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WORK TITLE: Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 7/17/1967
WEBSITE: http://www.deanrader.com/
CITY: San Francisco
STATE: CA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://www.usfca.edu/faculty/dean-rader * http://www.deanrader.com/about.html * https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/dean-rader *
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born in OK; married Jill Ramsey; children: Gavin, Henry.
EDUCATION:Baylor University, B.A.; SUNY-Binghamton, M.A., Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, poet, educator. University of San Francisco, CA, professor of English and department chair.
AWARDS:T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize, 2010, for Works & Days; Beatrice Medicine Award for Excellence in American Indian Scholarship, 2011, for Engaged Resistance: American Indian Art, Literature, and Film From Alcatraz to the NMAI; Distinguished Research Award, University of San Francisco, 2011; George H. Bogin Award, Poetry Society of America, for selections from Self-portrait as Wikipedia Entry.
WRITINGS
Author of chapbook, Landscape Portrait Figure Form, Omnidawn, 2013. Has also published poetry in numerous journals and periodicals, including American Poetry Review, POOL, Blackbird, Luna Luna, DMQ Review, Zyzzyva, New American Writing, Fifth Wednesday, Columbia Poetry Review, Economy, Hound, and Handsome. Reviewer of poetry for Huffington Post, Kenyon Review, Rumpus, Ploughshares, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among others.
SIDELIGHTS
Dean Rader is an American poet and writer, the author of–among other titles–two award-winning poetry collections, Works & Days and Self-portrait as a Wikipedia Entry, as well as the nonfiction work, Engaged Resistance: American Indian Art, Literature, and Film from Alcatraz to the NMAI. A professor of English at the University of San Francisco, Rader has also served as department chairman. According to a contributor in the Poetry Foundation Website, Rader’s “His work engages themes of identity and sustainability, with attention to formal and global shifts.”
Works & Days
Rader’s first poetry collection, Works & Days, was the winner of the 2010 T.S. Eliot Prize, and established the poet as a vital new voice. The poems in this collection deal with themes of identity, but in imaginative and often playful ways. Rader examines both high and low culture and involves real people in his works, including the poet Wallace Stevens, the photographer Dorothea Lange, Estonian composer Arvo Part, pop icon Michael Jackson, and the cartoon characters Frog and Toad from Arnold Lobel’s popular books for children. Rader’s poems are a tip of the hat to the Greek poet Hesiod and his Works and Days.
Reviewing Works & Days in the online Rattle, Catherine Staples noted: “What first won me to this book was the authenticity of Rader’s voice and a striking ease in shifting, swift changes of tone. He is like a skilled mid-fielder in fluent stop and start moves.” Staples praised the opening poem, “Traveling to Oklahoma for my Grandmother’s Funeral” as “masterful in its modulation of tone.” Staples added: “Spiritual inquiry runs throughout this volume and it’s ever present, if not always overt, as Rader’s home currents in San Francisco,” and also had praise for the offbeat verse about Frog and Toad: “It’s the delightful mix of earnest inquiry and wickedly funny humor that makes this book so much fun to read.” A contributor in the online 32 Poems also had praise, commenting: “Works & Days is an engaging book that manages to be both experimental and ‘accessible,’ if by that latter term one doesn’t mean dumbed-down. More than just a conglomeration of poems, it is a book with a subtle architecture, an ironic unity fashioned on the theme of fragmentation. This coherence and sophistication is an outstanding achievement in a first book.” Colorado Review Online critic Eric Weinstein similarly observed: “Whereas Hesiod’s text serves as a sort of hybrid mythology, farmer’s almanac, and moral treatise, Rader’s is somehow subtler . His poems draw out the stories and epiphanies stirring below the surface of description and philosophical query. … [Rader’s] poems ask the difficult questions in accessible ways, ways rendered all the more effective via wry humor and an eye for the darkly poignant.”
Engaged Resistance
Rader turns to nonfiction in Engaged Resistance, an overview of American Indian artists, filmmakers, and writers, and how they depict the American Indian experience. Rader examines the poetry, fiction and films of Sherman Alexie, the writings of Louise Erdrich and Leslie Marmon Silko, the paintings of Quick-To-See Smith, and the sculptural work of Edgar Heap of Birds and Allen Houser, among many others. Rader focuses on the creative expression of American Indians as their means of survival, book-ending his work with documents and visuals from the 1969 Alcatraz Occupation at the opening and closing with the inauguration of the National Museum of the American Indian.
Reviewing Engaged Resistance in American Indian Quarterly, Cutcha Riding Baldy noted: “In all facets and forms, whether proclamations, poetry, film, storytelling, painting, sculpture, or museum exhibitions, Rader’s overarching metaphor of ‘engaged resistance’ is an important addition to the discourse about Native American literatures and art. This book is a conversation not only between Rader and his readers but also between different artists and different forms of expression all working together to resist, engage, and thrive for many generations into the future.” Similarly, Journal of Folklore Research Online contributor Karra Shimabukuro observed: “Dean Rader’s Engaged Resistance is an ambitious work that shows how literature, film, and art engage in resistance against Anglo ideals and power systems. He provides interesting ideas on how these artists are subverting these systems for their own purposes and how ‘storytelling becomes a form of sovereignty’, and he examines these works as represented by borders, maps, and frontier space. … His latest contribution to the conversation is a worthy one.” Studies in American Indian Literatures writer Audrey Goodman also offered praise, terming this a “terrifically appealing, accessible,
and provocative book.” Goodman concluded: “While Engaged Resistance works significantly toward revising traditional vocabularies and methods used to explicate Native literature and visual art, it also issues a more urgent—and, I think, irresistible—invitation to delve into what Radar terms a ‘poetics of entrance’: to read now, look ahead, and imagine how we as listeners, viewers, readers, teachers, and writers can create new types of open and informed conversations about Native cultural production.” Likewise, Western American Literature Online writer Breanne Robertson observed: “[Rader’s] insightful readings of Native texts and symbols are sensitive and accomplished. . . . Engaged Resistance performs important cultural work by bringing new attention to Native American artists, authors, and filmmakers, whose contributions remain marginalized and under appreciated in popular culture.”
Self-portrait as a Wikipedia Entry
Rader’s second poetry collection, Self-portrait as Wikipedia Entry has as its title poem one that questions fact in the digital age and was first published online with numerous faux links. Other poems in the collection sample bits of cultural life and remixes them with various references to people, as he did in his first collection. Here Rader employs references from Paul Klee to al-Qaeda. He also serves up a poem in the choose-your-own-adventure tradition with “Democracy or Poem in Which Readers Select Their Favorite Last Lines.”
A Publishers Weekly reviewer had praise for Self-portrait as Wikipedia Entry, noting that “few poets capture the contradictions of our national life with as much sensitivity or keenness.” Online Rumpus contributor Barbara Berman also had praise, observing: “Dean Rader has a gift for picking up shards after damage, and placing them back into our wounded territory. … We come to poetry to take pleasure, and to ingest and face profundities in shapes our ears and eyes prefer to prose. How does Dean Rader help make sense of them all? Dear Reader, count the ways.” And online SFGate critic Diana Whitney remarked: “Rader’s ingenious new collection, Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry, is lyric poetry for the digital age. His subject is the self ‘entwined in society,’ as an epigraph informs us, and Rader’s poems offer a timely comment on America and American culture, its dark history of omissions.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
American Indian Quarterly, winter-spring, 2013, Cutcha Riding Baldy, review of Engaged Resistance: American Indian Art, Literature, and Film from Alcatraz to the NMAI, p. 261.
Poets & Writers Magazine, March-April, 2017, review of Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry, p. 14.
Publishers Weekly, January 16, 2017, review of Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry, p. 37.
Studies in American Indian Literatures, spring, 2013, Audrey Goodman, review of Engaged Resistance, p. 125.
ONLINE
32 Poems, http://32poems.blogspot.com/ (July 1, 2011), review of Works & Days.
Colorado Review Online, https://muse.jhu.edu/ (September 1, 2011), Eric Weinstein, review of Works and Days.
Dean Rader Website, http://www.deanrader.com/ (September 11, 2017).
Journal of Folklore Research Onine, http://www.jfr.indiana.edu/ (January 16, 2012), Karra Shimabukuro, review of Engaged Resistance.
Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/ (September 11, 2017), “Dean Rader.”
Rattle, https://www.rattle.com/ (February 15, 2011), Catherine Staples, review of Works & Days.
Rumpus, http://therumpus.net/ (May 5, 2017), Barbara Berman, review of Self-portrait as a Wikipedia Entry.
SFGate, http://www.sfgate.com/ (March 1, 2017), Diana Whitney, review of Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry.
University of San Francisco Website, https://www.usfca.edu/ (September 11, 2017), “Dean Rader.”
Western American Literature Online, https://muse.jhu.edu/ (September 1, 2012), Breanne Robertson, review of Engaged Resistance.
QUOTE:
his poems ask the difficult questions in accessible ways, ways rendered all the more effective via wry humor and an eye for the darkly poignant
Dean Rader
http://www.deanrader.com
Poet Dean Rader was raised in western Oklahoma. He earned a BA at Baylor University and an MA and a PhD in comparative literature at SUNY-Binghamton. His work engages themes of identity and sustainability, with attention to formal and global shifts. In a review of Works & Days for the Colorado Review, Eric Weinstein observes that Rader’s poetry “so often simultaneously attends to the reader's senses of emotional, rhetorical, and aesthetic urgency; his poems ask the difficult questions in accessible ways, ways rendered all the more effective via wry humor and an eye for the darkly poignant.” In a 2012 interview with Andrew David King for the Kenyon Review blog, Rader discusses how he blends fact and fiction in his self-portraits, noting, “Poems are part of the world, just as they are part of the poet’s world. Finding that sweet spot between the authentic and artistic and autobiographical is where much of the magic of poetry comes from.”
Rader’s debut collection Works & Days (2010) was chosen for a T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize by Claudia Keelan. Rader is also the author of the scholarly work Engaged Resistance: American Indian Art, Literature, and Film from Alcatraz to the NMAI (2011), which was nominated for a Beatrice Medicine Award for Scholarship in American Indian Studies, and coauthor, with Jonathan Silverman, of the textbook The World Is a Text: Writing, Reading and Thinking About Visual and Popular Culture (2008, 4th edition, 2011). With poet Janice Gould, Rader coedited the anthology Speak To Me Words: Essays on Contemporary American Indian Poetry (2003). His own work was featured in the anthology Best American Poetry 2012.
Rader has served on the poetry jury of the California Book Awards, and he ran the blog 99 Poems for the 99 Percent. His honors include a Writer’s League of Texas Poetry Prize, several Pushcart Prize nominations, a Sow’s Ear Review prize, and a Crab Creek Review poetry prize. Rader chairs the English Department at the University of San Francisco and has written columns for the San Francisco Chronicle and the Huffington Post. He lives in San Francisco.
a b o u t
Picture
Dean Rader has published widely in the fields of poetry, American Indian studies, and visual culture. His debut collection of poems, Works & Days, won the 2010 T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize, was a finalist for the Bob Bush Memorial Award for a First Book of Poems, and won the 2010 Writer's League of Texas Poetry Prize. His chapbook, Landscape Portrait Figure Form (Omnidawn), was named by the Barnes & Noble Review as one of the Best Poetry Books of 2013.
His newest collection of poems is entitled Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry (Copper Canyon Press, 2017). A portfolio of poems from the book won the George H. Bogin Award (judged by Stephen Burt) from the Poetry Society of America. The Bogin Award is given for poems "that use language in an original way to reflect the encounter of the ordinary and the extraordinary and to take a stand against oppression in its many forms."
Suture, a collection of collaborative poems written with Simone Muench, is forthcoming in April 2017 with Black Lawrence Press. The poems, which Simone and Dean have dubbed, "Frankenstein Sonnets," have appeared or will appear in a myriad of publications such as American Poetry Review, POOL, Blackbird, Luna Luna, DMQ Review, Zyzzyva, New American Writing, Fifth Wednesday, Columbia Poetry Review, The Economy, Hound, and Handsome and have been nominated for Best of the Net and Pushcart Prizes.
Rader is the editor of 99 Poems for the 99 Percent: An Anthology of Poetry. Published in July of 2014, the book features poems by well-known writers like Edward Hirsch, Bob Hicok, Robert Pinsky, Dana Levin, LeAnne Howe, Timothy Donnelly, Camille T. Dungy, Jon Davis, Brian Clements, Ellen Bass, Joan Houlihan, Matthew Zapruder, Ray Gonzalez, Heid E. Erdrich, and Dorianne Laux as well as a generous sampling of work by beginning poets and students. The book debuted at #2 on the Small Press Distribution List and took over the #1 spot for August.
His most recent scholarly book, Engaged Resistance: American Indian Art, Literature, and Film from Alcatraz to the NMAI was published in April 2011 from the University of Texas Press. It is the first book to look at recent Native American art, literature, and film and focuses on the work of figures like Sherman Alexie, Jaune Quick-To-See Smith, Louise Erdrich, Chris Eyre, Edgar Heap of Birds, David Treuer, Joy Harjo, and LeAnne Howe. Engaged Resistance was nominated for a PROSE Award and it won the prestigious Beatrice Medicine Award for Excellence in American Indian Studies for 2011.
Rader is also the co-author of a best-selling textbook on writing and popular culture, The World is a Text (with Jonathan Silverman), which is about to enter its fifth edition. With poet Janice Gould, he co-edited Speak To Me Words: Essays on Contemporary American Indian Poetry (University of Arizona Press, 2003), the first collection of essays devoted to Native American poetry. Most recently, he curated a special issue of Sentence that focused on recent American Indian prose poetry.
Rader reviews poetry regularly for The Huffington Post, The Kenyon Review, The Rumpus, Ploughshares, and The San Francisco Chronicle. His series of pieces on the 10 Greatest Poets was covered by The New Yorker, The New York Times, and dozens of other media outlets. He recently wrote about teaching poetry post-truth and post-Trump and was interviewed by The Washington Post on the convergence of poetry and politics.
Rader earned his Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Binghamton where he studied comparative literature, creative writing, translation, American Indian literature, and visual culture. He is a professor of English at the University of San Francisco, where in 2011, he won the University's Distinguished Research Award.
A Native of Western Oklahoma, Rader lives in San Francisco with his wife Jill Ramsey and their sons Gavin and Henry.
Dean Rader
PROFESSOR
Department Chair • Full-Time Faculty
rader@usfca.edu
(415) 422-4184
Kalmanovitz Hall 485
Biography
Dean Rader has published widely in the fields of poetry, literary studies, American Indian studies, and visual/popular culture, and he teaches regularly in all of these areas. His most recent collection of poems, Landscape Portrait Figure Form, was named by the Barnes & Noble Review as one of the best poetry books of 2013. His scholarly book, Engaged Resistance: American Indian Art, Literature, and Film From Alcatraz to the NMAI, (University of Texas Press, 2011) won the Beatrice Medicine Award for Excellence in American Indian Scholarship, and his 2010 collection of poems, Works & Days, won the T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize. His edited collection, 99 Poems for the 99 Percent: An Anthology of Poetry reached #1 on the Small Press Distribution Poetry Bestseller List. His forthcoming collection of poems, Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry, will be published in 2016 by Copper Canyon Press. He is the recipient of USF's Distinguished Research Award for 2011, and he is funnier than his photo might suggest.
APPOINTMENTS
Chair, English Department
EXPERTISE
Poetry
Literary studies
American Indian studies
Visual/popular culture
PUBLICATIONS
Rader, Dean. (2011) Engaged Resistance: American Indian Art, Literature, and Film From Alcatraz to the NMAI. University of Texas Press.
Rader, Dean. (2014) 99 Poems for the 99 Percent: An Anthology of Poetry. 99: The Press .
Rader, Dean. (2010) Works & Days. Truman State University Press.
Rader, Dean. (2014) Landscape Portrait Figure Form. Omnidawn.
Rader, Dean. (2011) Engaged Resistance: American Indian Art, Literature, and Film from Alcatraz to the NMAI. University of Texas Press.
Dean Rader
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University of San Francisco State University of New York at Binghamton
San Francisco, California 500+ 500+ connections
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Experience
University of San Francisco
Professor and Department Chair
Company NameUniversity of San Francisco
Dates Employed2001 – Present Employment Duration16 yrs
LocationSan Francisco Bay Area
The Huffington Post
columnist
Company NameThe Huffington Post
Dates Employed2011 – Present Employment Duration6 yrs
LocationSan Francisco
The Kenyon Review
Writer
Company NameThe Kenyon Review
Dates EmployedJan 2016 – Present Employment Duration1 yr 10 mos
Ploughshares Journal
Blogger
Company NamePloughshares Journal
Dates EmployedJul 2016 – Present Employment Duration1 yr 4 mos
The Rumpus
Writer
Company NameThe Rumpus
Dates EmployedJan 2010 – Present Employment Duration7 yrs 10 mos
LocationSan Francisco Bay Area
San Francisco Chronicle
columnist/reviewer
Company NameSan Francisco Chronicle
Dates Employed2010 – 2012 Employment Duration2 yrs
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Education
State University of New York at Binghamton
State University of New York at Binghamton
Degree Name Ph.D. Field Of Study Comparative Literature; Poetry and Poetics; American Literature
Dates attended or expected graduation 1989 – 1995
Baylor University
Baylor University
Degree Name Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) Field Of Study English Language and Literature/Letters
Dates attended or expected graduation 1985 – 1989
Featured Skills & Endorsements
Publishing See 59 endorsements for Publishing 59
Endorsed by Vincent Spada and 1 other who is highly skilled at this
Endorsed by 7 of Dean’s colleagues at University of San Francisco
Poetry See 46 endorsements for Poetry 46
Endorsed by Vincent Spada and 6 others who are highly skilled at this
Endorsed by 5 of Dean’s colleagues at University of San Francisco
Editing See 44 endorsements for Editing 44
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Recommendations
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Given (6)
Conor Crockford
Conor Crockford
Writer/Editor
June 16, 2014, Dean was Conor’s teacher
To Whom It May Concern,
Conor Crockford was my student for two years at the University of San Francisco. He was a good student with an engaging presence. He met deadlines, and he participated in class discussion. I was most impressed with his improvement over the years he was in my classes. He became a more nuanced reader, a more precise thinker, and clearer writer. His final paper for my class in the spring of 2014 was one of the better projects in the class.
Sincerely,
Dean Rader, Chair
Department of English
University of San Francisco
Julie Bifano Boe
Julie Bifano Boe
Contributor at The Sentinel
December 17, 2012, Dean was Julie’s teacher
Julie Bifano was an excellent student. Besides being creative, Julie is talented, careful, responsible, and extremely hard working. She is a pleasure to work with.
Sincerely,
Dean Rader, Chair, Department of English
University of San Francisco
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Accomplishments
Dean has 2 languages2
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Languages
German Spanish
Dean Rader
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dean Rader is an American writer and professor who teaches at the University of San Francisco, in the Department of English, where he has also served as Department Chair.[1] Rader holds a M.A.and Ph.D. in comparative literature from the State University of New York at Binghamton where he studied translation, poetry, visual culture, and literary studies. He is primarily known for his poems that mix high and low art and his scholarly work on Native American poetry.
His latest book of poetry, "Self Portrait as Wikipedia Entry"[2] was published in 2017 by Copper Canyon Press, and was also posted on ZYZZYVA on February 6, 2012.[3]
Contents [hide]
1 Literary work
2 Other awards and fellowships
3 Works
3.1 Poetry
3.2 Books
3.3 Online publications
4 References
5 External links
Literary work[edit]
In addition to his teaching, Rader is a prolific reviewer, a scholar of film and art, and an award-winning poet. His poem "Hesiod in Oklahoma, 1934" won the Sow's Ear Review poetry prize in 2009, judged by Kelly Cherry.[4] Rader's debut poetry collection, Works and Days, won the 2010 Truman State University T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize, judged by Claudia Keelan.[5][6] Works & Days was also named a finalist for the Bob Bush Memorial First Book Award,[7] and it won the Writer's League of Texas Book Award for Poetry.[8]
Rader's most recent collection, Landscape Portrait Figure Form (Omnidawn 2014), a book that explores the connection between poetry and painting, was named by the Barnes & Noble Review as one of the year's Best Books of Poems. He was also the recipient of the George Bogin Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. Harvard poet and critic Stephen Burt selected a folio of Rader's poems entitled "American Self-Portrait" for the 2015 award.
In 2011, Rader wrote a series of columns for the San Francisco Chronicle on The 10 Greatest Poets, which received media coverage in The New York Times.[9][10]
That same year, Rader began a blog called 99 Poems for the 99 Percent, which posted 99 poems over 99 days.[11] The blog featured poems by well-known writers like LeAnne Howe, Matthew Zapruder, Robert Pinsky, Martha Collins, Heid Erdrich, Edward Hirsch, Timothy Donnelly, Maxine Chernoff, Camille T. Dungy, and Bob Hicok as well as beginning and non-professional poets. In 2014, 99 Poems for the 99 Percent: An Anthology of Poetry, was published in book form. In August, it debuted at #2 on the Small Press Distribution Poetry Bestseller List and in September, it took over the #1 spot.
Other awards and fellowships[edit]
Fellowships at Harvard University and Princeton University[12]
Poetry prizes from Crab Orchard Review and Common Ground Review, 2007[13]
National Endowment for the Humanities Chair at the University of San Francisco, 2009–2010.
Editor, Studies in American Indian Literature
Works[edit]
Poetry[edit]
"Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry" (Copper Canyon Press, 2017)
Books[edit]
Rader, Dean, editor; Gould, Janice (2003). Speak to me words: essays on contemporary American Indian poetry. Tucson, Arizona: University of Arizona Press. ISBN 0816523487.
Silverman, Jonathan; Rader, Dean (2008). The world is a text: writing, reading and thinking about visual and popular culture (3rd ed.). Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson/Prentice Hall. ISBN 9780136033455.
Rader, Dean (2010). Works & days. New odyssey series. Kirksville, Missouri: Truman State University Press. ISBN 9781935503088.
Rader, Dean (2011). Engaged resistance: American Indian art, literature, and film from Alcatraz to the NMAI. The William and Bettye Nowlin series in art, history, and culture of the Western Hemisphere (1st ed.). Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press. ISBN 9780292723993.
Online publications[edit]
The Weekly Rader, blog
99 Poems for the 99 Percent, blog
"Self Portrait as Wikipedia Entry". ZYZZYVA. 2012-02-06.
"While working on a translation of "Walking around", I Imagine Neruda Trapped in the Snowstorm Outside My Window". Poetry Magazines - FIRE (No. 26). 2005.
Rader, Dean (2007-05-21). "Core value". SFGate.
QUOTE:
few poets capture the contradictions of our national life with as much sensitivity or keenness.
Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry
Publishers Weekly. 264.3 (Jan. 16, 2017): p37.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry
Dean Rader. Copper Canyon, $17 trade paper (110p) ISBN 978-1-55659-508-0
Rader (Works & Days) samples and remixes with aplomb, combining references to everything from Paul Klee to al-Qaeda to the Sonic Drive-In in a second collection that is as rich in content and broad in scope as the eponymous online encyclopedia. "Frog Considers Slipping Toad Pop Rocks", "for example, begins in absurdity but ends in profundity: "Is there a better way to show/ devotion than to help someone burst from within?" Equally impressive is Rader's understated mastery of form: the collection includes a ghazal, a villanelle, sonnets, and haiku, not to mention numerous metapoetic inventions, as in the poem called "Democracy or Poem in Which Readers Select Their Favorite Last Lines." Such ranginess can, at times, slip into shagginess--not every poem here earns its place. The peaks of his varied terrain are those with the most immediate stakes, where his generous personality meets political urgency, as in his series of American allegories, which interrogate whiteness through the '68 Olympics and use Hieronymus Bosch to think about poverty. "This is for daybreak/ and backbreak, for dreams, and for darkness," Rader writes in "America, I Do Not Call Your Name Without Hope," and, indeed, few poets capture the contradictions of our national life with as much sensitivity or keenness. (Feb.)
Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry
Poets & Writers Magazine. 45.2 (March-April 2017): p14.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Poets & Writers, Inc.
http://www.pw.org/magazine
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"I want to begin by letting you know / that the title is no lie, even though / this poem is not quite a portrait of / reader and writer." Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry (Copper Canyon Press, February 2017) by Dean Rader. Second book, poetry collection. Agent: None. Editor: Michael Wiegers. Publicist: Kelly Forsythe.
QUOTE:
In all facets and forms, whether proclamations, poetry, film, storytelling, painting, sculpture, or museum exhibitions, Rader's overarching metaphor of "engaged resistance" is an important addition to the discourse about Native American literatures and art. This book is a conversation not only between Rader and his readers but also between different artists and different forms of expression all working together to resist, engage, and thrive for many generations into the future.
Dean Rader. Engaged Resistance: American Indian Art, Literature, and Film from Alcatraz to the NMAI
Cutcha Riding Baldy
The American Indian Quarterly. 37.1-2 (Winter-Spring 2013): p261.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 University of Nebraska Press
http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/
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Dean Rader. Engaged Resistance: American Indian Art, Literature, and Film from Alcatraz to the NMAI. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011. 304 pp. Paper, $27.95; cloth, $60.00.
Beginning with the occupation of Alcatraz and including poetry, fiction, film, art, sculpture, and the National Museum of the American Indian, Dean Rader's book Engaged Resistance: American Indian Art, Literature, and Film from Alcatraz to the NMAI invites readers to expand their understanding of Native art and literatures in order to see the many ways that Native peoples use these mediums to engage in visual and verbal resistance. Rader's writing style is straightforward and accessible, and his excitement for the subject matter and admiration of the work are evident on every page. The book is visually stunning and features numerous photos of paintings, texts, statues, and archival materials not usually available in print. This often strengthens Rader's analysis, as the visual impact gives the reader an opportunity to interpret and engage with the pieces. The discourse is also distinctly contemporary and includes pop culture and technological references. Rader refers to iPhones and Facebook and firmly places Indian artists and their work in a contemporary landscape.
Key to Rader's focus in the book is the concept of sovereignty. Rader offers a short nod to defining "sovereignty" but quickly glosses over the complicated nature of this definition. While Rader writes that "a consensus definition has emerged" and quickly discusses some of the definitions offered by various Indian scholars, this discussion is by no means comprehensive. Rader acknowledges that he believes "sovereignty is largely about self-determination, autonomy, and capability" and that "sovereignty means the ability of artists, writers, and film makers to tell their own stories in their own words, in their own language--whether that language is verbal or visual" (50). Throughout the book Rader engages with various forms of sovereignty, including cartographic sovereignty, semiotic sovereignty, cinematic sovereignty, cultural sovereignty, intellectual sovereignty, and even storytelling as sovereignty. Rader, however, misses the opportunity to engage with key scholarship and scholars on visual and photographic sovereignty, including Muskogee/ Creek artist and scholar Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie's work, which would add a particularly important layer to Rader's analysis.
There are ten chapters in the book. Chapter 1 introduces Rader's concept of "engaged resistance" through the public proclamations, poems, and paintings by the occupiers of Alcatraz during the 1969 occupation. Rader provides a close analysis through the lens of "aesthetic activism" and also manages to include a focus on the humor, anger, and rhetoric of the pieces. His presentation is significantly strengthened by the inclusion of photographs of the pieces he is referring to.
In chapter 2 Rader presents Salish artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith's series of paintings of US maps and her use of cartographic sovereignty. There is an obvious excitement and admiration in Rader's writing in this chapter, and he draws from poetry, photography, cartography, and literature to add to his thorough analysis of the work. This chapter is particularly enhanced by the included photos. Colored copies of the paintings are reserved for the center of the book and are gathered with colored copies of many of the other photos featured throughout the text. This provides an interesting juxtaposition, as the reds, yellows, and other colors are a very different experience from the black-and-white photos provided throughout the text. This decision to include color photos at the center of the book may have been a decision by the publisher, but it also demands a silent reflection on the colored photos away from the text.
In chapters 3, 4, and 5 Rader analyzes different literary texts (for which he includes film), and while he does not attempt an exhaustive interpretation of the texts, he does bring these seemingly different texts into conversation. Rader wants to situate Native art, literature, and film in conversation with each other to create a cross-genre discourse of resistance. In chapter 3 Rader looks at "post-Renaissance" Native American novels through a "tribalographic" lens; in chapter 4 he examines two very different films (Naturally Native and Skins); and in chapter 5 he analyzes three poets--Louise Erdrich (Ojibwe), Sherman Alexie (Spokane, Coeur d'Alene), and Wendy Rose (Hope, Miwok)--and how they use the lyric poem as a modern weapon against colonization. In chapter 6 Rader offers a skillful and important look at how Native American poets challenge genre through "compositional resistance."
In chapter 7 Rader places Sherman Alexie in conversation with Sherman Alexie by taking apart two of Alexie's films--the more widely watched Smoke Signals and the small independent film The Business of Fancy Dancing--through Gerald Vizenor's "post-Indian warrior" concept. Chapter 8 focuses on Leslie Marmon Silko's popular story "Storyteller." Rader provides an analysis with a pedagogical lens and a focus on literary semiotics. While any of the chapters in the book could be used in a classroom, this chapter is particularly focused on enhancing the classroom conversation.
Chapter 9 provides a quick and somewhat rushed look at the ways that public art by and about Native people claims public space and structures. In chapter 10 Rader once again shines with his insightful analysis of the National Museum of the American Indian. He begins by guiding the reader through a brief but important history of the land where the museum is now located. Rader also offers a thorough overview of the design, responses, and critiques of the museum. He adds a new layer of interpretation through his assertion of the museum's "compositional resistance" on a structural level, including how the museum is put together, the building's architecture, the internal layout, and the placement of the museum on the mall in Washington PC. Rader brings this chapter and the book to a close by coming full circle back to the occupation of Alcatraz.
In all facets and forms, whether proclamations, poetry, film, storytelling, painting, sculpture, or museum exhibitions, Rader's overarching metaphor of "engaged resistance" is an important addition to the discourse about Native American literatures and art. This book is a conversation not only between Rader and his readers but also between different artists and different forms of expression all working together to resist, engage, and thrive for many generations into the future.
Cutcha Riding Baldy, University of California Davis
Baldy, Cutcha Riding
QUOTE:
terrifically appealing, accessible,
and provocative book
While Engaged Resistance works significantly toward revising traditional vocabularies
and methods used to explicate Native literature and visual art, it also
issues a more urgent—and, I think, irresistible—invitation to delve into
what Radar terms a 'poetics of entrance': to read now, look ahead, and
imagine how we as listeners, viewers, readers, teachers, and writers can
create new types of open and informed conversations about Native cultural
production.
Studies in American Indian Literatures, Volume 25, Number 1, Spring
2013, pp. 125-128 (Article)
Dean Rader. Engaged Resistance: American Indian Art, Literature,
and Film from Alcatraz to the . Austin: U of Texas P, .
: ----. pp.
Audrey Goodman, Georgia State University
Dean Radar
’
s Engaged Resistance is a terrifically appealing, accessible,
and provocative book. Taking as its premise that “Native-produced texts
like poetry, fiction, movies, paintings, and sculpture are fundamental
products and processes of American Indian sovereignty,
” it approaches
varieties of Native cultural expression as acts of “
aesthetic activism
”
and puts them in dialogue to animate current critical debates. Careful
to distinguish between the
“
compositional resistance
” implicit in a
work’
s materials, form, or genre and the
“
contextual resistance
”
explicit
in overt statements of defiance, Radar provides—and tests—an effective
vocabulary for speaking about the strategies through which contemporary
Native authors and visual artists express resistance and tell stories
of survival.
Throughout the book, Radar draws on his extensive experience in
writing about American Indian poetry, in analyzing visual culture, and
in teaching Native texts. Topics of individual chapters range from the
art and rhetoric of Alcatraz to
“
postindian
” films by Sherman Alexie,
but the book is neither a sequential history nor a comprehensive survey.
At times it invites the reader to look back (on public acts of resistance,
canonical works in high and popular culture, neglected works,
and institutional histories) and, in the process, to reconsider the value of
existing critical paradigms. More often it looks at how Native art is produced
and viewed in the present, whether in contemporary fiction, film,
and poetry or in public spaces like roads, state capitols, or museums.
The art that draws Radar
’
s closest attention—such as Jaune Quick-toSee-Smith’
s map sequences, Jennifer Wynne Farmer and Valerie RedHorse
’
s film Naturally Native, poems by Esther Belin and LeAnne Howe,
Leslie Marmon Silko
’
s
“Storyteller,
”
and the National Museum of the
American Indian ()—shares an aesthetic of open-endedness. In his
work Radar likewise mixes genres, geographies, and scales of attention
within and across chapters to encourage interdisciplinary analysis and
further discussion rather than definitive interpretation. Thus he creates
a book that can be read through pairings of chapters devoted to a single
genre or in
“just about any order: from the last chapter to the first,
· · . , .
or spiraling out from the middle.” If narrative design is
“itself an act of
resistance, a narrative refusal to capitulate to colonial or generic linearity
and chronology,
”
as Radar claims, the design of Engaged Resistance
suggests a similar potential for critical discourse.
As the subtitle indicates, the book begins and ends by investigating
the places and institutions central to contemporary Native art and
activism: Alcatraz and the . The first chapter, which focuses on
the visual art, literature, and proclamatory discourses produced on and
about Alcatraz during its Indian Occupation between and ,
briskly sketches a historical sequence of events and then analyzes the
rhetorics of the Alcatraz Proclamation, Manifesto, and Declaration.
Here Radar establishes his characteristic method: to situate individual
expressions of resistance in their physical, historical, and aesthetic contexts
and then to read them from different angles, playing with a variety
of critical tools. He explicates hybrid texts and objects that historians
and other critics may have overlooked (such as newsletters, graffiti, or
a stretched hide), arguing that all the utterances produced during the
Occupation constitute a comprehensive project of symbolic action.
The book’
s final chapter, on conception and reception, also
collects evidence for art as an effective means of interdisciplinary and
intertribal activism. The serves as a test for Radar
’
s notion of compositional
resistance, and he makes a persuasive case for how the architecture
and curated exhibits enact “
museological procedures of everyday
creativity.” Noting the museum
’
s location on Algonquin land, its
appearance of having been carved by the elements, and its circular and
open design, Radar prepares his reader to enter and to engage with the
displays of living culture inside. He argues that the absences many visitors
have objected to (especially of chronological markers and written
histories of genocide and colonialism) are deliberate presences: acts of
tribal affirmation and proof of survivance. While the symbolic power of
Alcatraz may have waned, the remains a
“living testament.” Reading
the book’
s first and last chapters together, as twins, brings out the
book’
s larger claim that the master text of history is being replaced by
creative, place-centered acts of reoccupation.
A second, more sustained model for the book is the map. Mapping
functions as trope and method throughout, sometimes foregrounded
and often discussed as a self-conscious and ongoing critical process. If
the study as a whole
“
poses and responds to a new constellation of ques-
Book Reviews 127
tions about Native cultural productions,
”
mapping provides a concrete
territorial counterpart and a more delicate and flexible tool. As figure
and trope, the map is engaged by many of the artists discussed—and
most explicitly, perhaps, by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith. Radar
’
s second
chapter,
“Cartography as Sovereignty,
”
makes a strong case for the value
of Quick-to-See Smith’
s paintings among contemporary mainstream
artists and Native painters. It also brings out the author
’
s impassioned
response when standing face to face with this body of work, and such
evidence of personal investment is one of this book’
s great strengths.
Further evidence of Radar
’
s use of the map as methodology can be
found in his
“User
’
s Map
” to
“The New American Indian Novel.” As one
of several chapters to take on literary texts as aesthetic products (others
include close rereadings of Silko
’
s
“Storyteller
”
and books by Belin, Joy
Harjo, and Luci Tapahanso that combine poetry and prose), the
“User
’
s
Map
”
could stand alone as a critical or pedagogical guide. This chapter
acknowledges existing critical models for interpreting Native texts, but
it, too, resists dwelling in the past. Surveying a diverse set of novels by
Debra Magpie Earling, Charles H. Red Corn, Louise Erdrich, LeAnne
Howe, David Treuer, Craig Womack, and Sherman Alexie that neither
reimagine nineteenth-century histories nor fit within older interpretive
models that would define them as part of a
“
renaissance
”
or as cultural
documents, the chapter claims that each of the authors discussed “take
the past as their points of departure
”–much as Radar himself does. Both
these novels and this study insist that while the past may never be fully
past, it need not determine the meaning of the present.
As my account of select chapters suggests, Engaged Resistance is
deliberately and imaginatively organized (“taking a cue from Native
structures
” like webs, spirals, and twins) and expansive in scope. While
an understanding of time and history as simultaneously sequential,
circular, and mythic remain important to Radar, an understanding of
places and boundaries as contested, fluid, and constitutive of identity is
more critical. Some readers may find Radar
’
s reflections on methodology
to be overly self-conscious at times, but the book is justifiably more
concerned with how, where, and why we encounter and engage with
Native art than it is about what individual works mean. Radar
’
s own
excitement at viewing Quick-to-See Smith’
s
“Memory Map,
”
returning
to puzzle over the Howe Chevrolet Indian in Clinton, Oklahoma,
reading the signs created by William Heap of Birds, or meditating on
· · . , .
the experience of walking through the is palpable, and he demonstrates
well how such individual acts of engagement add up to a more
complete understanding of art’
s complexity and value. While Engaged
Resistance works significantly toward revising traditional vocabularies
and methods used to explicate Native literature and visual art, it also
issues a more urgent—and, I think, irresistible—invitation to delve into
what Radar terms a
“
poetics of entrance
”
: to read now, look ahead, and
imagine how we as listeners, viewers, readers, teachers, and writers can
create new types of open and informed conversations about Native cultural
production.
QUOTE:
Dean Rader has a gift for picking up shards after damage, and placing them back into our wounded territory.
We come to poetry to take pleasure, and to ingest and face profundities in shapes our ears and eyes prefer to prose. How does Dean Rader help make sense of them all? Dear Reader, count the ways.
WE HAVE MET THE MAELSTROM, AND IT IS US: DEAN RADER’S SELF-PORTRAIT AS A WIKIPEDIA ENTRY
REVIEWED BY BARBARA BERMAN
May 5th, 2017
Dean Rader has a gift for picking up shards after damage, and placing them back into our wounded territory. After he won the 2010 T. S. Eliot prize for Works and Days, readers who don’t feed at the poetry trough took enough note that his 2014 chapbook, Landscape, Portrait, Figure, Form was named one of the Best Poetry Books of the Year by Barnes and Noble. I love trajectories like this. It could be part of the boost that led Rader to nod to Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, when Rader called his latest book Self-Portrait as a Wikipedia Entry. It’s a weighty conceit carried off, because each composition is so strong and fine.
I want you to know that this is not the end.
I want you to know that when those memories
drop down, my umbrella opens.
This is from “Apocryphal Self-Portrait” in the 2014 volume, and it leads you toward wherever the next mystery ride might go. Umbrellas are flimsy shelters from the maelstrom, and Rader keeps going because he can’t stop. In other words, we have met the maelstrom, and it is us.
If silence is bitter, change yourself into song.
O listener, I think of you alone there
on the cliff’s edge of your daily duties,
waiting, the way saints wait, for the
falling to cease and the fire to rise,
when the tiniest note, the loveliest letter
from this world finally arrives.
Hold your breath. This is in ‘’Self Portrait with Contemplation,’’ in the first section of the new book, so he’s only just begun. He’s come to a tremor-edged peace with his associations, and also with his scholarship, which is not surprising for a tenured professor. Rader teaches at the University of San Francisco, in a city we all know is so blue that some residents think Bernie Sanders is purple. But Rader was born in the big red Central Valley of California, and grew up in Oklahoma. He’s well-traveled and he knows the complicated nuances of home.
Take off
_____your dress of flame: the whole
world is raining.
______We can say
we are more than a trickle
of sun, but what, really,
do we want of surrender
________________but supplication?
________Our lives
are language, our desires
apophatic but not in that
order.
_______We want what
language won’t do, and we
ask only what we
are prepared to live.
This is from ‘’American Self-Portrait III; Or What The Poet Thinks Instead of War,’’ and ‘apophatic’ is one of those plummy words that are above the grade level of Microsoft. It’s a trick of blatantly slippery rhetoric that says no while saying yes. I shall not tell you that I think there is a monster in the White House, is my shamelessly easy example. What we have with Rader are declarative dances that explode and implode at the same time—which makes off-the-page experience seem bearable and unbearable. It’s very Beckett, and it works because this is 2017, and it works tragically because it should hold up for years to come.
(Gosh. I keep breaking the vow I made before opening my laptop. I was not going to say anything about Rader that suggests where he might be headed in the widening gyre of the canon. My desire for his particular arrangements keeps making the better of me, and I’m good with that. So back to the rain.)
What, exactly, is the whole world raining, and how would it translate into Japanese, Korean, Dutch, or these days, God forbid, Russian? Some of Rader’s implications lean toward Dostoevsky, who gets a mention. This is a book with many epigraphs, some quoting writers whose first language was not English. Some are unnecessary flourishes.
“O listener, I think of you alone there,” continues the poet at war with his dilemma. But he also uses the word ‘saints,’ as in, “waiting the way saints wait,” because the rigorous doubters hedge their bets. And he and I and readers of countless persuasions know that the universe is full of wonderful saints, secular and devout.
One simply cannot write anything today and be in neutral gear or park. So when Rader calls a poem “America’s Frogs and Toads are Disappearing Fast,” and credits a Reuters headline for the title’s inspiration, he also puts himself and his audience back in the mess of the world we have been given. Note my passive voice. He’s looking at a bucket of algae, at ‘’blue death,’’ and he is also recalling:
that it has all
arrived from
somewhere,
what is
is what was,
like the blistered
light of a burst
star, long ago
imploded, only
now flashing in
our silent sky.
This is transcendent, and beautiful.
Rader has had some trail-breaking teachers in the poems and prose he refers to in his epigraphs, and their words are part of his physical body—where he moves, where he thinks, where he mourns and where he is exuberantly happy. Colson Whitehead and Walter Benjamin are two prose masters he quotes in this volume, and “Self-Portrait at Easter” begins with an epigraph by Emily Dickinson:
A Pang is more conspicuous in Spring
Prayer is the season of difficult belonging,
the ritual of rehearsal, both prune and blossom.
The flows of my heart flock
once more like geese going south.
Everything is at it again, even language,
which I have taught to lie low
except when I need its sharp shiv.
We come to language the way we come
to this life, which is to say confused
and desperate. We are nothing but need.
History swarms like a bowl of bees
broken for its honey. Let me intercede
for the fallen glass on behalf of gravity.
Let me speak for the mallet on behalf
of the nail. Let my words rise like
the soft bread of the body….
Somewhere in the silence the bright beak
of a wren drills its way toward the moon.
The sky is cinch and lock. The stars have slipped
on their black hoods, the long ropes of the dead
hooked to the battered bells in our hearts.
What sings is what we lack.
All sins, Simone Weil says, are attempts to fill voids.
And the Lord said You are small for a purpose.
_______And I said yes.
And the Lord said I have made you broken so that you might heal.
_______And I said yes
And the Lord said I have chosen another.
_______And I said amen.
Your utterance might be smoke, Father,
But not every word is on fire. Come closer.
Look down. Let me show you how we burn.
Each thought here creates an urge to say why it ripples out with meaning. Simone Weil, mystic and probable anorexic, was a tragic expert at facing, filling and emptying voids. Rader is just as honest, and healthier.
“We come to language the way we come / to this life, which is to say, confused.”
We come to poetry to take pleasure, and to ingest and face profundities in shapes our ears and eyes prefer to prose. How does Dean Rader help make sense of them all? Dear Reader, count the ways.
***
Author photograph © Lisa Beth Anderson.
QUOTE:
Dean Rader’s Engaged Resistance is an ambitious work that shows how literature, film, and art engage in resistance against Anglo ideals and power systems. He provides interesting ideas on how these artists are subverting these systems for their own purposes and how “storytelling becomes a form of sovereignty” (152), and he examines these works as represented by borders, maps, and frontier space.
his latest contribution to the conversation is a worthy one.
Engaged Resistance: American Indian Art, Literature, and Film from Alcatraz to the NMAI
By Dean Rader. 2011. Austin: University of Texas Press. 304 pages. ISBN: 978-0-292-72696-3 (soft cover).
Reviewed by Karra Shimabukuro, Independent Scholar
[Review length: 991 words • Review posted on January 16, 2012]
Dean Rader’s Engaged Resistance is an ambitious work that shows how literature, film, and art engage in resistance against Anglo ideals and power systems. He provides interesting ideas on how these artists are subverting these systems for their own purposes and how “storytelling becomes a form of sovereignty” (152), and he examines these works as represented by borders, maps, and frontier space.
Rader begins with the idea of storytelling as a form of sovereignty and with Alcatraz, stating that to understand the idea of resistance, the written word, the visual rhetoric of the graffiti, and the by-the-minute narratives of the poetry written during the occupation must be analyzed together; and that the intertextuality of these items must be examined. Rader begins with Alcatraz as he asserts it was the first place where text was used to invert “the ethos of colonialism by turning its condescending language back on itself” (14). The inclusion of these mostly unknown texts makes a welcome addition to the conversation about how Native rhetoric needs to be viewed and understood.
Rader returns again and again in the book to two seemingly separate ideas; that of borders, maps, and frontier space as well as the idea of Native artists subverting Anglo systems of conquest for their own purposes. This is clearly seen in “The Cartography of Sovereignty” that examines maps as “colonial constructs” (61) and analyzes the argument that these visuals make. His analysis of the work of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith illustrates the way that she has taken the map, a symbol of colonial and Anglo dominance and conquest, and used it to imprint “the stories of Indians over the storytelling device of America” (70). A similar technique can be seen in “Compositional Resistance” as Rader discusses writers whose poetry “doesn’t exist outside of form; it merely converts, reinvents, indigenizes form” (130). He states that the works of Esther Berlin, Joy Harjo, and Simon Ortiz “blur boundaries, cross borders” and resist definition as a single genre. This idea of subversion can also be seen in “Engaged Resistance” and its discussion of the National Museum of the American Indian in terms of how the NMAI has changed expectations, not only of how a museum can use form to fulfill function, but also how Native people feel that their work, history, and lives should be presented.
Rader’s emphasis on the circular nature of Native storytelling in stark contrast to the linear stories of Anglos is an important lens through which to view Native fiction, and the idea that “smaller conversations between books lead to a larger discourse on the micro level” (89) is one of the most interesting ideas Rader presents. Rader chooses nine Native novels that he says represent the twenty-first century, but he supplies no argument for why he chose these nine. This problem occurs again in “The Cinematics of Engagement, The Politics of Resistance” where Rader analyzes Naturally Native and Skins, where his only explanation for these choices is that they “remain two of the most interesting cinematic texts and two of the most important” (92) and that they illustrate “modes of resistance to and within the American systems” (110). The reader again wonders: aren’t all forms of Native film a form of resistance? In “Word as Weapon,” Rader examines the poems of Louise Erdich, Sherman Alexis, and Wendy Rose for how they “use the lyric poem as a mode of defiance that also participates in the cultural history of Native oral discourse” (114). One wishes Rader had provided more of a rationale for how he chose these novels, poems, and films over others, so the reader is not left with the idea that perhaps other works did not fit his argument. While the works he chose are certainly representative of Native artists, these artists are not the only ones producing work in the twenty-first century.
One of the few weaknesses in Rader’s argument is that he seems to want it both ways: he agrees that Native artists should be judged on their own merits, but he can’t resist constantly positioning these works as being in resistance to Anglo products. Rader quotes David Treuer, who requests us, with regard to the Native novel, “to stop reading them through a cultural lens and start looking at them, first and foremost, through a literary lens” (74) and then, rather than follow this advice to place Native novels in the larger conversation, he focuses on seemingly all the ways Anglo readers can’t understand these novels without a map. Again, in “The Cinematics of Engagement, The Politics of Resistance” Rader quotes Craig Womack that Native literary texts “deserve to be judged by their own criteria, in their own terms, not merely in agreement with, or reaction against, European literature and theory” (93). Rader argues that these two very different films represent “resistance to and within American systems” (110) which seems to analyze Naturally Native and Skins in the exact ways that Womack and Treuer state Native texts should not be viewed. “Word as Weapon” is another such contradiction as it speaks of how the work of writers such as Alexie, Erdich, and Rose “counters cultural canonization” while also works to “establish Natives as independent and interdependent communities” (125); but Rader again falls back on analyzing these works in opposition to Anglo works.
Situating Native arts, whether it’s film, art, prose, poetry or visual forms such as buildings and public art, within the larger context of these forms has always proved problematic. Where do these texts fit and how is the public supposed to view them? In the past, colonialism has been the standard lens through which Native work has been viewed. While Rader’s Engaged Resistance does not take a clear stance as to whether Native art should be taken on its own merits within the larger context of pop culture, or whether the lens of colonialism is still a valid one, his latest contribution to the conversation is a worthy one.
QUOTE:
what first won me to this book was the authenticity of Rader’s voice and a striking ease in shifting, swift changes of tone. He is like a skilled mid-fielder in fluent stop and start moves.
Spiritual inquiry runs throughout this volume and it’s ever present, if not always overt, as Rader’s home currents in San Francisco.
It’s the delightful mix of earnest inquiry and wickedly funny humor that makes this book so much fun to read.
February 15, 2011
WORKS AND DAYS by Dean Rader
Review by Catherine Staples
WORKS & DAYS
by Dean Rader
Truman State University Press
100 East Normal Avenue
Kirksville, MO 63501-4221
ISBN 978-1-935503-08-8
2010, 81 pp., $15.95
http://tsup.truman.edu
It’s hard to say what I love most in this glorious debut volume; is it the glorious Frog & Toad poems, the love poems, or the one-on ones with mentors—Stevens, Pound, and Wright? What’s clear is that re-reading only intensifies the delight of Dean Rader’s Works & Days. There’s something reminiscent of John Donne in Rader’s poems, the earnest spiritual questing of the sonnets and sermons counterbalanced with delightful and unexpected wit. Contemplate the marriage of “Batter my heart” with the playful “Mark but this flea…” and you’ll get a sense of his range.
I think what first won me to this book was the authenticity of Rader’s voice and a striking ease in shifting, swift changes of tone. He is like a skilled mid-fielder in fluent stop and start moves. “Traveling to Oklahoma for my Grandmother’s Funeral,” the opening poem, is masterful in its modulation of tone: “I am traveling to Oklahoma for my Grandmother’s funeral/ But all I want is to write a poem about Stevens.” I love the way that second line alters the first; the bare facts of the day spool loose with yearning. We don’t know why Stevens is crucial, yet we do not doubt the necessity. Rader draws us elbow-close with a vivid snatch of air flight reality: “The elderly woman next to me / In 7D has been peeking at this poem / For several minutes.” We’re right there with him, flush with memories of past flights. Cheekily, he continues, “I don’t mind, / because the next line is this: / she will die before I do.” Suddenly, we are grinning at the wit of this shrewd “cure,” and then, like quicksilver, his tone drops darkly, “All of us on the plane could get there/ In seconds. In the reverse burial that is this sky.” These are beautifully deft shifts in tone, masterful line breaks, all of which build to the essential question:
…What I need is to ask my grandmother—
Her entire life a believer—if, in that flash of black light,
In that dissolving instant she had the opposite doubts
Of Stevens; if she renounced the supreme fiction, the emptiness
Suddenly so clear, beyond the dividing and indifferent blue.
(“Traveling to Oklahoma…”)
Spiritual inquiry runs throughout this volume and it’s ever present, if not always overt, as Rader’s home currents in San Francisco. The book takes its title and structure from the early archaic Greek poet Hesiod’s Works and Days. Hesiod gives advice for a life of honest work as well as sound instruction in things like seafaring and agriculture; Works and Days is not unlike Virgil’s Georgics in this respect. The cosmic dimensions that frame the ancient poem can be glimpsed in works like “Ocean Beach at Twilight: 14” and “Hesiod in Oklahoma, 1934.” The Oxford Classical Dictionary describes Hesiod as a “surly conservative countryman, given to reflection….who felt the gods’ presence heavy about him.” In Rader’s book, it’s the characters of “Frog,” “Toad,” and even “Snow” who are, by turns, reflective, impatient, surly, or enthralled by ontological and metaphysical questions.
Frog, however, wondered why
he was Frog and Toad was Toad.
Frog knew who he was,
but this strange morning
he feared he was the wrong one.
(“Frog and Toad Confront the Alterity of Otherness”)
Rader has re-invented Arnold Loebel’s characters. The best friends are far more than the voices we’ve rendered reading to our children. They are grown up, truer versions. Remember that Loebel scene when Frog—exasperated by the long wait for Toad’s hibernation to end—simply rips the winter months off the calendar and wakes Toad? Well, a similar lyric spirit, arch and insouciant, is alive and well in Rader’s debut volume. It’s the delightful mix of earnest inquiry and wickedly funny humor that makes this book so much fun to read.
No one spreads your butter like Toad
His heart is jelly, his tongue is jam.
He’ll nibble the crust right off your bread.
(“Frog and Toad Sing the Birthday Blues: 38”)
Many of the love poems are kindred spirits. One of my favorites is “Waking Next to You on My 39th Birthday or The Other Arm”; and of this feast, I won’t give away so much as a crumb.
____________
Catherine Staples teaches in the Honors program at Villanova University. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Blackbird, The Southern Review, Commonweal, Third Coast, The Michigan Quarterly Review, and others. She is the recipient of the University of Pennsylvania’s William Carlos Williams Award, two APR Distinguished Poets’ Residencies, and The New England Poetry Club’s Boyle/ Farber Award. Betsy Sholl selected her chapbook, Never a Note Forfeit, for Seven Kitchens Press’ 2010 Keystone Prize; it is scheduled for release in May.
QUOTE:
Works and Days is an engaging book that manages to be both experimental and “accessible,” if by that latter term one doesn’t mean dumbed-down. More than just a conglomeration of poems, it is a book with a subtle architecture, an ironic unity fashioned on the theme of fragmentation. This coherence and sophistication is an outstanding achievement in a first book.
Review of Dean Rader's Works and Days
Dean Rader, Works and Days (Truman State University Press, 2010)
Dean Rader’s T.S. Eliot Prize winning book, Works & Days, takes for its title the name of Hesiod’s great epic on labor, and thus Rader asks his reader to consider his work in a tradition longer than that invoked by most contemporary American poets. The title seems to make a claim to epic proportions, but at the same time, in the poet’s choice to echo a previous epic so closely rather than giving himself the room Virgil gives himself with Homer or Dante with Virgil, Rader exhibits the sense of belatedness or reduced possibilities one expects from a postmodern poet. Put another way, Rader manages to seize the epic’s claim to encyclopedic inclusiveness and yet acknowledge the fragmented epistemology of our age. In this way, Works & Days reminds me of Berryman’s Dream Songs. When epic was new, it strove to be, in the words of one admirer of Paradise Lost, “the story of all things.” In the age of growing individualism, we see that encyclopedic urge turned inward in Whitman and Wordsworth: the story of the self as all things (Whitman: “I am large, I contain multitudes”). With Berryman, and now with Rader, we see a Whitmanian largeness filtered through the legacy of Freud, which is a sense of a divided self. The encyclopedia is now private and random, the epic inclusiveness echoed as unending pastiche.
Berryman gives us Henry and the unnamed minstrel as fragments of the self; Rader gives us Frog and Toad, characters from Arnold Lobel’s beloved books for children. Refashioning well-known kiddy characters into instruments of philosophical/lyrical meditation is a risky business; one could easily drift into the facile cleverness of The Tao of Pooh. Rader avoids the pitfall of cuteness through both careful selection of his borrowed characters and disciplined use of Lobel’s material. The choice of Frog and Toad – as opposed to, say, Dora the Explorer – gives Rader the advantage of working with characters that already have, I dare say, a sort of Homeric dignity about them. Frog and Toad as depicted by Lobel are types in bold outline, more like Achilles or Hector than like Hamlet or Emily Bovary. Thus, in Rader’s capable hands, they take on an instantaneous air of symbolic importance, unhampered by psychology and background. Rader furthers this effect by refraining from following Lobel’s storylines. He imports the characters into new contexts rather than bogging down his poems in references to the stories in Lobel’s books. Frog and Toad are free to represent isolated aspects of the self rather than a whole identity. If one considers the characters as treated by Lobel, one might be tempted to posit Toad as id to Frog’s ego, but Rader does not push such an identification. They could as easily be Yeats’ Hic and Ille as Jung’s “self” and “shadow.” In the first, and best, of the Frog and Toad poems, “Frog and Toad Confront the Alterity of Otherness,” Rader uses sparse, unrhymed couplets to augment this effect of bold Homeric outline:
The sun was hot in the sky
like a muffin in a bright blue tin.
The day was just the day.
The wind was nothing more
than wind, the leaves were leaves
and kept on being leaves.
The directness of these lines puts me in mind of C.S. Lewis’ commentary, in A Preface to Paradise Lost, on Homer’s use of stock phrases applied to the natural world:
Yes; but under all these, like a base so deep as to
be scarcely audible, there is something which we
might very lamely express by muttering ‘same old sea’
or ‘same old morning’. The permanence, the
indifference, the heartrending or consoling fact that
whether we laugh or weep the world is what it is, always
enters into our experience and plays no small part in
that pressure of reality which is one of the
differences between life and imagined life. But in
Homer the pressure is there. The sonorous syllables in
which he has stereotyped the sea, the gods, the morning,
or the mountains, make it appear that we are dealing not
with poetry about the things, but almost with the things
themselves.
Through Frog and Toad, Rader gives us our own divided psyches as “the things themselves.” Like Yeats in “Ego Dominus Tus” or “A Dialogue of Self and Soul,” Rader makes of the fragmented modern self a subject both universal enough and, in its own reduced way, heroic enough to be the subject of epic poetry.
But there is more to this book than Frog and Toad. There is also a fascinating play between the experimental and the lyrical, a sort of dialogue between two poetic strategies that also reflects a sense of the self divided. This division is clearly seen in the collection’s several love poems. There are poems, such as “Love Poem in 5 Couplets + 1 Line” and “Waking Next to You on My 39th Birthday,” which, while imaginative and original, are fairly straightforward in their lyrical appeal. Take for example these lines from the latter poem: “The bed we share is a ship. / You are the captain / in a big blue hat.” The image is compelling, and the blue hat is a surprising and amusing touch. The poem is, however, a standard love poem, based on a metaphor traceable at least as far back as Petrarch. Yet in “Talking Points [Love Poem]” the same lyrical impulse is fragmented into bullet points: “and the way the stars in their wool coats shine inward;” for instance. In “A Genealogy of Unfinished Love Poems” the same fragmented effect is achieved by leaving out words: “Your eyes are so _____.” This poem also approaches the subject of love through the differing perspectives of elegy, comedy, haiku, and epistle, as if any one genre were incapable of capturing the full experience of love. The effect is unsettling, a sense of a self in restless pursuit of a coherence not quite obtainable.
This same restlessness is evident in the book’s series of self portraits. These poems, scattered throughout but increasing in frequency as the volume draws to a close, offer a glimpse of the poet through a fractured lens, a kaleidoscope effect. “Self Portrait: Rejected Pop Song,” for instance, offers a view of the poet via a more mischievous and baffling version of Billy Collin’s “Litany”:
I am not the songbird
I am not the devil’s bunghole
I am not the oyster in the child’s mouth
I am not the shantih, not the shantih[.]
One might object that the reader is left with no idea of what the poet, then, is, but that is perhaps rather the point. Rader draws on postmodern notions of self as unincorporated fragments bound only loosely by the illusion of identity. In this framework, any poem could become a “self portrait,” and thus Rader offers a number of such poems on very diverse topics. As the book races to its conclusion, the self portraits shift into a series of birthday poems, each one less conventionally bound than the last, until we arrive at a final prayer from no one to nobody:
O distance,
O silent measure,
drink down the body:
drink down time’s cup.
In the blank space, in the spacious imagery, in the large and empty vowels, these line convey a longing for dissolution of self, the release of the mystic as filtered through Wittgenstein and Derrida.
Not all of the book’s poems are as obscure. There are charmers as well, like “The Poem You Ordered,” a playfully surreal engagement with the reader – again in the mode of Billy Collins – that takes a darker turn at the end. Another example of Rader in a more playful vein is “While Looking up the Etymology of ‘Country’ in the OED, I come across ‘Cornucopia,” a poem appropriately bountiful in its play with language.
Works and Days is an engaging book that manages to be both experimental and “accessible,” if by that latter term one doesn’t mean dumbed-down. More than just a conglomeration of poems, it is a book with a subtle architecture, an ironic unity fashioned on the theme of fragmentation. This coherence and sophistication is an outstanding achievement in a first book.
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""[Rader’s] insightful readings of Native texts and symbols are sensitive and accomplished. . . . Engaged Resistance performs important cultural work by bringing new attention to Native American artists, authors, and filmmakers, whose contributions remain marginalized and under appreciated in popular culture.”" (Western American Literature 2012-09-15)
Engaged Resistance: American Indian Art, Literature, and Film from Alcatraz to the NMAI (review)
Breanne Robertson
From: Western American Literature
Volume 47, Number 3, Fall 2012
pp. 326-328 | 10.1353/wal.2012.0065
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
Reviewed by
Breanne Robertson
Engaged Resistance: American Indian Art, Literature, and Film from Alcatraz to the NMAI. By Dean Rader. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011. 304 pages, $27.95.
Dean Rader begins his book Engaged Resistance: American Indian Art, Literature, and Film from Alcatraz to the NMAI with a brief history of the Ghost Dance, a nineteenth-century religious movement whose promise of restoring the earth to Native Americans through ceremonial dance represents the earliest pan-Indian act of colonial defiance. This performative mode of resistance serves as a leitmotif throughout Rader’s book, which elucidates anticolonialist strategies in contemporary Native American poetry, fiction, film, and visual arts.
Through a series of case studies, Rader demonstrates that “resistance in the symbolic field can be as powerful as resistance on the battlefield” (109). His insightful readings of Native texts and symbols are sensitive and accomplished, and he convincingly argues for a distinctly American Indian form of aesthetic activism that he terms “engaged resistance.” Rooted in indigenous ideologies and archetypes, the discourse of engaged resistance cleverly subverts the mainstream language of dominance—both verbal and visual—by dismantling its traditional frames of knowledge through blended genre, circular time, trickster tropes, and communal storytelling. In so doing, American Indian artists, writers, and filmmakers at once enhance and defend Native dignity and cultural autonomy.
Taking a cue from the indigenous works he studies, Rader positions his book as an activist intervention in the popular discourse about American Indian peoples and culture. The gusto with which Rader undertakes this task is palpable. He strenuously condemns the US historical record of Native genocide and its continuing legacy of cultural hegemony, and he champions contemporary American Indian tenacity and aesthetic ingenuity in countering mainstream tendencies of assimilation and erasure. Yet Rader’s ebullience also does a disservice to his project. By arguing for the exceptionalism of Native American aesthetic activism, Rader crafts his own “trap of receptive determinacy” that posits a singular, “correct” way to understand American Indian cultural production (93).
First, Rader refers to the United States and to popular culture in general as the enemy of Native American culture. This binary construct implies that the reader must ultimately agree with the author, thereby joining an enlightened minority, or accept guilt by association. Indeed, [End Page 326] Rader repeatedly disparages scholars and critics who, in his opinion, fail to situate Native works within an indigenous context or who acknowledge but are not adequately sympathetic to American Indians’ anticolonialist project.
Second, Rader proclaims the aesthetic excellence of Native American art by invoking Georgia O’Keeffe, Spike Lee, and other non-Native cultural leaders, but he refuses any extended comparative analysis, explaining that American Indian artworks reflect indigenous ontologies and thus “operate outside Anglo [and other ethnic] conceptions” (139). Rader’s narrow focus attempts to situate Native American literature and film beyond Western scrutiny, to evaluate these works on their own terms. However, the author finds himself in an interpretive catch-22, as his primary thesis rests on the idea that contemporary indigenous art expresses a hybridized aesthetic derived from American and Native aesthetic traditions. Rader even identifies historical sources and modern affinities with non-Native works as part of his analyses, thus rendering his decision to neglect comparison all the more perplexing and, at times, damaging to his argument. For example, Rader correctly observes the visual similarities between the map paintings of Jasper Johns and Flathead-Cree-Shoshone artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, but whereas Smith “indigenizes the lower forty-eight,” Johns merely “empties out his states” to create “innocuous” maps from an “unaltered perspective” (53). Certainly, Johns’s paintings do not explicitly evoke colonial transgressions as Smith’s paintings do, but Rader ignores postmodernist readings of Johns’s paintings, whose parallel project of challenging the authority of place names and blurring the distinction between maps/objectivity and paintings/subjectivity not only predated but also likely served as a model for Smith’s paintings. While this scholarly oversight might be attributed to Rader’s lack of art historical training, his assumption of Native essentialism nevertheless denies a larger understanding of recent American Indian art, literature, and film within contemporary avantgarde and activist movements in the...
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poems ask the difficult questions in accessible ways, ways rendered all the more effective via wry humor and an eye for the darkly poignant.”
Whereas Hesiod’s text serves as a sort of hybrid mythology, farmer’s almanac, and moral treatise, Rader’s is somehow subtler . His poems draw out the stories and epiphanies stirring below the surface of description and philosophical query.
his poems ask the difficult questions in accessible ways, ways rendered all the more effective via wry humor and an eye for the darkly poignant.
“so often simultaneously attends to the reader's senses of emotional, rhetorical, and aesthetic urgency; his poems ask the difficult questions in accessible ways, ways rendered all the more effective via wry humor and an eye for the darkly poignant.”
Works & Days by Dean Rader (review)
Eric Weinstein
From: Colorado Review
Volume 38, Number 3, Fall/Winter 2011
pp. 149-151 | 10.1353/col.2011.0088
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
149 Book Notes only briefly, before they are again forced to shift. Many of these stories, so frequently told from the perspective of children or young adults, are stories about growing up—or the illusion of doing so. One finally masters the mystical and terrifying world of childhood only to wake up in the banal and crushing atmosphere of adulthood. And then the winds there start to shift. This alertness also sets Call’s collection apart from so much magical realism and quirk where the mundane gets weird and that’s it; instead, a profoundly strange world gets stranger and what comes into sharp focus are the all-too-human yet still unexpected ways his narrators bumble and swerve through these curiously gentle end of days. Works & Days, by Dean Rader Truman State University Press, 2010 reviewed by Eric Weinstein Modeled on the poetic work of the same name by the Greek writer Hesiod, Dean Rader’s Works & Days (winner of the 2010 T. S. Eliot Prize) is, like its namesake, an account of labor , the various roles it plays in our lives, and its relationship to other aspects of our worldly experiences, human and non-. In “Ocean Beach at Twilight: 14,” Rader asks: “Who’s to say the stars understand / their heavy labor, or the moon its / grunt work across the hard curve of absence?” To the poet, labor is not the province of mankind alone, but its joys and sorrows are our own to bear. The narrator’s presence, often underplayed or even absent in the idyllic poems of other writers imitating the classical style, firmly grounds Rader’s poetry in the phenomenology of human life. In the opening poem, “Traveling to Oklahoma for My Grandmother’s Funeral, I Write a Poem about Wallace Stevens,” Rader writes about “the priest attending to Stevens” who swore “he made a deathbed conversion // To Catholicism, a claim his daughter denies. / I deny him nothing.” The agency of Rader’s narrator, his ability to offer confirmation or denial even in the face of his grandmother’s perishing, brings the simple facts of his labors—travel, burial—into line with the emotional landscape of his days. colorado review 150 Whereas Hesiod’s text serves as a sort of hybrid mythology, farmer’s almanac, and moral treatise, Rader’s is somehow subtler . His poems draw out the stories and epiphanies stirring below the surface of description and philosophical query. Instead of Hesiod and Perses, the principal voices of the 700 bc Works and Days, Rader takes up the personae of Arnold Lobel’s children ’s book characters, Frog and Toad. (One wonders whether this owes something, at least in part, to Lobel’s last Frog and Toad title, 1979’s Days with Frog and Toad.) In “Frog and Toad Confront the Alterity of Otherness,” Rader explores the epistemological questions of knowing whether one exists—and the ontological mystery of existence, period—through the interaction between the two friends. The poem ends: Good old Frog, he thinks. That bastard knows I hate toast. Toad spreads the jam like a man might smooth mortar on a brick for which there is no building. Thank you, he says. Thank you Frog. Rader’s poetry is remarkable in that it so often simultaneously attends to the reader’s senses of emotional, rhetorical, and aesthetic urgency; his poems ask the difficult questions in accessible ways, ways rendered all the more effective via wry humor and an eye for the darkly poignant. If there is an underlying fault in Works & Days, it is that its author occasionally substitutes bloodless abstraction for the emotionally salient image, as in the poem “Song for the Shell Shaker”: “Maybe it was the day when something passed / between the woman / and the words she spoke, / a private understanding / like the silent nods of the blind.” “Ocean Beach at Twilight: 14” draws the reader’s attention to “the beach’s pillar of stillness”; “Ocean Beach at Twilight: 41” invites us to “drink up the darkness.” These abstractions detract from the force of the work, its emotional import. We want the blood! We want to 151 Book Notes see the labor and sorrow, the victories and joys that life entails...
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Rader’s ingenious new collection, Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry (Copper Canyon; $17), is lyric poetry for the digital age. His subject is the self “entwined in society,” as an epigraph informs us, and Rader’s poems offer a timely comment on America and American culture, its dark history of omissions.
Poetry by Dean Rader, Elizabeth Powell, Jenny Molberg
By Diana Whitney Updated 5:43 pm, Wednesday, March 1, 2017
Dean Rader’s ingenious new collection, Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry (Copper Canyon; $17), is lyric poetry for the digital age. His subject is the self “entwined in society,” as an epigraph informs us, and Rader’s poems offer a timely comment on America and American culture, its dark history of omissions.
“We come to language the way we come/ to this life, which is to say confused/ and desperate,” writes Rader in “Self-Portrait at Easter.” He navigates this state of confusion while giving us a guide for how to read his varied portraits. Wikipedia is an unreliable source; it has 40 million articles in nearly 300 languages, but its entries are never finished, never confirmed as fact. And so Rader sees the self as fluid and circumspect, always evolving, open to edits, created by writer and reader alike.
In a conflicted series of “American Self-Portraits,” Rader proclaims the country’s desires: “You want my sandwich,/ hey get in line. This isn’t the army, but I’ll march./ I want your shoulder holster, I want your mouth of bullets.” Later he channels Neruda in a lyrical elegy to the American dream, our traditions of violence, racism, and fear:
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America, I do not call your name without hope
not even when you lay your knife
against my throat or lace my hands
behind my back, the cuffs connecting
us like two outlaws trying to escape
history’s white horse, its heavy whip
and a pistolshot in the ear.
Raised in Oklahoma, Rader now lives in San Francisco, where he is a professor at the University of San Francisco. Splicing wordplay with cultural critique, he quips: “I heart the left in San Francisco,/ but I left my heart in Oklahoma.” With formal dexterity, Rader draws from diverse sources: Choose Your Own Adventure novels, Frog and Toad children’s books, the haiku of Basho. “Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry” keeps trying to untie “sorrow’s tiny knot,” revealing the self as it hides, emerges and ultimately seeks connection. In a final poem, “Self-Portrait: Postmortem,” the speaker longs to drift with the reader in a dark boat beyond time: “You sit beside me in the dark ride as the organ plays and our boat lifts and drops over/ the edge. We are so close, it is as if we have traveled the many distances solely for this.” Thus human intimacy becomes a balm for the wounds of our past, for our ongoing digital dislocation.