Speak to Me Words: Essays on Contemporary American Indian Poetry (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Speak to Me Words: Essays on Contemporary American Indian Poetry Molly McGlennen (bio) Dean Rader and Janice Gould, eds. Speak to Me Words: Essays on Contemporary American Indian Poetry. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2003. 294 pp. There has been a lack of critical attention toward Native American poetry to date. As editors Dean Rader and Janice Gould of Speak to Me Words: Essays on Contemporary American Indian Poetry note in their introduction, only a handful of book-length texts are devoted entirely to native poetry, despite the burgeoning field of Native American literary criticism, and despite the extensive attention to Native American fiction, autobiography, and oral traditions. As Speak to Me Words shows, native poetry needs its own critical studies because the poets are developing a site of unique native discourse as well as a forum to continue the fight against prejudice and injustice. While native poetry often has a minimal presence at conferences and in college [End Page 104] classrooms, Speak to Me Words labors to fill this gap and lay the groundwork for subsequent critical attention to contemporary Native American poetry. In this way, it is a book of beginnings. It respects poetry's demand for astute close reading and honors the spirit that native poets invoke through their creative expression. Because of the enormous task upon which Speak to Me Words embarks, the breadth of its coverage of native poetry as a genre is overwhelmingly varied; however, despite the diversity of approaches, the essays each note similar notions of native poetry's power and healing capacity. Speak to Me Words reflects upon as many trajectories of native poetry as the text's space allows: Fourteen essays in all, not including Rader and Gould's dialogical and candid introduction, the collection includes older essays alongside brand new ones (for example, Simon Ortiz's well-known 1993 essay "Song/Poetry and Language—Expression and Perception" beside Robert Nelson's new essay "Dawn/Is a Good Word: Naming an Emergent Motif of Contemporary Native American Poetry"), female and male voices, and native and non-native authors. What is more, eight of the fourteen essays are exclusively about native women's poetry; three of the authors identify as Two-Spirit. At its very best, the essays in the collection provide criticism that recognizes the significant distinction of native poetry as a genre. The authors analyze what the poetry is doing both because of and in spite of the fact the poetry is written by native people. Each essay in the collection explores how scholars of Native American poetry are not only reading, discussing, and analyzing the work, but also how native poetry is positioning itself alongside and distinct from the American canon. Eric Gary Anderson's essay, "Situating American Indian Poetry," complicates notions of genre that stem from Western literary traditions and asks "can American Indian literature be properly and best taught, critiqued, and understood by way of non-native categories such as genre?" (34). His essay goes on to address hard questions about what characterizes native poetry, showing how the writing itself collapses western constructs while expressing its primary concern: to give back to and sustain community. Janice Gould's "Poems as Maps in American Indian Women's Writing" illustrates native women poets' preoccupation with mapping as [End Page 105] well as the significance of cartography as a tool to restore balance and allow healing. In acknowledging the spirit in poetry, Gould is not alone. Marilou Awiakta's "Daydreaming Primal Space: Cherokee Aesthetics as Habits of Being" examines the use of native knowledge as a means to—once again—live "poetry as a habit of being" (61). Carter Revard's essay "Herbs of Healing: American Values in American Indian Literature" argues how Native American poetry not only stands up against the Western classics, but also how it adds to this canon by taking poetry one step further: native poetry has the power to cure. Other essays in the collection utilize specific tropes and motifs in order to situate native poetry; for instance, Daniel Heath Justice's "Beloved Woman Returns: The Doubleweaving of Homeland and Identity in the Poetry of Marilou Awiakta," utilizes Cherokee basketweaving, while Janet McAdams...