This House
by Jim Bodeen
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This House

Afterward, the Introduction to This House: A Poem in Seven Books

On his journey from North Dakota to Seattle to Viet Nam to Chile and ultimately to Yakima, Jim Bodeen has accomplished something remarkable: he has learned who he is and grown comfortable with that understanding. "I experience the self as nothing. I am not inferior. Response to what has been given is all." This is the way he puts it in sHADOWmARKED lines on a broadside of the poem titled "In the Mari Sandoz Crazy Horse Camp..." that also opens his recent book, Impulse to Love.

In This House, On This Morning is about, among many other things, "the geography of the imagination." In Eastern Washington, especially Yakima County where this poetry was written, and Walla Walla County where it is published, the geography of the imagination is coming more and more to include the beautiful and revivifying tones and sounds of Spanish.

Mixing his dreams, his work, his family, his Labrador Lacy Dreamwalker, his students, his love of music, his friends and his literary antecedents into immensely compassionate poetry, is an act of faith in his stated belief that "all poems are spiritual." He writes what is possible with what he is given. In the course of a cycle he "was taken up in a spell with the first stanza and released with the last line, ten months later." Only the whole of life finally matters and in Bodeen's hands the common objects of our existence are suffused with warm intelligence.

The poetry goes in many directions at dream speed. Sometimes he wants to "Retain the conversational tone to project / the irrational image." Other times he turns into a receptacle and "When the dream speaks, I listen." Often as not he lets his friends and students speak for themselves as "The only fear I have / is the fear my mother gives me," or "The idea of courage is not going back. / Our hunger is sufficient fuel." The overall effect is to recreate the carefully woven fabric of our life.

A publisher as well as a poet of renown, he has time even for the ironic terror of the poetry business noting, "This is literature / that means business;" or "Not a single book will enter Barnes & Noble without a Bar Code;" or implicating his wife Karen into the mix, "Going to make her stand up for poetry / in a roomful of suits."

Way beyond the business of poetry is the actual business of poetry. Teaching at Davis High School in Yakima, someday to be renamed Ray Carver High -- the library already has a Ray Carver Center -- Bodeen knows that "The new culture will come from the ashes of this one." We are in a phrase, "Gabachos getting to know who we are."

Eastern Washington is only two congressional districts wide but a major cultural fusion is now taking place here and everywhere else in the putative United States, especially say, Texas, Colorado and California, where the hard-working vitality and élan of the rapidly developing Hispanic contributions are gradually shaming the rest of us into a deeper understanding of both our past and our future. Foremost among these contributions is their love of and reliance on family as the primary institution.

"Nothing on earth / is more contemptible // than borders." Bodeen erases the borders, phrase by musical phrase, with a fine eye for detail and with gracious humility. Notice what happens when he lets his students -- "Most of my students are illegal," -- speak for themselves as in "At the Hispanic Achiever's Award Banquet:"

    Every obstacle in the way
    is part of the curriculum.
    We all want to be here and everybody wants us.
    Everyone is legal and on scholarship...

    We are one pueblo,
    barrio unido.
    There is no division.
    The mayor is a homeboy.
    Alcalde como vato loco.
    Every scholarship is big. Becas grandes para todos.
    Everyone has papers...

    Our Social Security cards are our own.
    We're surrounded by truth. 

How sweet it will be when we all get it straight. The terrible exploitation has to cease. The sickening news out of Yakima this morning is that the INS is planning to "roundup" between 750 and 1,400 "illegal" migrant workers for the purpose of harassing, intimidating and deporting them. Roundup is a cattle prod phrase used by fascists too decadent and disorganized to pick their own fruit. It ought to be enough to make you choke on the apple in your mouth.

Bodeen quotes Gabino Salazar, Mixtec from Oaxaca: "I think this story / is the most beautiful story I've ever heard in my life. / This character is never embarrassed about his home."

So what is this "home" we hear so much about and where might it be located? Bodeen has written a poem into the future. It is a poem about who we are becoming and what we are doing here. What we are doing here is, "We're carving out a country we can carry with us. / In this third country todos son bienvenidos, / todos somos todo." You'll be bigger and warmer for feeling this poem. Bienvenidos a This House.

Charles Potts

Walla Walla
February 19, 1999