"Angle of Geese" by N. Scott Momaday

Text of poem here

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-The Stafford Challenge

-The Kiowa people

-Frederick Goddard Tuckerman

-Winters and Bowers

-"The Death Of Sitting Bear"

-"House Made Of Dawn"

-"The Way To Rainy Mountain"

-The Native American Renaissance

-Mixed meter, mixed KINDS of meter

-Remember, catalexis = without final unaccented syllable (opposite of acephaly)

-The inadequacy of language

-How should we mourn?

-The anecdote of the goose

-The Most Of It by Robert Frost

-The Conference of the Birds by Farrad Ud-din Attar (translated by Dick Davis!)

-Pythagorean mysticism

-The Tyger by William Blake 

-You have to feel it to believe it

-The poet's task 

Transcript

Versecraft 5-4: “Angle Of Geese” by N. Scott Momaday

         Hey there everyone, and welcome to another scrumptious episode of Versecraft. Before we dive in today, I’d like to give a shout out to Brian Rohr, a listener and poet who is currently organizing the 2024 Stafford Challenge. Named in honor of William Stafford, the challenge, which begins January 17th, 2024 and is absolutely free to join, is a commitment to writing one poem a day for an entire year. You’ll be supported in this herculean effort by regular emails, a private facebook group, and best of all, Guest Poet Zoom events featuring talks from literary figures such as Kim Stafford, Naomi Shihab Nye, Emmett Wheatfall, Lauren Camp, and Jessica Jacobs. If you think you’ve got what it takes for this mission, you can find out more at staffordchallenge.com, the link to which I’ll put in the show notes. 

         As always, if you enjoy today’s episode, please do actually consider leaving a tip, getting a paid subscription to the show, or buying a very fetching Versecraft t-shirt, all of which you can find at my links in the show notes. If you would like to support the show without any monetary commitment, please consider giving it a rating on Apple or Spotify, or putting your mouth to the grapevine and spreading the word. Thank you so much. 

         I hope you all had a lovely Thanksgiving, and that you’ve found many things to be grateful for as this year hastens to a close. I hope too however that the holiday has prompted you to give some thought for our indigenous citizens whose humanity and hospitality we celebrate, yet whose horrific suffering, historic mass extermination, and vibrant living cultures we must never ignore or forget. Before Native American Heritage month ends then, I would like to share the work of my favorite indigenous writer, N. Scott Momaday. 

         Navarre Scott Momaday was born in 1934 and is wonderfully still with us at the age of 89. Born in Oklahoma to a mixed-race mother and a Kiowa father, he was raised on a Navajo reservation in Arizona, where he had the opportunity to learn the folkways of both his Kiowa heritage and the surrounding Southwestern native cultures. 

The Kiowa, one of the great horse warrior and buffalo hunting tribes of the Great Plains, originated in Montana and Wyoming before sweeping down through Colorado into the Southern Prairie in the 19th century, where they often quarreled with other tribes before uniting with the Comanches, Apaches, and Cheyenne against the encroachments of American settlers. While they were eventually beaten back and confined to a reservation in Oklahoma, they produced many notable war chiefs in their fierce raids against the United States, including Dohasan, Satanta, Big Tree, and Sitting Bear. Throughout his career, Momaday has been a passionate spokesperson and storyteller for the Kiowa people, and has not only produced works of undeniable literary merit but served an invaluable role as memoirist and elegist for their diminishing way of life. 

Sometime during his undergraduate years at the University of New Mexico, Momaday decided that he wanted to become a poet. I am not sure of the exact circumstances, but somehow Yvor Winters, who as a young man had also lived in New Mexico and who was a devoted student of Native American poetics, came to know of Momaday and invited him to Stanford to study with him for his doctorate. This Momaday did, where he wrote his graduate dissertation on the fascinating American poet and future Versecraft feature Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, assembling the first definitive edition of that neglected poet’s works. 

Studying with Winters affected Momaday profoundly, and the former’s interest in post-symbolist poetics, syllabic verse, imagistic precision, and emotional restraint helped to give shape to Momaday’s most accomplished verse. Very touchingly, when Momaday released his selected poems, The Death of Sitting Bear, in 2020, he dedicated it “To the memory of Yvor Winters,” his mentor from sixty years before. It is probably safe to say that Momaday is one of the very last people alive who can say they had the privilege of studying with the sage of Palo Alto. After he graduated from Stanford, his first job was as an assistant professor at UC Santa Barbara, where he worked for several years alongside Edgar Bowers. 

Though Momaday saw himself primarily as a poet, he found surprise success as a novelist before he even had the chance to publish his first book of poetry. In 1968, just a few years after he graduated from Stanford, he published House Made Of Dawn, a bildungsroman loosely based on his own experiences. The novel was an enormous success, and has come to be seen as a trailblazing work of indigenous literature that paved the way for the so-called Native American Renaissance, a literary boom in Native writing that includes figures such as Leslie Marmon Silko, Joy Harjo, and Louise Erdrich. The year after the book was published, Momaday won the Pulitzer Prize, the first Native American to do so. His next book, The Way To Rainy Mountain, contained a few poems, but was in large part a folk history and memoir of the Kiowa people, and this too became a classic of its kind. Only in 1974, at the age of 40, did Momaday publish his first and most acclaimed book of poetry: Angle of Geese, the title poem of which is our feature for today. 

In subsequent years, Momaday continued to publish poetry, novels, memoirs, environmental writing, and accounts of Kiowa culture, and has also became renowned as a teacher of creative writing, putting together some of the first curricula to emphasize Native American myth and literature. He is tenured at Stanford, Berkeley, Santa Barbara, and Arizona, and has been a visiting professor at Columbia, Princeton, Moscow, and elsewhere. He is a veritable institution in himself, and it is an honor to be able to share his work with you today.

The central image of our poem, the titular angle of geese, which is to say the V-formation of flying geese, is one that has haunted Momaday his whole life, and which crops up again and again in his work as a leitmotif for the mathematical beauty of nature. Here, it is juxtaposed with the ineffability of grief and mortality to spiritually poignant effect. I will say that of all the poems we’ve examined on Versecraft, this is one of the most elliptically expressed—at times it can be obscure and difficult to follow. Once contextualized however, it reveals a remarkable austerity and concentration. The poem goes like this:

Angle Of Geese

How shall we adorn
 Recognition with our speech?—
 Now the dead firstborn
 Will lag in the wake of words.
 
 Custom intervenes;
 We are civil, something more:
 More than language means,
 The mute presence mulls and marks.
 
 Almost of a mind,
 We take measure of the loss;
 I am slow to find
 The mere margin of repose.
 
 And one November
 It was longer in the watch,
 As if forever,
 Of the huge ancestral goose.
 
 So much symmetry!—
 Like the pale angle of time
 And eternity.
 The great shape labored and fell.
 
 Quit of hope and hurt,
 It held a motionless gaze
 Wide of time, alert,
 On the dark distant flurry.

This poem is intriguing from a formal point of view, because it is a synthesis of two kinds of verse—syllabic and accentual syllabic. The entire poem is syllabic—each of the six stanzas consists of four lines which run 5, 7, 5, 7, syllables in length, suggesting the shape and subtle music of haiku or tanka. The hymn-like alternation of line lengths, the unusual diction and phrasing, and the metaphysical rumination may also remind us one of Momaday’s influences, Emily Dickinson. The poem is also however intermittently accentual-syllabic, and these moments are further identified by the rhyme scheme—in every stanza, the first and third lines are rhymed, and the second and fourth lines are unrhymed. With the notable exception of the fourth stanza, the first and third rhyming lines throughout the poem are in strict catalectic trochaic trimeter, and this consistency, highlighted by the rhymes, serves as a rhythmic anchor for the poem. We should also note that the second line of the first four out of six stanzas is in catalectic trochaic tetrameter. As such, while the poem is not uniformly in catalectic trochaic lines, the majority of it is, and this adds a greater degree of pattern and structure than we would see from syllabic verse alone. 

As I suggested, we encounter the highest degree of irregularity in the fourth stanza, at the poem’s midpoint. Unsurprisingly, this marks an abrupt turn in the poem, a complete change of scene—we have suddenly shifted from a wake for the dead child to an anecdote about a dying goose. The rhythmic disruption not only signals the shift, but clarifies that the true organizing factor of the poem is syllable count, not feet. Finally, we should also observe that alliteration plays a frequent role in adding musicality to this poem: the dominance of “m” sounds from lines 7-12 is particularly noteworthy. 

Let’s now go back and read the first half of the poem again:

How shall we adorn
 Recognition with our speech?—
 Now the dead firstborn
 Will lag in the wake of words.
 
 Custom intervenes;
 We are civil, something more:
 More than language means,
 The mute presence mulls and marks.
 
 Almost of a mind,
 We take measure of the loss;
 I am slow to find
 The mere margin of repose.

         The opening question: “How shall we adorn recognition with our speech?” immediately plunges us into the weeds of linguistic philosophy. It amounts to saying: “We cannot hope to use language to actually capture and express a complex mental event like recognition; at best, we can use language to decorate or beautify our experience. Yet even with these limited expectations, how can or should we go about this task?” In the next two lines, Momaday reveals that the recognition in question is one of profound magnitude and gravity: the death of a parent’s firstborn child. How can such a dreadful fact be adequately articulated? It cannot be. The dead first born will “lag in the wake of words.” That is, the words we use to process the pain will actually distance us from the brute fact, and as words move our minds toward consolation, the actuality of the child’s death will lag behind in their wake. We may also suspect that the word “wake” functions as a serious pun—this first part of the poem takes place at the child’s wake, where words of eulogy fail to capture the reality at hand. Moreover, once we have “awoken” to the possibility of using words to describe our situation, we have already distanced ourselves from pure experience. 

         We are further distanced from the immediacy of experience by custom, civility, and social mores. When Momaday says that we are “something more” than civil, he may be criticizing the trappings of modern Western civilization, which dictate a genteel and respectable response to the death of our loved ones. By contrast, the traditional Kiowa response to death was openly traumatic and violent, and often involved keening, the tearing of clothes, full-body exposure, head shaving, and even self-mutilation. Dramatic as such an approach may seem to many of us, it is perhaps a more authentic response to the facticity of death, a way of expressing the recognition of death and feeling of grief more truthfully than mere elegiac words allow. Momaday recognizes the difficulty of his position—he is a poet, working in the Western tradition, and words are his medium. At the same time, while he wishes to write about grief, he recognizes the insufficiency of words to do so. We are “something more” than animals, and civilization is a good thing. At the same time, at heart, we are also “something more” than civil, which is why civilization so often fails us. 

         The “mute presence,” the dead child, is “more than language means.” It “mulls and marks” those who come into contact with it. “Mull” is related to the word “mill,” and refers to grinding. When we “mull something over,” we are grinding down coarse mental facts into a usable flour of ideas. Here, the presence of the body marks the speaker in a way too deep for words, and grinds down his faith in the sovereignty of language and customs in the face of such a casualty. 

         Presumably speaking to the child’s parent, the speaker says that they are “almost of a mind,” a sympathy communicated beyond the use of words, and that both try to “take measure of the loss.” The speaker admits however that despite these efforts— despite the attempt to distance oneself from death through language, ritual, or rationality— he cannot find even the margin, the beginning of repose. To find the peace and acceptance he seeks, he must look elsewhere. 

         Let’s now begin the poem again, this time, reading all the way through:

How shall we adorn
 Recognition with our speech?—
 Now the dead firstborn
 Will lag in the wake of words.
 
 Custom intervenes;
 We are civil, something more:
 More than language means,
 The mute presence mulls and marks.
 
 Almost of a mind,
 We take measure of the loss;
 I am slow to find
 The mere margin of repose.
 
 And one November
 It was longer in the watch,
 As if forever,
 Of the huge ancestral goose.
 
 So much symmetry!—
 Like the pale angle of time
 And eternity.
 The great shape labored and fell.
 
 Quit of hope and hurt,
 It held a motionless gaze
 Wide of time, alert,
 On the dark distant flurry.

         We now shift into the anecdote of the goose, and in order to appreciate this part of the poem, I think it’s necessary to have a little backstory. The event referenced here refers to a real experience Momaday had as a teenager on a hunting expedition, which he first wrote about in an article for the Santa Fe New Mexican. Momaday describes the scene as follows:

“The geese were there, motionless on the water, riding like decoys. But though they were still, they were not calm. I could sense their wariness, the tension that was holding them in that stiff tentative attitude of alert. And suddenly they exploded from the water. They became a terrible, clamorous swarm, struggling to gain their element. Their great bodies, trailing water, seemed to heave under the wild, beating wings. They disintegrated into a blur of commotion, panic. There was a deafening roar; my heart was beating like the wings of the geese.

And just as suddenly out of this apparent chaos there emerged a perfect fluent symmetry. The geese assembled on the cold air, even as the river was still crumpled with their going, and formed a bright angle on the distance. Nothing could have been more beautiful, more wonderfully realized upon the vision of a single moment. Such beauty is inspirational in itself; for it exists for its own sake.

One of the wild, beautiful creatures remained in the river, mortally wounded, its side perforated with buckshot. I waded out into the hard, icy undercurrent and took it up in my arms. The living weight of it was very great, and with its life’s blood it warmed my frozen hands. I carried it for a long time. There was no longer any fear in its eyes, only something like sadness and yearning, until at last the eyes curdled in death. The great shape seemed perceptibly lighter, diminished in my hold, as if the ghost given up had gone at last to take its place in that pale angle in the long distance.”

         We note that when Momaday says that “the river was still crumpled with their going,” he echoes the image of “crumpled water” found in Robert Frost’s great poem, “The Most Of It,” which was a favorite of Winters. In the second half our poem, Momaday seeks to compress this complex story into twelve short lines, and if we are not familiar with it, we may get a little lost. He begins, “And one November it was longer in the watch.” Already we may be confused as to what the object of the word “it” is. My suspicion is that “it” has no object, but merely serves as a grammatical placeholder, similar to the phrases “it’s raining” or “it’s 3 o’clock.” 

One day in November, Momaday says, he and his companions were watching, seemingly forever, the flight of the “huge ancestral goose.” As we will understand when we read on, this “huge ancestral goose” is in fact the v-formation of geese moving together as one, bound by instinct together. This great spiritual bird formed out of the cooperation of many smaller physical birds strongly recalls the climax of the great Sufi Persian poem, The Conference Of The Birds, wherein a group of birds discover that the king of the birds whom they have been seeking is in fact the collective consciousness of all of them together, an allegorical lesson in pantheistic unity. Many variants of Native American religion are similar, believing that all natural phenomena are possessed by spirits, which are in turn manifestations of one great world spirit. The great ancestral goose is therefore not only an animistic entity, but a microcosm of God itself. 

Looking up at this prodigy, the speaker exclaims, “so much symmetry!” and compares the converging lines of the flying geese to the convergence of time and eternity. For Momaday, the flight of the geese as one unit not only demonstrates a spiritual kinship reminiscent of universal interconnectedness, but is a demonstration of the mathematical beauty inherent in nature, which is in turn a further sign of how the eternal is at work in the temporal. Mathematics is abstract and timeless in itself, yet at the same time is constantly at work in the material world in the form of physics. Momaday’s conception of time and eternity converging in nature’s symmetry is reminiscent of the Pythagorean notion that God is a mathematician and that the world is essentially made of numbers. We also cannot help but think of the “fearful symmetry” which William Blake perceived in nature’s invention of the tiger, another beautiful-to-the-point-of-mystical animal. 

Unfortunately, not all of the geese are able to flee the hunter’s shot and take to the sky. One “great shape labored and fell.” This goose, riddled with buckshot, is dying, and in so doing becomes “quit of hope and hurt.” Its gaze is “wide of time,” having entered into the eternity intimated by the formation of its fellow geese, and dimly perceives its companions in the sky as a “dark distant flurry.” 

The poem does not offer any sort of holistic conclusion, but instead invites the reader to make sense of the juxtaposition of its two independent scenes. Like a haiku writ large, we are offered a pair of images and must infer the semantic association between them. Clearly, the speaker calls to mind the hunting episode in order to cope with his grief at the child’s death. What consolation does he find there? The knowledge that death marks the end of hope and hurt; that impersonal divine beauty is eternal and omnipresent. Merely uttered in language, these are nothing but empty truisms, and that is part of Momaday’s point. Comfort lags in the wake of such words. One must not merely be preached to, but experience. One must be shown, not told, to borrow the old MFA chestnut. The speaker probes his memory and finds an experience which offers solace not because there is an easy moral platitude to be drawn from it, but because the necessary moral insight is embodied in the transcendent feelings of holding the dying goose, watching the flying V in the sky. These experiences, which betoken a world of fierce grace and melancholic dignity, are the revelation he must consult when words are not enough. The glorious, paradoxical task of the poet is to use words to offer an experience beyond words. 

With all that we’ve learned and explored, let’s read through this poem one last time, as an old friend: 

Angle Of Geese

How shall we adorn
 Recognition with our speech?—
 Now the dead firstborn
 Will lag in the wake of words.
 
 Custom intervenes;
 We are civil, something more:
 More than language means,
 The mute presence mulls and marks.
 
 Almost of a mind,
 We take measure of the loss;
 I am slow to find
 The mere margin of repose.
 
 And one November
 It was longer in the watch,
 As if forever,
 Of the huge ancestral goose.
 
 So much symmetry!—
 Like the pale angle of time
 And eternity.
 The great shape labored and fell.
 
 Quit of hope and hurt,
 It held a motionless gaze
 Wide of time, alert,
 On the dark distant flurry.