In June one of America’s best-known authors, Joyce Carol Oates, tweeted her followers: “Remarkable new gathering of poems by William Heyen — Crazy Horse & the Custers. Surreal, soaring poetry and fantastical art by DeLoss McGraw.” Another tweet soon followed: “A fevered imagination has created Heyen’s Crazy Horse & the Custers — poems that read like snapshots of a vivid American past still living.”
Brockport poet Heyen’s poems about the lives of Oglala warrior Crazy Horse from his boyhood on the Plains to his death at Fort Robinson in 1877, and George Armstrong Custer from his West Point and Civil War experiences to his death at the 1876 Battle of Little Bighorn, had made their mark before. His Crazy Horse in Stillness (1996) received the Small Press Book Award, and was praised by Larry McMurtry, author of the Lonesome Dove books, as “a powerful book of poetry showing that the imagining and reimagining still goes on.”
In fact, Oates had described that earlier book as “a fantastic meditation that only Heyen might have dared – lyric, tender, appalling heart-rending, unique.” Poet Aaron Kramer wrote at the time, “Heyen [is] our century’s poet of memory and conscience. No reader of Crazy Horse in Stillness can fail to see how powerfully he keeps fulfilling that sacred mission.” And Leslie Marmon Silko, perhaps our most famous Native American author, wrote: “The old spirits don’t bother with just anyone; usually, poets who try to invoke the indigenous spirits of the Americas fall short. With Crazy Horse in Stillness, it’s as if the old spirits of the Great American Plains took possession of William Heyen and ‘rode’ his poetry on a journey of a thousand years into the past and into the future.”
And now, two decades later, Silko has responded to Heyen’s new book, Crazy Horse & the Custers, with another eagle whistle endorsement: “Now the cycle of poems is complete and encompasses the history of the Americas. In Crazy Horse & the Custers, Bill Heyen’s poems flash across glimmering quantum plains to illuminate fierce truths about the invasion and the eventual retaking of the Americas. I smile every time I think of this book.”
Heyen’s 1996 collection was published by Rochester’s BOA Editions. Crazy Horse & the Custers, which selects from that book and includes 128 new poems, is published by Nine Point Publishing in Maine, but there remain Rochester connections. This new book’s cover bears a painting by Oklahoma artist DeLoss McGraw that is in the permanent collection of Memorial Art Gallery. Thirty-two other paintings by McGraw in response to Heyen’s work appear in this book. When many of these were first exhibited at MAG in 2000, Director Grant Holcomb wrote that McGraw’s paintings, “with their deeply saturated grounds of Prussian blue, ultramarine and black, bespeak a melancholy and darkness that is part of the American experience.”
Heyen, the author of more than 30 books, is a retired Professor of English/Poet in Residence at The College at Brockport, former Senior Fulbright Lecturer in American Literature in Germany and Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of awards from the NEA and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, winner of the University of Rochester’s Andrew Eiseman Award and the Literary Artist of the Year Award from Writers & Books.
Upcoming is a limited letter-pressed edition of baseball poems — on the Babe (when a baby, Heyen bounced on Babe Ruth’s knee), Mickey, Billy, Casey, and Whitey. Also upcoming are a volume of selected and new Holocaust poems called The Candle (Heyen’s Shoah Train was a finalist in 2004 for the National Book Award) and a third volume of the journal he has been keeping since he was 24 (he’ll be 75 in November).
Provided information, file photo
