Week 6: Before, During, and Beyond the Black Arts Movement
Critical Introduction:
As a person from an othered population, I do not wish to take away, in any sense or form, from another othered culture. Therefore, I choose not to add commentary to this section on the Black Arts Movement, except to combine the two weeks dedicated to this group into one, to hold space for Native American poetry. This is in no way an indication that the Black Arts Movement is any less relevant to American poetry than any other movement, school, or format. This is only an indication that, in a class dedicated to American poetry, more than two weeks should likely be given to othered populations.
Who’s Afraid of the Black Indian?
Poetry:
Shonda Buchanan* – The Trail (#9)
*This poet is added here as an indication of her self-identification as Afro-indigenous. No critique nor critical analysis of her poetry is offered for the purpose of this course, as it is not necessary. This poet identifies as bi-racial, Black and Indigenous, therefore she fits within this category. We do not care about Blood Quantum here. We are not the Gatekeepers of culture and identity.
NDN Inclusion (#9):
The Trail
These are the holes
That fill you up
A morning after 4th
Of July
The empty hollow
A memory in the fire
The quiet morning
Rises
Death of father
Suicide of a nephew
Addiction of sister
Another nephew at war
His brother, prison
Pummeling of a mother and aunts
The breaking of lives without a sound.
No honor in their deaths or mistakes
No memory of them, except here
These are the shimmering calcified minutes
The spotted ghosts of a black Indian’s
Midwest life
Where nothing and everything changed
In the fires that burned your farm houses down
And you wonder how you would
Have been or grown
How you would have loved
Had not this or this happened
I remember another July
Years past, under the glass of time
When we were all together, laughing
Spit-polished by hard love
Smoky with hunger for the future
When memory was a thing
Yet to come
Week 7: Formalism
Critical Introduction:
Taylor, Michael P. “Not Primitive Enough to Be Considered Modern: Ethnographers, Editors, and the Indigenous Poets of the American Indian Magazine” (reused from Week 1)
Poetry:
Ruth Muskrat Bronson – Sonnets from the Cherokee (I) (#10), Sonnets from the Cherokee (III)
Everything old becomes new again at some point, and that holds true for poetry. While many schools in the Post-45 era sought to leave behind the “traditional” forms of poetry and forge bold new paths to new frontiers in both form and thought, the tide began to turn back towards more structure for some poets in the latter part of the 1970s and early 1980s. In this era, some poets began to leave the free and open verse of earlier generations for the meter and rhyme offered in traditional forms like the sonnet. As previously mentioned in Week 1, Indigenous poetry was going through this Formalist phase while most of the rest of the country was experiencing Modernism, due to the strict teachings and confines of Indian Boarding Schools like Haskell and Carlisle. Taylor suggests that “similar dichotomies undergird many of the colonial assumptions responsible for delegitimizing early twentieth-century Indigenous poetry from the Indigenous and mainstream canonical literary record of North America” (67). At the point when most of the country was leaning into the unknown, many Natives were forced into traditional forms of poetry, and they willingly utilized those forms in an effort to share their message. In contrast, shortly before when much of the country began to return to traditional forms of poetic expression, Native Americans were embarking on a Renaissance.
NDN Inclusion (#10):
My heart is like an opal, flashing fire
And flaming gleams of pointed light
At thy approach; or lying cold and white
When thou art gone; robbed of a dream’s desire
Is left moon-white and dull; no darting flame
Or sapphire gleam to mark a sweet suspense.
But only still, benumbed indifference
Unwaked at thy soft whisper of my name.
Come now, I tire of waiting to know love;
Teach me to scorn indifference white and dim
For I would drain fate’s cup of joy or strife;
Would play to the lost chord the vibrant hymn
That passion sings; my heart lifted above
Dull apathy; pulsating; knowing Life.
Week 8: Language Poetry (Reimagined)
Critical Introduction:
Linda McCarty – “Hear Our Languages, Hear Our Voices: Storywork as Theory and Praxis in Indigenous-Language Reclamation”
Poetry:
John Watchman (Diné) – Chipmunks (#11)
Jake Skeets – Emerging
Jake Skeets
In this reimagining of the course syllabus, Week 8 is dedicated to poetry written in Native American tribal languages, without translations. Linda McCarty notes in “Hear Our Languages, Hear Our Voices” that “Of approximately seven thousand known spoken languages, 50 to 90 percent are predicted to fall silent by century’s end. Two-thirds of those would be Indigenous languages” (160). That is a staggering statistic in and of itself, but it is absolutely tragic when considered in light of the devastating effects that the COVID-19 pandemic had on Indigenous populations around the globe, including the United States. Many tribal elders are the keepers of languages that are being lost to attrition, and COVID dealt an especially hard blow to tribal populations that were not able to quickly secure their borders to prevent the rapid spread of the disease. There is no need for further discourse on the subject of Language poetics in a reimagined course.
NDN Inclusion (#11):
’Áadi ’índa hazéists’ósii,
“Nishą’?
’Ákǫ́ǫ́ náádílgheed!
T’áádaats’í ’aaní.
Daaztsą́,” ho’doon’iid, jiní.
’Áádóó ’ákǫ́ǫ́ náájílghod.
Ńt’éé’, “t’áá’aaníl ma’iiyę́ę daaztsą́lá!”
Yikáá’ haasghodii’ dahnahacha’.
“ts’os, ts’os,
ts’os, ts’os,” nóo dahnahacha’.
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