Metaphor and Metamorphosis

Bitsui, who is Diné of the Tódích'íi'nii (Bitter Water Clan), born for the Tłizíłaaní (Many Goats Clan), roots his work in a Diné-influenced metaphorical understanding of the world and to a lesser extent, in surrealism—Spanish surrealism with its horses and tambourines, as opposed to central European surrealism with its umbrellas and sewing machines. His poems, therefore, resist explication, but they reward the reader with fire and mystery and scope. Bitsui's most recent book, Flood Song, is a book-length panoptic poem, a song that's also about a song that travels land and time, that has a physical presence in the world, metaphorically and literally affecting the course of events.

It's impossible to suggest the scope of a book-length poem in this space, but Flood Song is, in some sense, holographic—in that any sample both contains and contributes to the whole. In the section here, Bitsui tracks the song, the flood song that "sunflowers a yield sign"—an image that seems mystifying, unless you drive along Santa Fe streets during our current monsoon season and see the wild sunflowers that are sprouting along our roadsides. In places like Iowa City, the verbing of nouns is the mark of a poet who is the very model of a modern major versifier. Though he looks to be partaking in the trend by making "sunflower" a verb, I'd suggest that Bitsui's impulse to verb probably runs deeper: "Diné Bizaad," he has written, "is my first language. It is very imagistic and descriptive and also very verb driven; everybody in my family spoke metaphorically…and poetically about things."

The flood song, which is also the rain and the flowing water itself, is everywhere, doing everything; the song, in the current parlance, has agency—it makes things happen. In an interview in Guernica magazine, Bitsui talked about this sense of language and song: "I come from a traditional family, and I was taught to view the world metaphorically from a young age. Our physical world had to be attended to ceremoniously and often such ritual devices involved the act of 'speaking' a world into a balance. Words have power to transform or create a situation."

Bitsui is also a painter (his painting "Drought" graces the cover of Flood Song), whose largely abstract paintings, like his poems, are maps of metaphor and metamorphosis and juxtaposition much like the end of this passage, when the images, both natural and mechanical, accumulate and shift. The shift from yellow and green to black—the crows, obsidian, starlings, coal, the black dot of the pass—suggests, in Diné symbology—a movement from west (yellow) to north (black) and a flight back to the south, when the black is left behind. But perhaps the most intriguing line—"a pebble splits the tribe into half brothers"—implies something about the relative scale of event and consequence that we would do well to keep in mind these days.

Santa Fe Reporter