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21 - Contemporary Indigenous American Poetry

from Part III - Native American Renaissance (Post-1960s)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 September 2020

By
Dean Rader
Edited by
Melanie Benson Taylor
Melanie Benson Taylor
Affiliation:
Dartmouth College, New Hampshire
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Summary

This essay looks at the innovations in poetry and poetry publishing from 2001 to 2018, with a particular emphasis on the emerging generation of Indigenous poets like Sherwin Bitsui, Orlando White, Natalie Diaz, and Layli Long Soldier. While paying close attention to the themes and motifs that have been of interest to Native writers, this essay foregrounds innovations in poetic form, including erasures and strikethroughs, complicated syntax, and typographical experimentation. A good deal of recent Native poetry takes on English and its rules and structures as a tool of colonization, repression, identification, and misinformation, and in so doing, seeks to remake English so that it might be viewed through an Indigenous lens.

Keywords

PoetrylanguageinnovationexperimentationLayli Long SoldierNatalie DiazpublishingcolonizationJoy Harjoresistance
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Native American Literature , pp. 395 - 412
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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References

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