4 - Sovereign Poetics and Possibilities in Indigenous Poetry

Summary

Contemporary Native American and Indigenous poetry is disrupting, crossing, and transgressing boundaries set up by settler states. Poetic possibilities reflect the movement and motions toward seriously engaging trans-Indigenous possibilities: coming to the table already knowing that we have had ways of speaking to and with each other since time immemorial, while also remaining attuned to the cultural specificity reflected in past craftmanship of earlier published poets. Sovereign poetics are a means of enacting and expressing a self-determined justice. Janet Rogers’s Peace in Duress offers a sovereign poetics that asserts the ancestral power of creation against state policies that seeks to normalize and erase Indigenous bodies. Qwo-Li Driskill’s “Map of the Americas” creates a map in relation to body parts, affirming Indigenous embodiments that belie the conventional map we have come to recognize. Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas rethinks the settler practice of telling history and then providing an insincere apology. Other poets discussed include Heid E. Erdrich and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson.