It Ain't Over Until We're Smoking Cigars on the Drill Pad: Poems From Standing Rock and the Frontlines by Mark Tilsen (review)
2023; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 35; Issue: 3-4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/ail.2023.a928903
ISSN1548-9590
Tópico(s)American Literature and Culture
ResumoReviewed by: It Ain't Over Until We're Smoking Cigars on the Drill Pad: Poems From Standing Rock and the Frontlines by Mark Tilsen Taté Walker Mark Tilsen. It Ain't Over Until We're Smoking Cigars on the Drill Pad: Poems From Standing Rock and the Frontlines. Mark K. Tilsen, 2019 98 pp., paper, $25.00. The poems and stories in Mark K. Tilsen's debut collection, It Ain't Over Until We're Smoking Cigars on the Drill Pad, reflect both the vitality and the mundanity of what day-to-day life was like for those in the thick of 2016's Dakota Access Pipeline protests at Standing Rock. So much of what drove this movement into worldwide fame and history is due to the no-bullshit efforts of relatives like Tilsen, who documented on-the-ground energies through these writings, which are funny, heartbreaking, frustrating, contemplative, sexy, depressing, and excruciatingly real. This book pulls you right back to Backwater Bridge and forces you to experience the wonderful community-building and fucked-up-ness of camp life, frontline action, post-protest blues, and the "what's next?" of it all. Tilsen is Oglala Lakota and self-published the first edition of the It Ain't Over … in 2019. I was gifted a copy of the third edition (2021) in the fall of 2022. The book embodies the #NoDAPL experience within fifty-plus poems and journal entries. I was at Standing Rock as a journalist, and I found myself nodding along with Tilsen's distinct voice, which offers an archive-worthy perspective that is at once both profound and simplistic. In "We are Going to Stop the Pipeline" (9) Tilsen explains: There are warriors here and wannabe warriors and honest to god want to be warriors. We have allies too. I am not a warrior, nor a defender, or an activist, or a protester, or protector, nor a man of prayer. I am a poet. That's it. As the third piece in the book, and the first listed in the table of contents, it sets the tone for what readers can expect in the rest of the book: direct, [End Page 45] vulnerable, and in your face. This is frontline action as poetry. There are also poems like, "Ode to the Prairie Knights Casino Bathroom" (29), a chuckle-worthy title. As a kid, I visited the casino on several occasions (I spent my teen years in Bismarck, and many of my family are Standing Rock citizens), and I can vouch for its amenities—and buffet. Tilsen does the venue justice in this love letter when he writes: A candle and altar would not be out of place herewash your hands cleanlet goin a camp of thousandsthis is the only privacy you get. Like a lot of poetry, reading Tilsen's words offers a different experience than hearing them read aloud by the poet. Tilsen's normal tone is gruff, gravely, and dry, but familiar in a rez cousin-type way. When he performs to an audience, Tilsen drops into a lyrical urban cadence that recalls scenes from Good Fellas, especially if he's holding one of his titular cigars. Many of his poems mirror this shift in tone: On one page you'll get beautiful imagery about dancing women and dancing water; the next page filled with paranoia and depression. In "Leaving Camp" (54) we get the lines: you imagine every vehicle is following youhelicopters freak you outone month outthere are people you don't talk to because you feel the surveillance on your skinyou're a danger to them, or they to you Later, in "The Modern Lakota Man" (78), Tilsen fills our cups with this prayer: My beautiful boysMy beautiful lakota menStay youStay trueLead us out of the darkness and brutality and mental infection that has been ending usLet us not be the monsters we were trained to beI need not be a terror on my people [End Page 46] Be like thatJust like thatwahwahala Tilsen includes a few pieces from time spent with land and water protectors in...
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