Harper's Anthology of 20th Century Native American Poetry

Abstract

The first poem in Duane Niatum's wonderful anthology is by Frank Prewett, the last, by A. Sadongei. By accident or sheer ignorance, had never heard of, let alone read, either of these authors. (And, obviously enough, one of the great values of such a book is to bring hitherto unremarked poets to the reader's attention.) Prewett, an Iroquois, was born in 1893, served in the First and the Second World War, studied at Oxford, knew Siegfried Sassoon, Virginia Woolf, and Robert Graves -who published a posthumous collection of his poems in 1964. (I have these, and the following details from the extremely useful biographies given at the end of the book.) Sadongei, of Kiowa and Tohono O'odham (Papago) descent, was born in 1959 and was singled out for an Academy of American Poets College Prize; her best work, we may reasonably imagine, lies all before her. In their initial and ultimate poems, however, these authors, born more than a half century apart, raise a similar question, that of the audience for their work. Sadongei begins After Seeing Paintings in a Small Book by T.C. Cannon (1946-1978) with the lines, I don't know/who I'm writing this for. Prewett's poem, 'The Red Man, does not explicitly raise the question of audience, although, when he concludes, His ways are strange, his skin is red/ Our ways and skins our own, (my emphasis) one can't help but wonder about his distance from that red man, his apparent identification with the ways and skins of an us and an our most likely white not red. My point is not to skewer Prewett as an Apple (or what have you) but only to lead into a discussion of the complicated ways in which questions about audience in these poems are linked to questions about self-identification and both of these matters at every point bound up with questions of poetic form. Prewett's forms, for example, are likely to strike today's readers as (embarrassingly?) old-fashioned and decidedly non-Indian: 'The Red Man consists of five four-line stanzas alternating regular iambic tetrameter and hexameter lines in a familiar a-b-a-b rhyme scheme. (Other of his poems included by Niatum are rather more various but within a very narrow range.) Sadongei's work, suspect, will just as readily