- The phrase and so I shall at the end of the first line raises the expectation of an accommodating response to the demand for forgiveness, but that assumption is immediately dispelled. By the impossibility of the conditions that follow each repetition of so I shall after, the speaker signifies that the transgressions he is told to accept are irreversible and, in fact, ongoing, and therefore unacceptable. His attitude is equivalent to a cry of When hell freezes over or a response of His victim is still dead to a convicted killers parole application; but, in our view, the quiet fury and controlled rage of Alexies poem make for a more effective indictment than would a more obviously angry approach. Clearly, we are not alone in that view. Here is a passage from an article on the website of the North Carolina Arts Council, posted by state poet laureate Kathryn Stripling Byer; she is describing the state finals of the Poetry Out Loud National Recitation Contest sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, held in Raleigh on February 23, 2008 (the Hart Crane poem, by the way, can also be found in the anthology in Poems for Further Reading):
Special moments still make my head spin. Cherokee High School student Sara Tramper, second-place winner, offered a stunning reminder of how poetry can enable us to express our deepest selves in ways nothing else can. She dedicated her recitation of My Grandmothers Love Letters, by Hart Crane, to the memory of her own grandmother. Through her pacing, her inflection, and her controlled emotion, she brought this lyrically moving poem to life. From that poem she moved to Sherman Alexies mesmerizing chant-poem, The Powwow at the End of the World. When she finished, the person behind me whispered, Wow (
www.ncarts.org/freeform_scrn_template.cfm?ffscrn_id=281)
You can find a recitation of The Powwow at the End of the World by Will Horwath, with an accompanying slideshow presentation by Janet Knell, at video.google .com/videoplay?docid=1399244527539736240.
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