Finding an Indian Poet

The following is taken from correspondence between Simon Ortiz and the editor on November 1, 2005.

Kate,

Thank you. For your persistence. Somebody mentioned Jim Welch recently, but I can’t remember who. And I thought then, Hmmmmm, oh yeah, Kate Shanley is doing a SAIL issue, and maybe I should write something.

Well, so here you are in the next breath . . .

Would an informal-sounding memory piece be alright? I think I could do something like that. It’ll be interesting to me anyway. Geesuz, I think it was 1967-68 when I was asking around for Indian poets. Indian poets? You mean poetry written by Indians, right?

I thought I was the only one doing it!

Well, I knew of the young poets at the Institute of American Indian Art (IAIA) beginning to barely surface in the modern world. By the way, I just met James McGrath recently in Santa Fe at the Lannan Readings and Conversations event I did with Joy Harjo and Leslie Marmon Silko. McGrath and his wife, T. D. Allen, were teachers and mentors of the young poets at IAIA in the 1960s when IAIA started. But other than that, there were no poets. Nothing. I mean literally nothing.

Oh, there were poems rendered from musings by non-Indian aficionados of Indian songs and “Indian ways.” Usually hokey and corny and hokey and corny. I mean “poetry” was garnered and romanticized and tokenized and Hollywoodized and so forth. Or there was poetry that sounded like Henry Wordsworth Longfellow or James Fennimore Cooper but obviously nothing that sounded genuine and authentic and could be nothing but Indian! Oh, I think there were writings too that came from students at Indian schools, probably beginning in the 1890s, like from Carlisle, Haskell, perhaps Chilocco, written at Indian schools that were usually very sanitized, contrived, and edited so they looked like sweet, sugary, fluffy renderings that no genuine Indian would sincerely claim! Well, I knew there was real poetry out there. I just knew there had to be. And then I heard of James Welch. And then I met Jim. And then I heard and read his poetry. And the world was never the same since.

Will it work?

Simon