James L. White

James L. White Poems

James L. White Biography

James L. White (March 26, 1936 - July 13, 1981) was an American poet, editor and teacher. Born in Indianapolis, Indiana, White attended Indiana University and Colorado State University where he attained an MA in Literary Criticism. White taught as a poet in the schools on the Navajo Indian Reservation and in Minnesota public schools as part of a pilot program by COMPAS. He also taught with Allen Ginsberg at Naropa University's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. While teaching, White edited the poetry collections Time of the Indian (1976), which featured the poetry of Indian schoolchildren, and First Skin Around Me (1976), which featured the work of contemporary Indian writers including Joy Harjo and Duane Niatum. His own books of poetry include the book The Salt Ecstasies, published in 1982 after his death by Graywolf Press. White died of heart disease on July 13, 1981, at the age of 45.)

The Best Poem Of James L. White

At Darien Bridge

The sea here used to look
As if many convicts had built it,
Standing deep in their ankle chains,
Ankle-deep in the water, to smite

The land and break it down to salt.
I was in this bog as a child
When they were all working all day
To drive the pilings down.

I thought I saw the still sun
Strike the side of a hammer in flight
And from it a sea bird be born
To take off over the marshes.

As the gray climbs the side of my head
And cuts my brain off from the world,
I walk and wish mainly for birds,
For the one bird no one has looked for

To spring again from a flash
Of metal, perhaps from the scratched
Wedding band on my ring finger.
Recalling the chains of their feet,

I stand and look out over grasses
At the bridge they built, long abandoned,
Breaking down into water at last,
And long, like them, for freedom

Or death, or to believe again
That they worked on the ocean to give it
The unchanging, hopeless look
Out of which all miracles leap.

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