American Poets in the 21st Century

by Claudia Rankine

  Although Hedge Coke did not have access to LiDAR imaging technology when she wrote Blood Run, her multiply coded, three-dimensionally imagined, and highly patterned sequence of poems—dense with data—similarly reveals new ways of seeing and new ways of conceptualizing an important earthworks site. In contrast to the 3-D images produced by LiDAR, however, Hedge Coke’s sequence provides an added fourth dimension: perspectives that are explicitly and distinctly Indigenous.

  The titles of Hedge Coke’s “Snake Mound” and “Stone Snake Effigy” mark the personas they animate as intimately connected, a before and after, perhaps, or a repetition with variation. Focused analysis reveals these “serpentine” poems to be interrelated on multiple levels: not only in their explicit content, intricate wordplay, biblical allusions, and overt themes, but also in their formal structures and subtle but elaborate structural patterning. These poems do more, though, than simply quote each other’s language, lineation, and stanza breaks. Each cites, as well, central physical and astronomical characteristics of the majestic Serpent Mound extant in southwestern Ohio. Through their citation of the Serpent Mound’s provocative terrestrial form and cosmic alignments, “Snake Mound” and “Stone Snake Effigy” work to incite in readers an activist response. They advocate for the preservation, appreciation, and, ultimately, reactivation of the Blood Run site as a whole.

  In organizing this level of structural analysis, I take my cue from reading practices developed for interpreting aerial photography and LiDAR-produced 3-D imaging of earthworks themselves. Viewed from the surface—that is, moving among the intricate language and specific content of individual poems—the formal structures of Hedge Coke’s book appear rather flat or two-dimensional; they do not stand out as especially developed or regularized. Viewed from an overhead perspective and at a relatively great height, however, the book’s macro-structure becomes more clearly visible and increasingly legible. The patterning of Hedge Coke’s sequence of diverse but intimately related free-verse poetic forms is revealed to be highly complex, even, we might argue, three- or possibly four-dimensional.9 From an aerial position, we can better see the mathematics and geometry at the foundation of Hedge Coke’s carefully constructed “earth”-works and better determine the specific units of measurement on which the poet has based individual constructions, complexes, their multiple alignments and, indeed, multiple nestings.10

  Viewed from above, the Indigenous world built in Hedge Coke’s Blood Run is revealed to be based on a principle of layering diverse forms and materials, the construction technique for building actual Indigenous earthworks. This textual world of sections, poems, stanzas, lines, words, and syllables is also revealed to be based on the repetition, recombination, and reconfiguration of a limited set of natural numbers—four, three; their sum, seven; and multiples of all three—as well as on the repetition, recombination, and reconfiguration of the sequence of primes, those natural numbers that can be divided only by themselves and the number one, which is itself unique in the sense that one is neither a prime nor a composite number. Hedge Coke’s embedded manipulations of four, three, seven, and the sequence of the first twenty-four primes illustrates what Tewa scholar Gregory Cajete describes as the “proper role of mathematics” within Indigenous scientific systems. As in contemporary physics, a field often engaged with phenomena “that cannot be explained in words,” Cajete argues that within Indigenous fields of science, mathematics helps render “transparent” certain “basic relationships, patterns, and cycles in the world” through their quantification and symbolic “coding.”11

  On the surface, the sixty-four persona poems in Blood Run draw attention to what outsiders, invaders, and looters have viewed as mere inanimate objects and revivify these as living and articulate entities situated within multiple contexts, relationships, and narratives. Their voices bear witness to the site’s former glory, historical and ongoing violation, and possible reclamation, repatriation, and renewal. The collective and singular personas of the earthworks at Blood Run—“The Mounds,” “Ceremonial Mound,” “Burial Mound,” and “Snake Mound”—describe themselves as technologies for relating the human community to the earth and cosmos, that is, as technologies for connecting the “middle world” of their raised surfaces to both a “lower world” and an “upper world.”12 The earthworks form a vital middle space that is simultaneously natural and artistic, spiritual and civic. The mounds assert that the activities that take place on, in, and among their bodies of packed earth place human beings within a matrix of relationships—with each other, with the natural forces of the universe, with the spirit world—that produce significant meaning. These assertions narrate an evolving story about place-identity and sacred geography. Understood as extensions of the mathematics and geometry at the structural foundation of Hedge Coke’s poetic sequence, these assertions develop, as well, a highly nuanced definition of what it means for human communities to legitimately settle: not simply to occupy a particular place or to exploit its resources, but to become integral to the regularities and harmonies of its dynamic systems.

  Siting/Sighting/Citing

  In the contemplation of Indigenous earthworks, the word siting evokes, foremost, the concept of position: where these precise structures of layered rock and soil stand within North American landscapes, why they occupy particular locations, how they relate to other physical phenomena, and how they both reflect and intersect social, economic, political, and spiritual systems. Earthworks parallel natural ridges and embankments, follow the waterways of rivers and creeks, mirror the regular seasons of the sun and moon, the patterned coordinates of stars in transit. They occupy symbolic positions, too, aligning within North American systems of representation, within complexes of ceremony and ritual, within economies of power and exchange.

  The word siting, however, invites an obvious pun on its more familiar homophone, sighting, evoking the equally relevant concept of perception. In our contemporary era, it is difficult to actually see Indigenous earthworks because they have been obscured by centuries of erosion, reforestation, and human neglect, on the one hand, and by centuries of violent attack and removal by European settlers and their descendants on the other. The very presence of earthworks in North American physical and symbolic landscapes has been largely erased within US institutions, evacuated from our formal education, our civil engineering, our rural and urban planning, our art, commerce, and politics. For too many North Americans living in the twenty-first century, Indigenous earthworks are either completely invisible or, if seen, an illegible presence, a ghostly sign or a sign of forgotten ghosts. They appear to bear no inscribed meaning. Sighting thus evokes, as well, the great difficulty for most contemporary viewers to perceive earthworks in terms of the complexity of their interrelated structures, the conceptual power of their designs, the beauty of their architecture. It has become hard to imagine how the Indigenous peoples who built these structures applied their sophisticated observations of natural phenomena to planning and design, to techniques for construction, to the organization of necessary labor. All these achievements have been consistently devalued—or simply ignored—within the Western intellectual traditions that have come to dominate North America.

  Siting can, of course, provoke an additional pun on its less obvious homophone citing, which evokes related concepts of the quotation of earthworks for the forms of Indigenous knowledge they continue to embody in the design and patterns of their structures, and the praise of earthworks for the remarkable achievements they represent in Indigenous mathematics, engineering, architecture, art, and astronomy. All three versions of siting apply to the contemplation of Indigenous earthworks themselves and to an analysis of Hedge Coke’s Blood Run. Like the physical earthworks that endure in North American landscapes, Hedge Coke’s sequence invites readers to open their eyes, their intellects, and—importantly—their imaginations to messages coded in and through the multiply layered, packed structures of poems.

  “Sinuous, I am”

  The pe
rsona of the effigy “Snake Mound,” which speaks only once in the sequence of sixty-four persona poems and which Hedge Coke positions as the nineteenth poem in section II, “Origin,” draws special attention in part for how it evokes the Serpent Mound located in what is now Adams County in southwestern Ohio. In her formal acknowledgments, positioned at the end of Blood Run rather than at the beginning, Hedge Coke writes: “Once, a snake mound effigy of a mile and a quarter length, much like the worldwide lauded Snake Mound in Ohio State, existed in this very place—Blood Run. The railroad used it for fill dirt” (93). Hedge Coke acknowledges this physical violation and spiritual sacrifice from the very beginning of her persona poem. Although modeled on the extant Serpent Mound in Ohio, Hedge Coke’s “Snake Mound” speaks from a position of “present invisibility” and apparent absence at Blood Run (31).

  Hedge Coke sites her “Snake Mound” on the individual page, within section II, and within the broader sequence so that it cites both the physical characteristics and known celestial alignments of the Serpent Mound effigy in Ohio. The body of the extant Serpent Mound runs roughly a quarter mile in length and is mounded to a height of about three feet. It begins at its southern end with its tail in a triple-coiled spiral, undulates along the plateau above the Brush Creek Valley in seven distinct body convolutions, and then straightens out toward its broad and horned head. The Serpent’s mouth hinges wide open, poised to swallow a large, oval-shaped disk. Since the nineteenth century, some viewers have interpreted the effigy as a snake attempting to swallow an egg and have assumed that the site was primarily used in rituals for fertility. Others have interpreted the effigy as the great horned serpent, a symbol of the lower world, attempting to swallow the disk of the sun, a symbol of the upper world, which can suggest an iconic representation of a solar eclipse. Still other viewers, including the archaeologist William Romain, have speculated that the effigy embodies the philosophical and spiritual concept of a cosmic balance, in which the forces of the lower world, represented by the horned serpent, are in productive tension with the forces of the upper world, represented by the sun. In this interpretation, the serpent symbolizes “dark” forces that include “the moon, night, winter, darkness, and death.” The oval disk, in a contrasting symmetry, represents “the sun, daytime, summer, light, and life.”13

  Building on the work of earlier surveyors, Romain has confirmed eight astronomical alignments in the body of the Serpent Mound: true astronomical north, the summer solstice sunset point, and six lunar rise and set points on the horizon.14 He hypothesizes that “the Mound Builders celebrated world renewal ceremonies at the site, in order to help strengthen the powers of the upperworld in the continuing struggle against the forces of the underworld. In this way,” he concludes, “the Serpent Mound builders would have been able to exercise some control over the forces that ruled their universe and affected their lives.”15 Romain’s speculation is strengthened by Cajete’s characterization of the motivations behind Indigenous astronomy and, more broadly, behind attempts by Indigenous peoples “to align themselves and their societies with what they perceived was the cosmic order.”16 Cajete argues that “Native astronomers were driven not only by their own awe and curiosity, but were also serving the innermost needs of their societies—to resonate with the cosmos and to be the power brokers of their worlds.”17

  In Blood Run, “Snake Mound” is situated as the nineteenth poem within section II, “Origin,” which consists of the first twenty-eight of the larger sequence’s sixty-four persona poems. In an aerial analysis, we note immediately several numerical alignments: two is the first prime, nineteen is the eighth prime, twenty-eight is the result of multiplying four and seven, two of Hedge Coke’s basic units of measurement for Blood Run, and sixty-four is the cube of four (4 × 4 × 4, or four made three-dimensional). Four and seven are related, further, by the fact that seven is the fourth prime. In many Indigenous North American cultures, these numbers are associated with natural phenomena and with ritual activity and the sacred. Moreover, the number four can describe a two-dimensional schematic of the world divided into the four cardinal directions; the number seven can describe a three-dimensional schematic that adds to the four cardinal directions the three complementary spatial positions above, below, and center. If we divide the twenty-eight poems of section II into four sets of seven—into balanced quadrants, each composed of a three-dimensional world—“Snake Mound” is positioned as the fifth poem within the third set, revealing further significant alignments. Five is the third prime and three is the second.

  Within the third set of seven in section II, the first three poems that precede “Snake Mound” manifest cosmic forces that can be aligned with the specific siting of the Serpent Mound in Ohio: the personas “Moon,” “Blue Star,” and “North Star.” The Moon is one of the “dark” forces associated with death and the lower world. Its poem begins by emphasizing practices of burial and mourning: “My children were buried ’neath altitude, / within masses of earth as their sisters mourned them / with painted faces resembling my spirit full” (27). The Blue Star, another name for the bright star better known as Sirius, is associated with the western direction and with the winter season (“In cold, I dangle in west”), other “dark” forces associated with death and the lower world. Its poem concludes by emphasizing constancy in the face of change: “Look to me when change requires courage. / My face bears all will, stability” (28). The North Star indicates the Serpent Mound’s primary alignment with true astronomical north. Its poem begins by emphasizing its centrality to processes of Indigenous orientation and navigation: “By me multitudes thread earthly blanket, / set their paths to come, go, / weave their ways nightly” (29).

  The fourth poem in the set, which immediately precedes “Snake Mound,” manifests the collective persona of “The Mounds,” which appears in a total of seven poems across the sequence. This second appearance of the persona of “The Mounds” (two is the first prime) is placed in dialogue with “Snake Mound” across the central spine of the open book, suggesting their intimate relationship. Indeed, both poems are composed of the same number of lines, seventeen, which is the seventh prime. In this appearance, the collective persona of The Mounds articulates the imminent danger of violation and erasure of the earthworks at Blood Run: “Somewhere along the way, the world went inside out, / yielding, unfolding, to tools crafted to scrape unbearably ransomed. / In this turning, all we have come to hold, now exists in jeopardy” (30). This danger is especially acute for the site’s effigy Snake Mound, which was destroyed during the construction of the railroad in the name of US “progress.”

  Seventeen brief lines compose the “Snake Mound” persona poem, creating a narrow column of words on the page visually suggestive of a snake. These seventeen lines are divided into eight stanzas: seven stanzas of two lines each, and one stanza of three lines. As already noted, seventeen is the seventh prime; two is the first (and only even) prime, and three is the second prime. The eight stanzas of the poem can be aligned with the eight known astronomical alignments of the extant Serpent Mound in Ohio: true astronomical north, the summer solstice sunset point, and six lunar rise and set points. The poem’s seventeen lines are also arranged into eight distinct statements of varying lengths: two statements of two lines each, one statement of four lines, one statement of five lines, and four statements of one line each. All of these numbers are either prime (two, five, seven), sacred (four, seven), or, in the case of the number one, unique in the sense that it is neither prime nor composite. Moreover, the particular sequencing of statement lengths (2 – 2 – 4 – 5 – 1 – 1 – 1 – 1) simulates the Serpent Mound’s structure of complex head, long body, and tightly coiled tail. Finally, the poem’s division into eight stanzas means that, on the page, there are seven “convolutions” or turns in the seven gaps of white space between stanzas, further mirroring the Serpent Mound in Ohio.

  What we might call the poem’s thematic geometry, that is, its multiple numerical structural alignments and th
e relationships of those alignments to the poem’s significant ideas, including the idea that the imagined persona is linked to the extant Serpent Mound in Ohio, asserts both the sacredness of the Snake Mound effigy and its primality—its condition of originality, primacy, indivisibility. The specific content of the poem’s seventeen lines, divided into eight stanzas and arranged into eight statements, positioned at the juncture of multiple prime and sacred numbers, reinforces these alignments and supports the hypothesis that the Serpent Mound may have been devoted to ceremonies designed for nothing less than world renewal:

  Snake Mound

  1

  Present invisibility

  2

  need not concern.

  statement 1

  [1]

  3

  My weight remains

  4

  heavy upon this land.

  statement 2

  [2]

  5

  Winding,

  6

  weaving, incurve,

  [3]

  7

  mouth undone,

  8

  for egg swallow.

  statement 3

  [4]

  9

  Though my body

  10

  suffered sacrifice

  11

  to railway fill,

  [5]

  12

  my vision bears

  13

  all even still.

  statement 4

  [6]

  14

  Be not fooled.

  statement 5

  15

  Be not fooled.

  statement 6

  [7]