, if you used five senses. Because she was Indian, displaced by colonial rule, Corliss had always been approximately homeless. Like the homeless, she lived a dangerous and random life. Unlike landed white men, she didn’t need to climb mountains to experience mystic panic. All she needed was to set her alarm clock for the next morning, wake when it rang, and go to class. College was an extreme sport for an Indian woman. Maybe ESPN2 should send a camera crew to cover her academic career. Maybe she should be awarded gold medals for taking American history and not shooting everybody during the hour and a half in which they covered five hundred years of Indian history. If pushed, Corliss knew she could go crazy. She was a paranoid schizophrenic in waiting. Maybe all the crazy homeless Indians were former college students who’d heard about manifest destiny one too many times.
Corliss and the homeless white man ate in silence. He was too hungry to talk. She didn’t know what to say.
“Thank you,” he said after he’d finished. “Thank you for the acknowledgment of my humanity. A man like me doesn’t get to be human much.”
“Can I ask you a personal question?” she asked.
“You can ask me a human question, yes.”
“How’d you end up homeless? You’re obviously a smart man, talking the way you do. I know smart doesn’t guarantee anything, but still, what happened?”
“I just fell out of love with the world.”
“I understand how that goes. I’m not so sure about the world myself, but was there anything in particular?”
??
?First of all, I am nuts. Diagnosed and prescribed. But there’s all sorts of nutcases making millions and billions of dollars in this country. That Ted Turner, for example, is a crazy rat living in a gold-plated outhouse. But I got this particular kind of nuts, you know? I got a pathological need for respect.”
“I’ve never heard of that condition.”
“Yeah, ain’t no Jerry Lewis running a telethon for my kind of sickness. The thing is, I should have been getting respect. I was an economics professor at St. Jerome the Second University here in Seattle. A fine institution of higher education.”
“That’s why you’re so smart.”
“Knowing economics only means you know numbers. Doesn’t mean you know people. Anyway, I hated my job. I hated the kids. I hated my colleagues. I hated money. And I felt like none of them respected me, you know? I felt their disrespect growing all around me. I felt suffocated by their disrespect. So one day, I just walked out in the campus center, you know, right there on the green, green Roman Catholic grass, and started shouting.”
Corliss could feel the heat from this man’s mania. It was familiar and warm.
“What did you shout?” she asked.
“I kept shouting, ‘I want some respect! I want some respect!’ I shouted it all day and all night. And nobody gave me any respect. I was asking directly for it, and people just kept walking around me. Avoiding me. Not even looking at me. Not even acknowledging me. Hundreds of people walked by me. Thousands. Then finally, twenty-seven hours after I started, one of my students, a young woman by the name of Melissa, a kind person who was terrible with numbers, came up to me, hugged me very close, and whispered, ‘I respect you, Professor Williams, I respect you.’ I started crying. Weeping. Those tears that start from your bowels and roar up through your stomach and heart and lungs and out of your mouth. Do you know the kind of tears of which I’m speaking?”
“Yes, yes,” she said. “Of course I do.”
“Yes. So I started crying, and I kept crying, and I couldn’t stop crying no matter how hard I tried. They tell me I cried for two weeks straight, but all I remember is that first day. I took a leave of absence from school, sold my house, and spent my money in a year, and now I’m here, relying, as they say, on the kindness of strangers.”