Nome Poems

People all over the U.S., especially in the music and poetry communities, are talking about Ken Waldman, "Alaska's Fiddling Poet". I picked up Nome Poems about a year ago when Ken was making a live appearance on Sedge Thompson's West Coast Live radio show (originates from San Francisco, syndicated to a bunch of public radio stations). Also, if you sign his mailing list, he sometimes sends you brand new poems, fresh off the tundra, by mail (postcards). For West Coast Live, he penned a poem for the occasion. As you would gather from his nickname, he is also a fiddler (notice the photo on book cover). He's developing a following among fiddlers, banjoists and guitarists who accompany him at various gigs. Many public radio stations also play his songs. He definitely synergizes these two talents well. His poems are accessible. You don't have to have understood The Waste Land or Cantos to get his (snow)drift. Nome Poems is a good place to start along the path of Ken.

In his concise and intense book of poems, Ken Waldman shares his impressions of the westernmost city in the United States, Nome, Alaska. This is not the Princess Cruises version of the 49th state, but instead an unflinching look at the social ills, the tragedies, the litter and the rummage sales of a booming turn-of-the-century Gold Rush town that is still coasting along. His eye is sympathetic, but not blind. In "Inupiat Blood," for instance, Waldman peeks inside the ambitions of a talented Alaska Native woman who settles for staying home and raising a child, who in turn will never reach his own potential. Some may call this a bigoted cliché, but it happens, it is real.All of the people he writes about are real and still live in Nome today. The names, as they say, have been changed to protect the innocent. But "Nome Poems" is a portrait of innocence lost. It is Alaska at its seediest, a dysfunctional cutlure that somehow lurches through winter after winter.Waldman walked away from a plane crash and, in a series of poems, his story turns personal. Waldman knows he is one of the lucky ones who somehow survived the kind of accident that has claimed so many other lives here. As a four-year resident of Nome myself, I can say that the town has glorious sunsets, abundant wildlife, amazing empty beaches and a rollicking frontier culture. But it also has flaws I have learned to accept and even appreciate. Life up here is not easy. Waldman drives home this point in a hundred different ways: the harsh weather, the free-flowing booze, the isolation all conspire to defeat the lives of good people. But in spite of these problems, Waldman recognizes that these people are indeed good and worthy of our recognition and thoughts.