An Evening With Layli Long Soldier
101 Archer
Tulsa
June 6, 2024
First, a confession: after 25 years of teaching poetry, I secretly worry that I still don’t “get” it. Even though my livelihood is based in the world of textual interpretation (I’ve published books about poetry, for gosh sakes!), would I have anything interesting to say about poetry if I hadn’t been immersed in academia for so long, well-versed (see what I did there?) in the language of understanding language?
When I first read the writing of Oglala Lakota poet Layli Long Soldier, I immediately recognized that the usual tools in my literary toolbox (identifying formal conventions, central metaphors, underlying drama or tension) were helpful but not sufficient for studying this innovative new voice. Long Soldier’s debut book of poetry, Whereas (2017), directs readers’ attention to structures of language that undergird colonial violence; she wrestles especially with the text of the 2009 U.S. congressional apology to Native American people, exposing the ways language can obscure or conceal. At the same time, many of the poems show how critical language is to our experiences of honoring, of being in kinship with one another.
These poems are certainly striking because of their deep engagement with philosophies of language. Their form, however — their interweaving of blank spaces, shapes, and interchangeable utterances — is what asks more of me than my relied-upon starting points for critique.
After headlining the Tulsa LitFest in 2023, Long Soldier recently made a return trip to Tulsa to serve as the keynote speaker for the 2024 annual conference for the Society of Textual Scholarship, which the University of Tulsa hosted June 6 – 8. According to conference chair and TU English Department faculty member Jeffrey Drouin, textual scholarship considers the relevance of texts as made objects. Long Soldier delivered a lecture in keeping with the conference theme, “Text Under Pressure,” exploring the ways her personal and family histories figure in to the pressure that galvanizes her artistic and poetic practices.
For Long Soldier, art is a way of saying what others cannot understand; pressures can be understood as responsibilities to tell the truth while honoring relationships, and writing can be a way to release pressure. It’s a striking subject to consider in Tulsa, a city the conference website describes as “steeped in many varieties of cultural encounter and collision, marked by repression, assertion, protest and celebration.”
Seeing images during the talk from Long Soldier’s exhibitions, especially her Responsibilities and Obligations: Understanding Mitákuye Oyás’in, which opened at Racing Magpie in Rapid City, South Dakota in 2017 – 2018, immediately made clear why Long Soldier’s work is so pertinent for consideration of texts as made objects. Long Soldier explained that the meaning of the Greek word poiesis, from which the word “poetry” derives, is “to make.” This act of making, of creation, doesn’t require a poem to be a text at all! A poem has an identity as a form of art, and our task is to allow it to exist as it wants, even if that requires us to surrender to its mystery.
Long Soldier recounted her creation of several works of art — such as her piece “Obligations,” an intricately imprinted star quilt — as counterparts to or iterations of her poems, since shape itself can also be a language. She emphasized how important it is to use community forms to create rather than always using western literary traditions as our vantage point.
Poetry is a kind of alchemy. These everyday words we utter can be catalysts for recognizing each other’s humanity, for confronting ourselves with possibilities we could not entertain without language play to shake loose new ways of thinking. But language can also fail us. Perhaps poetry is less about the pressure to understand and more about a call to create, to make our mark.
Next at 101 Archer: Bloomsday, June 16
