Moving forward: “On, sail on!”
We spent “Thanksgiving” in the nation’s capital, with a focus on the Museum of the American Indian which opened in 2004, as well as a gathering of cousins. There was a story behind my special focus. There is another site in DC that I wanted to see in a half-neglected grove in Rock Creek Park with an abandoned hut and a gathering of homeless “squatters” scattered around the empty log cabin once home of the poet and Western frontiersman Joaquin Miller. I asked our daughter to drive me on this adventure and she, mostly reluctantly, agreed in her usual cheerful and kindly way. I was doing a bit of poetic research.
I was seeking the meaning of the phrase used by that once poetic pilgrim of a prior period in our national history in a poem titled “Columbus.” Born Cincinnatus Heine Miller in 1837, he adopted the pen name Joaquin Hiner Miller. He sought his fortune in California during the gold rush and lived in a Native American village for a year which influenced several of his writings. Miller was married at least twice, once to a Native American, and had four or five children. His ode to the Admiral of the Ocean Sea was once well known to every school child. On that westward bound voyage, the crew grew anxious and asked Columbus what to do with the winds, storms, hurricanes, and his only answer was, ON! SAIL ON!”
I interpreted that as a fitting guide for the America of Now as well as Then. Poetry does not merely seek opinion but something less intentional, open, uncertain. And I found the same sense among the homeless folk there in an abandoned log cabin in a forgotten or forsaken space with my determined daughter as my personal guide and helper. She was searching for a few words to acknowledge the history of the rather wretched remainder of what had once been a free but welcome homestead for a poet of yore, whose reputation rose and sank in his lifetime. It struck me as more inspiring and relevant and truly artistic than the big new museums that celebrate space travel among the stars. In fact, the only rival for me was the 2004 museum, a marvelous complement to the culture of the Native Americans.
Long ago when I was both a Brown grad student and a fresh new faculty member at RISD, there was a “Liggetts” counter where I took my midday coffee break. Oddly the guy who poured my brew called me “Cincinnatus.” This eventually led me to pursue some recent research to figure out who the poet named for the virtuous Roman stateman really was. It turned out that the book of famous American verse or speech words included his salute to Columbus! It mentioned the pen name of the writer, who switched from Cincinnatus to Joaquin, and with the help of a kindly librarian I re-discovered both the adventures he had undertaken in the West, and the rise and fall that is often the fate and fortune of a poet or an author. He seemed to embody the Biblical idea that “A prophet is not without honor, save in his own country” since he was feted as an exotic Western frontiersman in England but more often derided as bombastic in the United States.
The geography in the “Columbus” poem is accurate, including the description of the passage beyond the Azores and the rough and tough weather that frightened and distressed the crew, but their fearless leader would repeat to their anxieties about it only the words “On! Sail on!” My motive for sharing this story is to highlight that poetry is not the articulation of ideas, advice or counsel or even wisdom, but rather a challenge and a conundrum, a question, not an opinion.
At this moment in time when many among us wonder what is ahead for the next chapter in our culture, maybe the plight of poetry is captured in the very nature and biography of the poet who changed his name, his fame and his wives (at least twice). As well as the children he left behind, there are those apt words for the concerns we have today, “On, sail on.” His genuine sympathy for the richness of the environment, the diversity of the design of the new and old worlds, and his adventurous spirit seem remarkably apt just now. I am proud to recall and claim that nickname, “Cincinnatus.”
MIKE FINK (mfink33@aol.com) is a professor emeritus at the Rhode Island School of Design.
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