A Half-Life of Cardio-Pulmonary Function: Poems and Paintings, Eric Gansworth
by Christopher B.Teuton

from The Kenyon Review, Winter 2010

Eric Gansworth's self-portrait rides the spine of his second book of poetry and paintings, A Half-Life of Cardio-Pulmonary Function. Occupying the center of a triptych of paintings set side-by-side on the dust jacket and titled Cross-PolliNation: Imagination, Gansworth's face—expressionless, goateed, and with his signature John Lennon spectacles—stares straight ahead at us and occupies the frame, his chin and forehead sliced off by the border. Half his image is on the front cover, half on the back. The lenses of the poet's glasses are comprised of opposite sides of an Indian Head nickel, the buffalo side (the "bullshit side," his character Fiction Tunny tells us in his novel Smoke Dancing) looking at us on the front, the Indian head of the coin (the side of "tradition") staring out the back. Halves of a face seeing through halves of a coin, divided by the contents of a book. Gansworth's self-portrait is bookended by two paintings depicting the Three Sisters (corn, beans, and squash) of Haudenosaunee tradition. On the front cover, three women face the center of the triptych in alternating profiles, one looking down in sorrow, one looking defiantly ahead, and one with head tilted back in a joyous smile. On the back cover, corn, beans, and squash are layered upon one another. Three Sisters, three complementary ways of engaging the world.

Perhaps most significant in this opening gesture to the reader, however, is Gansworth's incorporation of strings of wampum, the shell beads synonymous with Iroquois diplomacy and communication, the victory of peaceful negotiation over bloody war. Through each painting of the triptych the wampum strings flow in waves of continuity and connection, beginning with six strings, and ending with five, one string disappearing in the poet's self-portrait.

Gansworth, who is Onondaga and grew up on the Tuscarora Indian Reservation in western New York, celebrates and explores his Haudenosaunee roots in all his work, from his use of cultural symbols in his poetry, painting, and fiction, to the very color of the print in this collection: a pale purple to match the color of wampum. Nickel eclipse: Iroquois moon: poems and illustrations (2000), Gansworth's first volume of poetry and paintings, was structured by the months of the Haudenosaunee calendar and punctuated by corresponding paintings of the phases of the moon, whose face is depicted as alternating sides of an Indian Head nickel. In Half-Life, the Three Sisters each model different responsibilities to defend, nourish, and support community, responsibilities which the poet shares in this work as well. But as the cover triptych depicts, the poet occupies a mediating, interpretive position from which he must see out of both lenses, a complex double-consciousness, which Gansworth negotiates with unflinching honesty.

Just as the Indian Head nickel, Gansworth's symbol of the literal commodification of American Indians sets one critical agenda for Half-Life, the Three Sisters and wampum strings of Haudenosaunee tradition offer a living reminder of the necessity of community, the imperatives of communication, and the importance of exchange across cultural and political lines. In "Cross PolliNation," Gansworth offers the Three Sisters as a model of critical engagement. Presented in two columns, one titled "Cross" and the other "PolliNation," the poem may be read separately in vertical columns, or together horizontally. Read vertically, "Cross" tells how corn, beans, and squash each serve one another in their mutual survival:

And look here, you three
sisters grow together
each providing things
the others lack: support,
food, protection ... (9)

And while the Three Sisters of "Cross" are reminded of "the ways / you put us all in danger / with each small tug" on one another, it is the tensions rather than connections that define the relationships in "PolliNation":

how you pull in opposition you
jerk on the strings of beads
like seed in the wind
leaning in unforeseen directions
moment, hour, day, week, in another
place you land ... (9)

Read together, "Cross PolliNation" offers a vision of the threats and unexpected results of cultural and political cross-fertilization, but these political and cultural tensions are balanced by the tradition of wampum and the promise of regeneration:

... Each time you offer                     us in endless variation,
the line up, we will add one              dark color, light color,
purple bead to your white strand       diluting your heritage
reminding you of the ways               we disappear for that moment
you put us all in danger                    then strengthen, regenerate ourselves,
with each small tug                          and embrace. (9)

Wampum, the carved quahog shells first introduced to the Haudenosaunee people by Hiawatha, serve as Gansworth's symbol of communication and connection. For hundreds of years, wampum have bound peace for the Iroquois Confederacy. Linked together in strings and woven into white and purple treaty belts, wampum serve both diplomatic and religious purposes, guaranteeing the authority of a message and the seal of a promise. Unlike alphabetic writing, wampum belts do not reproduce speech, rather they signal a different set of communicative values rooted in community. For the message of a wampum belt to continue, that message must be remembered in a living, human community.

Half-Life is concerned with these processes of remembrance and with exploring other mnemonic processes that shape our world. Reaching out to embrace multiple sources of artistic energy, but in a meticulous and resonant structure characteristic of Gansworth's writings, the volume is organized around the act of breathing and the beat of the heart. Its five sections include: "Inspiration"; "Beat: Where the Dawes Act Finds Its Voice"; "Pause: The Rain, the Rez, and Other Things"; "Beat: Learning to Speak"; and "Expiration." Gansworth's intimate, conversational voice offers a veiled emotional access on this poetic journey of one cardio-pulmonary cycle, foregrounding the poet's responses to the world and the inability to ever truly know the thoughts and motivations of friends, lovers, and family members. Distance is figured as disembodiment, so that the poet's unnamed lover remains genderless, a "you" known best through cycles of absence and return. A dead brother is accessed through yellowed photographs that tell only a partial story.

When graphic connections falter, Half-Life offers alternative natural and musical rhythms to highlight the beats we do share. In conversation with the long-standing American fascination with the orality and musicality of language, particularly in Whitman, Williams, Ginsberg, and Hughes, Gansworth explores musical resonances throughout the volume. Stylistically, his lines occupy that liminal space between breathlessness and breathfulness—"A Half-Life of Cardio-Pulmonary Function" offers us a three-page sentence with tumbling enjambments. Part of the journey of Half-Life is the poet's learning to measure and control breath and the rhythms of the body, which culminates in "Learning to Speak":

Waiting,
say nothing
until you hear
blood rushing then slowing
pushing then being pulled
drawn through the chambers
of your heart, listen
as those cells flow
through you (127)

What is crucial about the poet's education is that it occurs within a Haudenosaunee cultural context that allows for multiple other cultural influences, especially popular music, which Gansworth engages with loving respect. In "Cancellation Line," a momentary community comes together and separates in the course of waiting for U2 concert tickets. The five "Dakota" poems juxtapose the murder of John Lennon and the messages of his music with the possibilities and impossibilities of relationship:

We follow ambiguous signs along
endless looping paths, your hair a sunburst
in the autumn light when we finally stumble
upon the right walkway, enter
Strawberry Fields and find ourselves
at the circle of mosaic tiles, the top
floors of their apartment visible
through falling leaves but we don't
look, instead stare at one another, smile
across the universe, that singular word deeply
engraved in the stone, between us, commanding:

IMAGINE

and I do. (110)

Similarly, the breakup of the Beatles mirrors the breakup of the poet's family:

not knowing I was selecting
some of the last
recorded moments
of cohesion a different group
of brothers held
with one another. (54)

But just as popular music forges connections, it signals disconnections as well. In "(Not) Born in the U.S.A." it is through discussing the music of Bruce Springsteen that the poet and a friend expose their political allegiances. Missing the concert for Springsteen's The Rising becomes a metaphor for the dissolution of a politicized friendship:

In trying to rebuild the bridge
between you and me, the United States
and the reservation, I ask you to the return
concert at the end of the tour, but you list
all the reasons we cannot go, except the real one
that America never forgives indiscretions
except those from within its own borders. (103)

In "Where the Dawes Act Finds Its Voice Even Now in Northern New York," Gansworth confronts the history of colonialism and its effect on his voice, explaining why a water drum remains

silent, here, in my living room,
because though I know
how to document any source of American
Indian literature in proper MLA style
the art of stretching a water drum
to the right tension to find
its voice and allow it to sing
was lost to me two generations ago (40)

Although his family members forgot their Haudenosaunee tradition and were compelled to learn the "piccolo and piano joining the band" of the Carlisle Indian School, two generations later Gansworth uses whatever rhythms he chooses, incorporating equal parts "memory and invention" to create a new voice both in relation to and in spite of the past (41,125).

As the title suggests, Half-Life is equally interested in exploring that which decays, decreases, and is lost over time, and that which continues regardless. The weight of loss played heavily in this volume's conception. Gansworth's older brother's death and the burning down of his family's home provided contexts. But as a counterbalance to its bluesy explorations of the spaces between connections and the distances, both conceptual and spatial, between loved ones, friends, and lovers, Half-Life embraces breath and heartbeat as symbols of continuity amidst change. Witness the final lines of "A Half-Life of Cardio-Pulmonary Function," the one and only poem of the "Inspiration" section of the collection:

holding her breath as long as she
dared, letting his presence seep
out only when she could no longer
bear, leaving him to be a vapor ghost
on her window, a fog sure
to vanish even before she turned
from the window and here I am
years later living in that same

state, you miles away and I,
knowing how presence disperses
into air, wonder how long
I can hold my breath. (5)

While we live in a divided, entropic world, we also live in an embodied world of communities of people. Half-Life offers us multiple forms of exploring our connections and disconnections, the sources and meanings of our shared breaths.

Gansworth's blending of oral, written, and graphic elements in his works is not unprecedented in Native American literature, but what distinguishes his artistic approach is his commitment to creating a conversation between these different modes of artistic expression. N. Scott Momaday's use of Al Momaday's illustrations in The Way to Rainy Mountain may have initiated the use of visual images as textual counterpoints, and Leslie Marmon Silko's Storyteller incorporated photographic images, but Gansworth's paintings, illustrations, and musical references expand the reach of Native American poetic expression in promising new directions, opening fertile sources of inspiration. Like some of his peers, including Simon Ortiz, Kimberly Blaeser, Heid E. Erdrich, Mark Turcotte, and Louise Erdrich, Gansworth's verse shifts back and forth between our material world and the world of cultural myth and meaning. Arguably, Gansworth's poetry has the most in common with the work of Ray A. Young Bear. Like Gansworth's, Young Bear's poetry arises out of a focused cultural aesthetic, but is equally unwilling to see a necessary separation between the dynamics of Native existence and the resonances of the best of popular cultural music—for Young Bear, the Zombies, the Doors, and other rock bands of the '60s. With his paintings, Gansworth opens another artistic perspective.

Rather than creating something "new" to Native American art, Gansworth's formal innovations are best understood as reimagining a long tradition in indigenous expression. From Mesoamerican painted books that were read aloud, to Navajo sings that incorporate sand paintings and songs, Native American cultures have sought to balance the oral with the graphic, the spoken word and recorded thought. Gansworth has said, "I tend to look at my body of work, really, as a whole. The paintings, novels, short stories, poems, essays and photographs, even readings—they are all connected in some way" (Teuton 40). In A Half-Life of Cardio-Pulmonary Function: Poems and Paintings, Gansworth reimagines models of creating and sustaining the communities we share by traversing the boundaries of Native artistic expression. In this creative space, the oral, written, and graphic juxtapose each other as they do in the communities in which we live, shaped by wampum as well as American pop culture, the Three Sisters as well as our visual imagination. And always, the breath and heartbeats of new sources of artistic life are grounded in the flowing rhythms of the poet's voice and body, as stated in the final lines of the book:

a body in motion
a body at rest
a body in motion
a body at rest. (135)

Works Cited

Gansworth, Eric. Nickel eclipse: Iroquois moon: poems and illustrations. East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 2000.

---. Smoke Dancing: A Novel. East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 2004.

Teuton, Christopher. "A Conversation with Eric Gansworth." Cold Mountain Review 34.1 (Fall 2005): 31-44.

About the Author
Dr. Christopher B. Teuton, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, is associate professor of English at the University of Denver, where he teaches American Indian literature and Multicultural literature. Dr. Teuton is coeditor of Reasoning Together: the Native Critics Collective (University of Oklahoma Press, 2008) and author of Deep Waters: the Textual Continuum in American Indian Literature, forthcoming in fall 2010 by the University of Nebraska Press. Dr. Teuton is currently the Katrin H. Lamon Fellow at the School for Advanced Research on the Human Experience, where he is completing an edited collection of Cherokee oral traditional stories titled Stories of the Turtle Island Liars' Club.

The Kenyon Review
Gambier, Ohio

Guest Editor: Simon Ortiz
Editor: David H. Lynn
Managing Editor: Tyler Meier
Associate Editor: Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky
Poetry Editor: David Baker
Fiction Editor: Geeta Kothari
International Editor: John Kinsella