When I want to write seriously I think of
people like
dg for whom I wrote a long poem for whom I revised
until the poem forgot its way back troubled I let
it go when
you love something let it go if it returns be a
good mother
father welcome the poem open armed pull out the
frying
pan grease it coat it prepare a meal
apron and kitchen sweat labor
my love and sleeves pushed
to elbows like the old days a sack
of flour and keys I push them
typography and hotcakes work
seduce a poem into believing
I can home it I can provide it
white gravy whatever the craving
poem eat and lie down full
poem rest here full don’t
lift a single l
etter. (“Vaporative”)
I’m
a stunned by Santa Fe, New Mexico poet Layli Long Soldier’s remarkable Whereas (Graywolf, 2017), a book of lyric
revolt, resistance and argument; moreso stunned for the fact that this is Soldier’s
debut, a stunningly smart and
fearless collection of poems that “confronts the coercive language of the
United States government in its responses, treaties, and apologies to Native
American peoples and tribes, and reflects that language in its officiousness
and duplicities back on its perpetrators.” There is both an ease and a heft to
Soldier’s lyrics, stating clearly and resolutely her terms of resolution
without aggression, but as an absolute, incredible and clear-eyed force. The terms
of her resistance are many, and powerful.
A poem about writing, bo-ring. Says my contemporary artistic companionate, a muscular
observation and I agree. A poem about writing poems, how. Boring as it is, it
asks me to do. I couldn’t any other thing tonight. I sat I wrote about writing.
I write I sit about writing. I’m about to write about it, writing and sitting. I
will write and sit with my writing.
Defamiliarize your writing then, somebody says
okay I’m not sitting then I say to somebody. I’m chewing at a funeral and. I’m
nibbling my pulp knuckles. I’m watching a man with a stain on his. Pants always
wrinkle in this heat, gnats and humidity. I walk to the front pew to make a
lewd, joke. I regard laughter from the man in the. Pants are always honest I mean
really heavy at a summer burial. Yet he doesn’t ever cry, the stained man, why.
When I observe nothing (unusual) I do nothing (unusual) in response. New or
novel. Real lit relics on these occasions. In ritual: nobody’s learning, true. And
to lewd is dumb, likewise. Like the way I put up my dukes when I observe the
cowboy kneel. He’s praying he’s asking. He doesn’t see me, my gesture’s futile.
What am I doing here, writing. What am I doing here righting the page at
funerals. (“Vaporative”)
On Saturday, December 19, 2009, US President
Barack Obama signed the Congressional Resolution of Apology to Native
Americans. No tribal leaders or official representatives were invited to
witness and receive the Apology on behalf of tribal nations. President Obama
never read the Apology aloud, publicly—although, for the record, Senator Sam Brownback
five months later read the Apology to a gathering of five tribal leaders,
though there are more than 560 federally recognized tribes in the US. The Apology
was then folded into a larger, unrelated piece of legislation called the 2010
Defense Appropriations Act.
My response is directed to the Apology’s
delivery, as well as the language, crafting, and arrangement of the written
document. I am a citizen of the United States and an enrolled member of the
Oglala Sioux Tribe, meaning I am a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation—and in
this dual citizenship, I must work, I must eat, I must art, I must mother, I must
friend, I must listen, I must observe, constantly I must live.
In
many ways, as she composes utilizing the language of the oppressor in response,
turning the tables, Soldier’s work could also be seen in relation to some of
the work Jordan Abel has been doing in his own series of reclamation projects,
from his poetry titles Injun (Vancouver
BC: Talonbooks, 2016), The Place of
Scraps (Talonbooks, 2013) and Un/inhabited
(Talonbooks/Project Space Press, 2014), engaged in his own conversations
attached to Idle No More and Truth and Reconciliation, and Language/Conceptual
Poetries. The title poem/section to Soldier’s Whereas is composed utilizing the flavour of legal language (akin
to that of the Apology), twisting it back against the original document:
WHEREAS I did not desire in childhood to be a
part of this but desired most of all to be a part. A piece combined with others
to make up a whole. Some but not all of something. In Lakoka it’s hanké, a
piece or part of anything. Like the creek trickling behind my aunt’s house
where Uncle built her a bridge to cross from bank to bank, not far from a
grassy clearing with three tipis, a place to gather. She holds three-day
workshops on traditional arts, young people from Kyle and Potato Creek arrive
one by one eager to participate. They
have the option my auntie says to sleep at home and return in the morning but
by and large they’ll stay and camp even during South Dakota winters. The comfort
of being together. I think of Plains winds snow drifts ice and limbs the
exposure and when I slide my arms into a wool coat and put my hand to the door
knob, ready to breave the sub-zero dark, someone says be careful out there
always consider the snow your friend. Think badly of it, snow will burn you. I walk
out remembering that for millennia we have called ourselves Lakota meaning
friend or ally. This relationship to the other. Some but not all, still our
piece to everything;
If
this book doesn’t win at least half the awards, there is something terribly,
terribly wrong.
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