American Indian Culture and Research Journal

I. Blackfeet surrealism James Welch is Blackfeet on his father's side (Blackfeet say Blackfeet, not Blackfoot), and Gros Ventre on his mother's. He was born in 1940 in Browning, a town of 2000 in northwest Montana which serves as the headquarters and trade center for the Blackfeet Reservation. He attended schools on the Blackfeet and Fort Belknap Reservations, ultimately graduating from high school in Minneapolis. He attended Minnesota University and Northern Montana College before receiving a B.A. from the University of Montana. He went on to teach in the Creative Writing Program there for two years before leaving teaching to devote more time to writing. Welch published his first collection of poems, Riding the Earth-boy 40, in 1971. Earthboy was the name of a family from Welch's reservation; the 40 refers to the number of acres in their allotment of land. The poems are drawn mainly from Welch's Montana experiences. The collection was reviewed favorably in the Saturday Review (October 2, 1971), but World Publishing Company allowed it to go out of print. Harper and Row has since reissued it, with seven new poems. Welch has attracted some attention in Europe; Roswith von Freydorf Riese, a German poet and critic from Heidelberg, has been translating his poems into German. While some of Welch's poetry is perfectly clear, even to an unsophisticated reader, much of it is difficult to understand. The reason is that like many other American poets today-James Dickey, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, Robert Bly and James Wright, to name just a few - he has been influenced by surrealism. The most important direct influences have been the poetry of his friend James Wright and the works of Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo.