Wednesday, June 5, 2019

New Poets of Native Nations


Heid E. Erdrich, ed. New Poets of Native Nations. Graywolf Press, 2018.

     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 views as our own. 

 COMMENT

     You'd think that someone, maybe academic librarians, would be working harder to collect Native American poets.  But poetry doesn't  tend to circulate much without encouragement and these days it's unfashionable to collect for the sake of bibliography.  In order to persuade my own library to buy such such poetry I've had to suggest a purchase for my own personal use, even for books by poets like Sherwin Bitsui or Orlando White who had recently been in town to give readings and workshops.

    Poetry is an especially weird genre. Everyone wants to be a poet, but nobody wants to read poetry. Well, I do. I even like to write reviews of poetry books. I think one barrier to poetry is that it's actually quite difficult to figure out which poetry to read. Poetry resists descriptive reviews so you have to experiment a bit to discover what you like.  There is a lot of truly dreadful poetry out there, so you also have to be confident to recognize it as dreadful and move on.

     That's why Heid Erdrich has performed such an important service to introduce us poetry readers to some Native American  poets she likes (she's a wonderful poet herself, BTW). [1]  Here's a book that we librarians can catalog and simply pull off the shelf when a student or professor is seeking Native American poets. It would be even better if we bought some of their books.  There's a bibliography of sources on pages 281-284 in case any librarians want to order some.

[1] Guidelines for the Treatment of Sacred Objects

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