In my poetry travels, I often quote Audre Lorde’s claim, “Poetry is not a luxury.”

If not a luxury, it follows then that poetry is a necessity. But how and in what ways is that true? When I teach, I speak about the “supra-literary” intentions of poetry—poets creating art that refuses to stay still on the page, that wants to stretch itself and do something in the world. Like other arts, poetry is an act of attention: it asks us first to look at and then to look through what we encounter in our world—to see it differently. Seeing differently, of course, is the first step toward change; a new understanding can lead to new action. Today, more than ever, we need poetry in its role as an agent of change.

Seamus Heaney has suggested poetry is “a joy in being a process for language” and an “agent for proclaiming and correcting injustices.” In her poem “Savings,” Chickasaw poet Linda Hogan writes, “This is the truth, not just a poem.” She also writes, “This is a poem, not just the truth.”  For me, poetry is both “affective” and “effective”: aesthetically pleasing and simultaneously doing something in the world.

I periodically teach a graduate poetry craft and theory seminar called “The Poetics of Spirit, Witness, and Social Justice.” On the simplest level, the work we read and the work the students write in that class casts new light on conditions and experiences of our world. They require us to re-see everything from history to nature, education to politics, and to revise—not just the poems we may have drafted in our notebooks, but our very understanding about spirit, language, privilege, and power.

I grew up on the White Earth Reservation with my inheritance one part Indigenous wisdom, one part a legacy of violence and unjust treatment at the hands of the U.S. government. Somewhat naturally, then, for me activism and poetry have always been wedded. The work I do as a writer is a vital part of a life lived leaning toward an other light; it hearkens toward a different vision of how to be in the world. Humbly, as I place myself among those who seek justice, equality, a sustainable relationship to our planet—who seek change—I hold up my own small lamp of assembled words and images.

But poetic activism is not merely opposition—it is the work of sustaining spirit and community building. Indeed, I began writing poetry seriously when I was traveling with Winona LaDuke and Gordon Henry to raise money for the White Earth Land Recovery Project. At different times over the years, I have been a part of writing groups, participated in various publication projects, and belonged to formal or informal art communities—Word Warriors, Poets Against the War, Crow Commons, etc. In line with this notion of community building, activism can also mean providing basic access. Much of the work I do as a teacher, much of what I did as Wisconsin Poet Laureate, is simply this—sharing poetry with diverse groups of people and giving them the opportunity to share their work and their ideas as well.

The re-seeing poetry encourages, the spiritual nourishment it provides, and the communities it can build, all circle us back to thinking about tangible ways poetry sustains us. In classes, I have used Carolyn Forchè’s volume Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness as a text to show the longstanding use of poetry in confronting extreme conditions like war, poverty, and injustice in different eras and many different parts of the world. Poets exposing the stories may prevent future atrocities. Naming the truth of history also heals.

In my own travels, I have met and performed with poets in various regions of the world, including Bahrain and Indonesia, and yes, poetry of witness, poetry of resistance, poetry for change is flourishing around the globe. But precisely because poetry raises awareness, there are also attempts to silence the voices of writers, artists, and other agents for change. I know individuals who have suffered at the hands of repressive governments. To me, the fear that fuels such repression merely reinforces my belief in the power of literature to teach, to incite change.

These Small Turns of Memory

6 a. m.

Syllabus I type

while outside

August lake shivers,

stretches silver

under wisps of fog,

then lifts itself

as from downfilled

sleep.

 

6:20.

I sip steaming stove-top coffee,

write Course Description.

Now sift recollections

of other chill mornings—

in the French village

St. Hippolyte du Fort,

baggy brown pants

sway, the arc of the broom

carrying the sweeper.

I am the swept debris

old streets, detritus,

duty of language.

 

At 6:32 a.m.

My fingers click on keys,

but on the other side of air

I touch your table.

Again finger the lamp screw,

carefully twist it beyond

black burned edge of wick.

Now the lick of new light

rises behind etched glass chimney,

and shadow companions startle and dart

across sheetrock walls.

Some light still frightens.

 

6:55 a.m. 6:59

7:08 Course Requirements.

In the hyperreal font bank

of my computer screen

I search a color I might know,

some pigment like boiling maple sap

like dried fish blood.

Vital reflection on the eye,

a variant on crayola imagination

like baked dust on a brown beret.

 

At 7:16 I type Grading Policies

and list in mathematical formula

a future. 

7:30, Due Dates.

Yet

somewhere

half a world away

as I sit in ice-carved stadium seats,

voices of Norwegian children

vibrate the arctic night

they sing the cycle, the sun’s return.

 

7:35. 7:40. 8:00. 

LED time accumulates like image.

I let it pass. 

 

And each morning

I still come in slippered feet

steady time at the doorway:

there my blue-sweatered Daddy  

old formica table

a small radio before him.

His thick brown fingers curve

like the notes; the beat he taps

bends into some dimension—

not sound exactly

not light,

but the motion of darkness

on walls mime simple

in a world of flame,

some turning of memory

we too trace,

maybe with fingers

folded over keys. [stanza break]

 

So this is why I write.

Not because my uncle’s new horse

tried to roll me off its back that spring,

not because of the Mahnomen sheriff

who, with a body bigger than myth

sunk devil deep into the squad seat

pushing us all to pavement.

I tell you the vote to build

yet another bank, new road,

casino was incidental.

 

I type Syllabus.

8:20 comes and goes.

I add Reading List.

Supplementary Bibliography at 8:48.

The province.  Not memory exactly.

Not story or language. Nor even pure sound.

Winter count. 

The year grandma dodged rabid skunks.

Fuel bills tied in embroidery floss.

Following blue trouser legs

down each thorny path of months,

months not named for roman gods.

Following sun-dappled work boots

to berry patch afternoons,  

a dimension both hungry and sweet  

red-fingered and flushed.

Don’t call it happiness.

Think of the morning lake

the ice stadium the broom

carrying human motion in its arc.

Who can explain the science

of alchemy, the texture of stillness—

one thing suspended

minute in its

turning.

 

9:22.

Final Exam Date.

Two hours to declare knowledge

in lines and boxes.

I turn from counting and there,

in the sliver space between

one second ticking,

you arrive—a dawn child.

Call it return.

Nothing as accidental as birth order

dictates destiny.

Who knows of sources,

only image and refracted light.

Assembled here like tincture,

medicine color or errand of memory—

as if the alphabet song

were made of scents or gesture.

Each lilt of meaning

like the living flame of old campfires,

like the synapse of a moving bobber

on Pickerel Lake.

Not spelling

but the consequence of the barely visible

filament, line stretched taut between infinities.

How evidence spills from every water surface

that rises and falls as code or sign

fingers gripping the translucent thread—

with life pulling hard on either end.