thinking about plot and character development is a much more linear way of thinking than it is to be in a poem. To be in a poem means you drop deeper down into yourself and your subject. And it's more resonant. I like the experience of writing poetry a lot better than composing fiction...I love to do poetry because it's so-- the experience of it is like a whole body experience and not just an exercise that's mental.
Chickasaw writer
Linda K. Hogan (born July 16, 1947) is a poet, storyteller, academic, playwright, novelist, environmentalist and writer of short stories. Hogan is a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry.
She lives in Tishomingo, Oklahoma.
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Feminism is a complicated issue for Indian women because what affects the women also affects the entire community. As individual nations, we have allegiances to the members of our tribes that seldom exist for non-Indian American women. Political and economic injustices are practiced against entire tribes, and are not limited to just the women. The issue of survival affects all people and the major efforts of Indian feminists have been struggles against the dominant society.
The native tradition of respect for other species, for the land, and for the water, is a view of the world that informs my work. The more I study, the more I see that the traditional stories, the traditional ceremonies, and the ways of living in the world are superior to what has developed from the Western view. I use that word "superior" with hesitation. I mean that there isn't room for species extinction, for exploitation of the land or water. One thing that indigenous people on all continents have been able to do is to keep a balance between all the relationships of what is now called ecology.
It is also honest land. It doesn’t lie or hide anything. Neither does Ama. Everything she is, everything she is about to do, is clear in her face and in her movement and in her words. The way everything is open to view when sunlight comes down through the hold where all life entered this world. (p55)
Emptiness and estrangement are deep wounds, strongly felt in the present time. We have been split from what we could nurture, what could fill us. And we have been wounded by a dominating culture that has feared and hated the natural world, has not listened to the voice of the land, has not believed in the inner worlds of human dreaming and intuition, all things that have guided indigenous people since time stood up in the east and walked this world into existence, split from the connection between self and land. ("Creations" p82)
Decisions are made in a person's life by small moments of knowing, each moment opening until, like pieces of a quilt, one day everything comes together in a precise, clear knowing. It enters the present, as if it had come all of a piece. It was in this year that I began to understand who I was. Every piece of myself was together anew, a shifted pattern. For my people, the problem has always been this: that the only possibility of survival has been resistance. Not to strike back has meant certain loss and death. To strike back has also meant loss and death, only with a fighting chance. To fight has meant that we can respect ourselves, we Beautiful People. Now we believed in ourselves once again. The old songs were there, come back to us. Sometimes I think the ghost dancers were right, that we would return, that we are still returning. Even now. (p325)
the evidence of healing is all around us. A scar, for instance, is evidence that a wound has healed. But the poems are also about wilderness; they're about animals that live in the wilderness and humans who go into the human wilderness, and who also fear the wilderness outside them. In some ways the poems are an investigation of the depths of people, the history of land.
We need to acknowledge the differences and their spectrum of human being, the significance of accepting all and not wishing for a monoculture. Diversity is a way of being, and the attempt to find an absolute is yet another part of the separate matrixes. Tribal peoples do not require a sameness of thought or belief. We come from different stories, different origins, and we respect the differences.
As an Indian woman, I come from a long history of people who have listened to the language of this continent, people who have known that corn grows with the songs and prayers of the people, that it has a story to tell, that the world is alive...This intuitive and common language is what I seek for my writing, work in touch with the mystery and force of life, work that speaks a few of the many voices around us...It is also poetry, this science, and I note how often scientific theories lead to the world of poetry and vision, theories telling us how atoms that were stars have been transformed into our living, breathing bodies. And in these theories, or maybe they should be called stories, we begin to understand how we are each many people, including the stars we once were, and how we are in essence the earth and the universe, how what we do travels clear around the earth and returns. In a single moment of our living, there is our ancestral and personal history, our future, even our deaths planted in us and already growing toward their fulfillment. The corn plants are there, and like all the rest we are forever merging our borders with theirs in the world collective. Our very lives might depend on this listening. In the Chernobyl nuclear accident, the wind told the story that was being suppressed by the people. It gave away the truth. It carried the story of danger to other countries. It was a poet, a prophet, a scientist. Sometimes, like the wind, poetry has its own laws speaking for the life of the planet. It is a language that wants to bring back together what the other words have torn apart. It is the language of life speaking through us about the sacredness of life.