New Poets of Native Nations Page 2
Native American and American Indian poetry anthologies are old. Critic Dean Rader in 2017 wrote: “That a comprehensive anthology of Indigenous American poetry has not been published since 1988 is utterly depressing.” At work on New Poets of Native Nations, I knew he was correct both in fact and in feeling. Just a few anthologies of Native American poetry have been published in the past thirty years—none comprehensive of U.S. Native poets alone. Individual collections of writings by members of a specific tribe or region, mixed-genre anthologies, and works focused on women writers have been more regularly, but not frequently, produced. Even the 1988 anthology Rader refers to ends before the beginnings of the careers of late twentieth-century poets of Native nations such as Esther Belin, Kimberly Blaeser, Adrian Louis, Deborah Miranda, Elise Paschen, James Thomas Stevens, Laura Tohe, Luci Tapahonso, Mark Turcotte, and Ofelia Zepeda, to mention just a few. In addition, most Native American poetry anthologies have been published by university presses and are less visible to a general audience. Internet searches for best-selling anthologies under the category of “Native American” or “American Indian” poetry return books published in 1918, 1996, 1988, and 1984, in that order. Clearly, it is time for something new.
The idea for this anthology came to me when I noticed a prominent poet and literary critic’s social media post asking for names of contemporary Native American poets. A few good answers were offered eventually. But responses also suggested the names of nineteenth-century tribal orators and worse—the names of known ethnic frauds, of which there are several, and even those who use American Indian–sounding pen names who are white. I looked at all the poetry lovers following the post on social media and it struck me that if an important critic of American poetry asked for general input about Native American poets and got very few names of poets from specific Native nations in response, then we Native Americans writing poetry are dangerously obscure and—worse again—obscured by poets who are not Native to any indigenous nation.
Even as I saw that post asking for names of contemporary Native American poets, I knew the answers were a direct result of what Rader found depressing. Readers are being informed by outdated anthologies. As an editor and judge on panels for literary prizes, I have found among my peer poets and critics a general lack of understanding of what Native American writing looks like, what it might be about, what styles it might choose, and how it can be recognized within the whole of American poetry. It has seemed to me that, unless our poetry conforms to some stereotypical notion of Native American history and culture in the past tense or unless it depicts spiritual relationship to the natural world of animals and plants and landscape, it goes unrecognized. We do and we do not write of treaties, battles, and drums. We do and we do not write about eagles, spirits, and canyons. Native poetry may be those things, but it is not only those things. It is also about grass and apologies, bones and joy, marching bands and genocide, skin and social work, and much more. But who would know?
Although a few poets of Native nations are now producing work within the mainstream of American literary publishing, very little poetry by Natives reaches a large audience—few readers are exposed to multiple indigenous authors at a bookstore or library or even in an academic course. There’s simply not enough of our poetry out there where readers can find it. There is no current basis upon which others might understand what poetry by Native Americans is today, in the twenty-first century. Consequently, I have witnessed editors and prize jurors choose poets they think are Native American. The result is that more often than you would imagine, what is selected is work by non-Natives. This poetry not only misrepresents the lived realities of Native people, but it does our communities real harm by presenting another’s view as our own. Poets who misrepresent themselves as members of Native nations defy each nation’s right to determine its own membership. Native American–themed poetry by non-Natives contributes to the erasure we have so long experienced and that has overwritten our identities in ways that confuse young people who are already at risk and struggling to forge an identity. It is often said that we original inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere are the most written about peoples on earth. But our own writing is often ignored or placed in restrictive contexts that keep us in the past and far from the words contemporary or new. This anthology is meant to bring new audiences to poets of Native nations, including Native audiences, and readers who might then start seeing actual Native-created poetry as part of the larger American poetry conversation.
As I conceived of this book, I wanted to select and present a substantial and strong gathering of work by U.S. Native writers. I wanted to avoid the ways Native American poetry, most edited by non-Natives, has been presented—with a lot of apparatus and within binary notions of an easily digestible “American Indian” history or tradition in order to tie contemporary to past in a kind of literary anthropology. I did not want to add to the body of literature that allows “Indians” to exist in the past, or in relation to the past, but remain invisible in the world we all inhabit now.
I also wanted this book to gather engaging poets in a literary context and within the general market for American poetry. As one who publishes and edits in an American Indian series, I recognize that anthologies from academic presses that do include living Native writers promote those poets, but they also create a kind of isolation. American Indian literary series expressly appeal to those seeking Native American work, so no matter how well-meaning the editors, the work we publish has a very hard time breaking through to a general audience. To put it another way, if you are not looking for authors from Native nations, you rarely find them in the usual places you look for poetry. To put it yet another way, if you are looking at poetry in general, you won’t often stumble upon poets of Native nations since literary publishers tend to have only one or two of us per list.
One of the ways into publishing that many of the poets included here have taken is to submit manuscripts for book awards, but after that, the second book can be quite a challenge. My own publishing arc is an example. My first book was published as a prizewinner in an anonymous competition. When I sought publication of my second book, I was told by more than one publisher that it was “too bad we already have our Indian poet.” That seems shocking now, but it is still true. I moved on to presses that published several Native writers.
After my first book, I determined to be published with other Native American and Ojibwe/Anishinaabe poets and luckily, those opportunities existed because of the work of Janet McAdams and Gordon Henry, two contributors to this anthology. Their influence can be felt here. More than half of the first books by the poets in New Poets of Native Nations are published in series for Native / American Indian and indigenous authors. A few are published by very small literary presses whose distribution is regional, and the very fewest have publishers that regularly publish poetry and that have a national audience and national distribution. Imagine if the same were true of any other culture or racial group in the United States?
The writers in this anthology deserve to be read along with their peers, in the context of the manifold diversity of American poetry, and among the best poets publishing today—especially because some of them are considered the best and most exciting new poets in American literature. Poets in this anthology have won awards from PEN America, the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lannan Foundation, USA/United States Artists, and other notable organizations. It is my pleasure to present new work by poets whose first books range in age from a few months to nearly eighteen years. Some of these poets have become well known, but to some readers they will be a revelation. I am pleased to introduce all twenty-one poets to a larger audience, perhaps one new to the reality of our persistence as nations. At a time of great change for everyone in this world we all share, it seems people are looking to us, to Indigenous people, perhaps because we have persisted through great change. The time for a new anthology of writings by poets of Native nations is right. Enjoy this place, this space, this dimension these writers open where we can engage deeply with the work of poets whose nations’ long tenure in this place tell us something new and enduring at once.
Heid E. Erdrich
July 2017
NEW POETS OF NATIVE NATIONS
TACEY M. ATSITTY
Tacey M. Atsitty, Diné, is Tsénahabiłnii (Sleep Rock People) and born for Ta’neeszahnii (Tangle People) from Cove, Arizona. She is a recipient of the Truman Capote Literary Trust Award in Creative Writing, Corson-Browning Poetry Prize, Morning Star Creative Writing Award, and Philip Freund Prize. She holds bachelor’s degrees from Brigham Young University and the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA in creative writing from Cornell University.
Atsitty’s first book is Rain Scald (2018).
Anasazi
How can we die when we’re already
prone to leaving the table mid-meal
like Ancient Ones gone to breathe
elsewhere. Salt sits still, but pepper’s gone
rolled off in a rush. We’ve practiced dying
for a long time: when we skip dance or town,
when we chew. We’ve rounded out
like dining room walls in a canyon, eaten
through by wind—Sorry we rushed off;
the food wasn’t ours. Sorry the grease sits
white on our plates, and the jam that didn’t set—
use it as syrup to cover every theory of us.
Nightsong
TO THE GORGE DWELLERS
With no fire, you offer
nothing. Say,
a body found, fall creek
gorge. Eventual
it is, meaning to happen.
Meaning to say,
Dear fellow ______,
It is with deep
Name—Name—
Name, strung like
hair. Water strands
made old, made
white. Too close
to dark. Second tragedy
fall creek throat.
Repeated repeated loss.
Thirst-in almanac
of the gorges. Litany
of wrists. Look
down at your wrists,
down here where
the thick laps
the lips. Where you
haven’t been taught:
pull yourself out of
the plunge pool
and look for fire, look
for rings shifted
to your thumb and
forefinger. There, like
vapor wrapping you
in strips. In this falling
moment, cities
sink into the depths,
drown. The earth
face carried up and
away in the current of
a whirlwind, where water
and mountains hide
in deep blue. What faces
bring: a reservoir filled,
following the night
when day fell into day,
soon followed by night
into night to night,
thrice with no moon,
thrice with no flame—
kept in the thick thick.
Downpour
I asked him down here:
where virgin belts dangle from my thighs
where my sash belt pulls the sky in, knuckles go white, and all without a moan
where leaves turn so quickly, already red with winter
where we wait for deluge, but it never comes
not yet ripe, only vocables can embody
Down here, I can’t pull out of this tune to utter
the cowardice of hand and tongue what I wanted
I can’t tear myself from this heap of blankets; this rocking comfort, my—
self: the only one I allow
and our son, I leave him, like a monster, cooing in the next gorge over
~
I can’t sing over the onrush of falling water, that pounding connect from mouth to base
lick cloudburst, the way I want
Down here, I speak with a tongue of cedar: bark and kindle
the clouds last night, they held back
But like I said, we shouldn’t chant what’s not ours
he sacks himself up for me to unravel
a bag of pears. I give one to him, and it gushes with each pull of skin
~
And still I can’t tear away from these blankets
even when he says he’s ready for downpour:
I offer him my hand to guide me down the gorge
But don’t play my flute for him; I don’t want him to fall in—
with me, like I did. I strum him so thinly, and still he chants
I am left to cramp, my entire body over
~
I bring him down here to let my hair loose, then ask him to put it in a knot
my confidence is worn to warps, a bald fringe
my breath no longer shapes syllables of his name
he says rain and I go beautifully together
what it means to apologize
how I curl my hair even though my wrists ache for him
how my nails chip before the moons push on through
how I cross my legs for him as he blows at rain
his fingers wrap our silence
how I prefer the heavens to rainfall
how for him, I am all of this—as sorry as I am when I say,
The sky is so hollow from child.
Paper Water
AFTER SB 2109
X threads us into rope, a weave of human
arms X-ed down a canyon wall. Voice
writes nights like these and calls
for complete night, without
scraps of light or dissonance or stuttered
cries. Crumble of tree limbs: X, there
we are again. This is how far we climb
for life. We’d rub out before reaching
the ground, where water cuts—
Once a man had only water to pray with.
Once life is the blur of a windmill,
each crisscross sets another arm
to bark. Cessation of the line; break
it up there. Article X: delineate marginal
arcs, say everything within windmill shot—
Whereas injury to water was writ
and concluded: how far inside earth
will they reach? Whereas for groundwater,
they steady their wrists for a slow up-stitch
across their own eyelids.
Elegy for Yucca Fruit Woman
Without me, she said. Go—
I’m going to the rock
that once had wings. My life
rolls like rock clods
down a volcanic throat, circling
the tips of big winds beneath
~
poised arms wing bone, surrounded
and closing, dust hinge. In upstroke, a slow
separate in landing then takeoff. To take
air, those inward whooshes as if blessing
oneself: marrow leaving the hollow
~
pop. She knelt with women
filling the earth: mush in tin
after tin, filled in with breaking
sun. Kneeling down, she’d flap
dough with the wood pop,
her hands whirring. The air
bubbles rising with heat ready to—
Later she’d send me to 7-2-11
clenching quarters for—
~
at two points: they say a man flew
with a life-feather, quill in hand,
from the top of Shiprock down
to the people, having slain
monster birds. Plumes
and all their vanes ending
in flight after bird strike
~
“A female eagle swooped east,”
she once told me. “It was like gold
whirring in the blue of my windshield.
I was in my truck, driving
and listening to Peyote songs
when it happened. I had never seen
so much dust.”
~
When skin slats, layered
like stone then collapses—
a red grows gray. Aspen expands
to the hush
of this cedar-filled room. When
her neck grew heavy she said,
“The music helps me; press play”:
Hei hei ya wena hei nei, Hei hei ya wena hei nei;
Hei hei ya wena hei nei, nei; Hei hei ya wena hei nei;
Ya na hei ya na hei o weno hei nei;
Ya na hei ya na hei o weno hwoi na hei nei yo wei.
Hole through the Rock
Nothing but slough before you rode me silver. And smooth,
until I shone. I rode in and didn’t even see I was gone: the eye
of my navel, sand folds this way all the time. And rain scours
just the same. You hold all the clay. I fall to granule.
But within my whorl, you are winged: doubled and pure,
like the coupling of pebbles in storm water. These enduring
glances from wind on pane say you can see plainly the part
of me you miss. Our palms meet at the fingertips, forming a W:
double which is only half me to whole us. Where our wrists
brush smooth, clay chips curve into this sand swept hollow:
a roil to the usual clink of bone and arc in stone.
This is not about time; it’s the closing
of a single us: a gentle
edging into an ellipse.