Tickle Me Alamo
MCCOWELL, ROBERT
Tickle Me Alamo The Alamo: An Epic By Michael Lind Houghton Mifflin. 351 pp. $25.00. Reviewed by Robert McDowell Executive director, Story Line Press When I was a boy in the early '60s,...
...I believe I have also seen every other film on the Alamo, and read many, though not all, of the thousands of books dealing with the subject...
...Frost wisely demurred, remarking that "no writer has ever been corrected into importance...
...Reviewed by Robert McDowell Executive director, Story Line Press When I was a boy in the early '60s, my sister walked me the three blocks to the movie house on Main Street in Alhambra, California, to see John Wayne's epic film, The Alamo...
...There is civil war in Mexico, and the conflict engulfs both Anglo-American and Mexican settlers in Texas...
...Nor is one likely to find a more sympathetic presentation of the plight of the Tejanos (Mexicans living in Texas, who sided with the secessionists) and of the Mexican soldiers serving their country's military dictator...
...To those who persist in viewing verse with suspicion, I offer the following Robert Frost anecdote as balm...
...As Yeats reminded us, folk art "refuses what is passing and trivial, the merely clever and pretty, as certainly as the vulgar and insincere, and because it has gathered into itself the simplest and most unforgettable thoughts of the generations, it is the soil where all great art is rooted...
...These are all by poets who evidently feel confident enough to attempt works "writ large against the sky...
...One faction, led by Sam Houston, plans to secede and establish an independent republic...
...Yet unlike other chroniclers, he does not scant the role of the women involved in this historic confrontation: Rebecca Cummings (Travis' mistress), Susannah Dickinson (who was allowed to leave the Alamo after the battle), and many others are brought vividly to life...
...The secessionists capture a Franciscan mission in San Antonio—the Alamo—and temporarily expel Santa Anna's troops from Texas...
...The destiny of earth was altered with each casualty.This iambic pentameter, with sevenline stanzas rhyming ABABBCC, is employed throughout The Alamo...
...Indeed, for sheer scope, The Alamo ranks with the achievement of those giants of 20th-century book-length poetry, Edwin Arlington Robinson and Robinson Jeffers...
...It neatly splits the difference between Robinson's chivalric, often florid epics, and Jeffers' more private, allusive excursions into the dark side of the American character...
...What is surprising, though, and most emotionally satisfying, is the long buildup, which weaves together fascinating historical details and restores the multi-layered political and cultural context surrounding the battle...
...The famous combatants— Jim Bowie, Davy Crockett, William Travis, Santa Anna —loom large...
...Lind's method highlights the characters, great and obscure, who lived through this episode...
...The ancestry of The Alamo is also linked to an earlier breakthrough in long verse, Robert Perm Warren's Audubon...
...One looks in vain over most of the landscape of contemporary American poetry for a kindred ambition...
...Lind's prosody will doubtless be attacked by insecure academics who are unable to hear metered verse, and by critics who cannot encounter stories in poetry without smirking...
...The actual battle takes up only the last fourth of his epic...
...From our own Civil War we are familiar with the horror of brother pitted against brother, but we are not as likely to know that a similar dynamic existed in Texas in the 1830s...
...I was not disappointed...
...All of these poems turn to historical characters and events for their subjects, and to folklore for the subtleties so often left out of the history lessons...
...Lind divides his poem into 12 books...
...Of the pre-dawn March 6 assault on the Alamo's walls, Lind writes, Again, the deadly wind...
...Its battles were exquisitely choreographed, its score rousing and its death scenes heartbreaking—it seemed to me, in a word, the ultimate movie experience...
...None of these ever surpassed Wayne's version in beauty, or breadth of vision...
...another aims to appease the military dictator, Santa Anna...
...this part captures the chaos, heroism and hell of hand-to-hand warfare, and contributes to the overall power of the poem...
...Since then, I've watched the film at least 20 times, seeing it differently at different periods in my life...
...Upon the dictator's return (following the Texans' premature victory celebration), a contingent of secessionists sets to work fortifying the Alamo...
...After the 1894 publication of Frost's poem "My Butterfly" in The Independent, the editor sent him a volume of Sidney Lanier's poems so he could study it and improve his own meter...
...The Alamo is organized in a successful, if somewhat surprising, way...
...In its theme, at least, Lind's epic is closest to those of Hudgins and Mason, who both chose a Civil War setting...
...His verse lingers and echoes in memory as only genuine poetry will...
...At last, one of our continent's most stirring episodes has met its ideal chronicler...
...The challenge, of course, is to make it sound natural, and Lind succeeds...
...But that has now changed...
...Lind poignantly reminds us, evoking the Esparza brothers—one a Mexican soldier assaulting the Alamo's ramparts, the other a doomed defender inside—and many other families whose members find themselves on opposing sides...
...As for the venerable art of the epic, one might paraphrase the author from his own comprehensive, useful essay that follows the poem: He has creatively renovated the form...
...Yet it is appropriate to his task...
...Michael Lind is a sixth-generation Texan, and he brings to the execution of his epic poem, The Alamo, both an abiding love of his region's history and the technical skill of a gifted and daring poet...
...Wayne was the greatest movie actor of all time, so I was predisposed to love every minute of his three-hour-plus film...
...The siege finally begins in Book Eight, and Lind covers its dramatic final day, March 6, 1836, in the poem's last three books, concluding with Santa Anna entering the conquered fortress...
...The Alamo is the latest in a series of long sequences and book-length poems that includes Frederick Turner's Genesis and The New World, Mark Jarman's Iris, David Mason's The Country I Remember, Rita Dove's Thomas and Beulah, Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate, Mark Rudman'sRider, Andrew Huagins' After the Lost War, and half a dozen others published over the last 20 years (most have appeared in the last 10...
...In matters of prosody, Lind justifiably possesses the same self-assurance...
...How many branches of families were pruned there on that day,how many souls in ullages and ranches would never be conceived because a spray of lead or iron drilled a brain's plush gray or sliced an artery...
...Somehow, even at the age of eight, I already believed that Mr...
...The story begins in 1835...
...Lind fuses true story and legend as only a poet working successfully in an epic tradition can...
...It reminds us of Kenneth Burke's comment that "form is a satisfied expectation...
...As a result of their efforts, narrative is rejuvenating American poetry...
Vol. 80 • March 1997 • No. 5
