Looking for John Wayne,
I knew he wasn’t anywhere
nearby.
He left some time ago,
into the sunset for good.
He was gone,
he could be anywhere.
The west was lost,
and so was he.
Locomotives came from the
east.
They came from everywhere,
but here.
Displacing lives,
burning homes,
For what?
The east is cruel.
No more
cowboys in the west.
Tomorrow hopes we have learned
something
from yesterday.
John said once,
while saddling up his horse.
He was the shadow now.
Caught in the smoke of the
locomotive.
It billows and haunts,
stretching from the east across Whitman’s America.
Looking for John Wayne,
I’m sorry you had to go.
Memory was his lost trail.
His Monument Valley,
came crashing down.
Buried underneath
the weight of the
iron.
John could not even watch,
it made him sick.
Have pilgrims always been
savages?
John didn’t want Democracy,
or to see the state capitol.
Some call it lawlessness,
he called it freedom.
But that was taken away,
by greed and hatred.
America the thief.
This is what she really is,
and what she stands for.
Looking for John Wayne,
I’m glad you left.
Time to find a new home,
I hope.
Looking for his shadow,
he could be anywhere.
When reading Simon Ortiz’s From Sand Creek last week, I was inspired by his poem titled “Looking for Billy” on page 61 of his book. What struck me about this poem is that it truly grasped the displacement that was forced onto Native Americans during the 19th century and even now into the 20th and 21st centuries. It’s a depressing piece, but it resonates so much with the themes surfacing throughout Ortiz’s collection of poems. I see “Billy” as this representation of all those forced out of the West by the greed and genocide inflicted upon by the East, and more specifically the pilgrims coming over from Europe and claiming their lives and land. In Ortiz’s poem, he looks for Billy, but yet he knows he is nowhere nearby. There is a hope in finding him, but he knows he is long gone. Billy is this shadow of a memory in his mind. A forgotten person amongst this new America. This vision of Billy coincides deeply with the displacement of the Native Americans and how in this era, “memory [has become their] lost trail.”
For the blog post this week, I wanted to attempt to craft a creative work based around this poem, but I was unsure of how to do so. I found myself grappling with the approach I should take in writing a creative work surrounding themes of Native American displacement and genocide. Unlike Whitman, I did not want to place myself into their shoes and conjure up experiences that I have no association with or understanding of. This made it difficult, but then I began thinking of Native Americans and their connection to the West and then I thought of John Wayne. As the Western genre progressed throughout the early to mid 20th century, the depictions the West began to change. In films like Stagecoach, John Wayne and his Monument Valley are depicted beautifully, casting these figures, and the West, as almost holy lands of freedom and adventure. As time went on however, the rise of the locomotive brought civilization from the East to the West and this former land of promise and privilege became displaced, as seen in films like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. With this displacement of the West in mind, I decided to write a poem that showcased this displacement using John Wayne, who was the figurehead of the Western Genre, as my “Billy”.
My favorite line from this poem is actually a quote by John Wayne himself: “Tomorrow hopes we have learned something from yesterday”. This quote speaks to this displacement of cultures, but more specifically to Ortiz’s book of poems. There is a frustrating sadness behind each of his works, but also a hope for change and a better future and I believe that Wayne’s quote echoes this sentiment.
Source: Clothesmonaut
Dan – I really enjoyed reading your creative post. John Wayne has always been an icon of the west, who we often look toward for what “western” means. But, as your piece says, he is nowhere to be found, just as the American West is now. You do a great job of capturing the multitude of the west while also acknowledging that there is much we don’t know quite everything about. You also do a great job at not putting yourself in the position to speak for Native Americans.
In my brief search about what kind of cultural capital Wayne still holds, there are some interesting views on Wayne as the embodiment of manifest destiny coupled with a sort of elegiac reflection on the loss of his “true” west. He has been taken up for conservative causes as representing the self-reliant loner and explorer–someone who doesn’t stomach ambiguity, and will do what has to be done.
In this poem, you seem to capture his own sense of loss of the West under that tonnage of iron, but I wonder how this also works alongside the Billy poem. Is Wayne’s presence in the poem ironic, or authentic? In a way, we have a double displacement: Wayne’s displacement of the indigenous west (through the rhetoric of manifest destiny) and then industrialization’s displacement of Wayne’s authentic and free west. In many ways, this wasn’t a double displacement, but a single narrative of the loss of the native past. Interesting figure in this context!