Split Arrow.

The Annals of Lit Versatility 

I recently learned that Pablo Neruda is a pseudonym.  Residence On Earth, a book that will probably be packed into my ramshackle, carry-on coffin with me when I ship off to Heaven was written by a man who was not actually surnamed Neruda.  Boo hoo.  Poets working in elusiveness yet again rain on this Rebel Brother’s parade. 

Of course I love all that shit.  Like Banksy status, right?  Except Chilean, dead, and slightly less anonymous.  I’ll never forget finding the phrase “muzzle of bees” in Neruda and never being able to forgive Jeff Tweedy.  See: he takes all his words from the books that you don’t read anyway.  

Poets are tanglers of labyrinthine reference.  I believe all the great novelists are really poets.  Most likely they’re South American too.   Or Russian.  Or white North American women; your Joyce Carol Oates’s, Jennifer Egans, Mary Gaitskills, Miranda Julys, (thought that was a pseudonym for Gaitskill awhile—right, a "real person" named Miranda July, though she is and probably questions her own inherent realness).  Then you have your Spokane master of the literary universe: Sherman Alexie. 

Alexie, who resides in Seattle and was born with water on the brain.  Alexie, who wrote the troublingly effective pulp-pastiche Indian Killer and beat the piss out of conceptual writer Saul Williams in the 2001 World Heavyweight Championship Poetry Bout (kidding, actually a nail-biting match).  Until powerhouses George Saunders and Roberto Bolaño completely hijacked all collective cognizance of accessible short story writing, his 2000 collection The Toughest Indian in the World was undoubtedly my favorite.  Now it’s “basically” my favorite.  Alexie forms armistice between humor and heartbreak, making friends, metaphorically or non, between the magician and the businessman, the hitchhiker and the territorial. 

I often like Alexie’s work.  His short stories are a great diving board into his fold which encompasses poetry, shorts, and novels.  Indian Killer is the great contemporary American novel.  “Whatever Happened to Frank Snake Church” and “The Sin Eaters” are variances in tone and pacing in Alexie’s short story wellspring.  This link is an Alexie poem.  It's an observance of the social networking mud we're Facedown in: 

http://www.mbird.com/2011/05/the-facebook-sonnet-sherman-alexie/

Thanks, Mockingbird.

Courtesies, 

The Brothers Rebel