Tai-Me to Rainy Mountain: The Makings of American Indian Literature

Abstract

-N. Scott Momaday, The Gourd Dancer What do you? the owlish owner of Serendipity Books quizzed me over the cash register. teach Native American Studies. Indians, eh, then you might be interested in this- He handed me packaged catalogue of collectors' editions and manuscripts, seventy-six writers including Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, J.V. Cunningham, and Thom Gun, clustered around Ivor Winters. is right in the middle, the bookseller smiled cryptically, stood up sporting baseball cap, and walked away. End of powwow. Outside on Shattuck Avenue I tore open the envelope and turned to MOMADAY (N. Scott). Peter Howard noted the Kiowa writer's 1963 doctorate at Stanford and added that Ivor Winters in Forms of Discovery considered him writer of distinguished prose, indeed a great next to Tuckerman, Dickinson, Stevens, Bogan, and Bowers. Such was Wintersian tradition, but I would remind the reader of my definition of great poet: poet who has written at least one great poem. Momaday's verse of distinction was Before an Old Painting of the Crucifixion in The Southern Review. Peter Howard was selling twenty-three Momaday collectors' items for ballpark figure of $4371.45, not all that unreasonable, since I had just seen $60,000 Gorman canvas in Santa Fe. Indian art was in, in America. Howard's package included $275 presentation edition of the 1969 Pulitzer Prize novel, House Made ofDawn, to Gus Blaisdell, then editor at the University of New Mexico Press, handmade first