5803.900 Native American Poetry
Robert Warrior

This course will provide both an introduction to Native American poetry and a specific focus on the work of Muskogee poet Joy Harjo. We will begin with an overview of contemporary Native poetry that will include works by Simon Ortiz, Roberta Hill, Wendy Rose, Ofelia Zepeda, N. Scott Momaday, and Luci Tapahonso. The goal of the overview will be to think through some of the basic issues and themes that have arisen among Native poets over the past three decades.

We will then turn to Joy Harjo's signal contribution to the emergence of Native poetry. Starting with her earliest published work, we will trace her extraordinary career as a poet, musician, editor, and essayist. We will read all of her books of poetry and samples of the critical work her poetry has inspired. Our goal will be to gain as full an understanding as possible of the depth and breadth of her work and trace the movement she has undertaken in her aesthetic. Requirements: Two recitations of memorized poems. Participation in the seminar. Twenty pages of critical writing that can be done in a number of ways and combinations of ways, including a traditional term research paper, development of curricular materials, and reaction papers.

Reading list:

Simon Ortiz, From Sand Creek
Roberta Hill, Philadelphia Flowers
Wendy Rose, Bone Dance, New and Selected Poems
Ofelia Zepeda, Ocean Power
N. Scott Momaday, In the Presence of the Sun
Luci Tapahonso, Blue Horses Rush In
Joy Harjo, The Last Song, What Moon Drove Me to This, She Had Some Horses, In Mad Love and War, Songs from the Center of the Earth, The Woman Who Fell from the Sky, Map to the Next World
Laura Cotelli, ed. Spiral of Memory: Interviews with Joy Harjo
Gloria Bird and Joy Harjo, eds., Reinventing the Enemy's Language: Contemporary Native Women's Writing of North America