diction James Carole Mertz. More Layli Long Soldier > sign up for poem-a-day Receive a new poem in your inbox daily. This linguistic commentary is often coupled with detailed imagery as illustration and elaboration. Change ), You are commenting using your Twitter account. Theirs is a visionary language with a visual rhetoric. —Layli Long Soldier I. Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account.
Fall / Winter 2016 At every curve in the road, I thought the towering stone formations might reveal my friend’s white dress. At every curve in the road, I thought the towering stone formations might reveal my friend’s white dress. Spring / Summer 2017 Carole Mertz has reviewed contemporary poetry, historical novels, and writers’ guides for Arc Poetry Online, Ascent Aspirations, The Conium Review, Copperfield Review, CutBank, MOM Egg Review, World Literature Today, and other periodicals.
Irony. A sentence from this poem tells us: “It is the talk we engage and the unnoticed way this shadow rears back, with black arms and twig teeth it engulfs me, your love, whole.”.
WHEREAS confronts the coercive language of the United States government in its responses, treaties, and apologies to Native American peoples and tribes, and reflects that language in its officiousness and duplicity back on its perpetrators. She weaves the language that we use to talk about language with fragmented imagery in a way that seems alchemical.…in poems with varying physical presences. The term “waĥpaniĉá” has us consider the meaning of “poor.” From an excerpt within this poem: Yet I feel forced to decide if poor really means brittle hands dust and candy-stained mouths a neighbor girl’s teeth convenience store shelves Hamburger Helper a dog’s matted fur a van seat pulled to the living room floor those children playing in the carcass of a car mice on the floorboard my sweeping chill hantavirus the ripe smell a horse chewed ripped its backbone exposed the swarms of do-gooders their goodly photos the heat the cold the drunks we pass waving dollar bills again tonight a bang on the door the stories no one here can stop the urge to tell I am buried in. Many of Long Soldier’s poems start with a drawing out of the meaning of a single native American word from the Lakota language, the language most known as the language of the Sioux. I connect the dots. Does it matter. In the discourse of a contract or a treaty, a whereas clause is an … slope corner arrange. I walked deeper into the rock, looking for more of the 3000-year-old language, the setting sun making the world more red. I waded through the fine, pink sand to the place where I could see the petroglyphs carved into their faces. cause Long Soldier makes the connections in “Left” between creation and taking care. . She will respect the sentence as she squares off with the sentencing of her ancestors. ( Log Out / I wake to red sand I sleep here coral brick hooghaan I walk thin rabbit brush Sign Up. Few Americans seem to know much about the Indian Occupation of Alcatraz, and fewer still are acquainted with the Occupation’s “Proclamation, ” a masterful document that deploys the language, diction, and vocabulary of unfair treaties and paternalism against the government that initiated those treaties. The “moldy sink counter,” “the cloudy mirror,” “open sores,” and the baby and his “loose flab of nose flesh” form a composite image of dreamed urgency, a sublimation. It became clear to me that the Native American people who carved and painted these images were certainly among our first surrealists. his angle a marginal The speaker is acknowledging that the poem itself must be agreeable to the process of becoming. Some of the poems in Part I, “These are the Concerns,” are written as prose poems, some as resolutions, some as word pictographs (such as “This is how you see me…,” where the content is set in an outline of a square, which brings to mind the fertile American Indian directional concepts of North-South-East-West).
Spring / Summer 2014 Change ), Review: They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us by Hanif Abdurraqib, Review: The Gratitude Diaries by Janice Kaplan, Review: Some Are Always Hungry by Jihyun Yun. Spring 2012, Julia Peterkin Summer Literary Contest Opens June 1, South 85 Journal General Submission Period Open, 2019 Julia Peterkin Flash Fiction Contest Winner, When You Can Bear It, Write What You Know. At the same time, her Whereas calls out fatal perversions of language and promotes the idea of language as place, as hearth. about mother tongues versus foster languages, belonging. ( Log Out / This is the way it feels for the poet when the poet listens to the poem at the moment of its creation and pays attention to how it arrives, and what form it wants to take. And the speaker wants to keep safe all three safe. These alliterative lines appear in the poem “Left,” whose speaker finds, in the third stanza, a baby abandoned in a filthy train station bathroom. In Whereas by Layli Long Soldier, you encounter the pain of one who wishes to honor her disenfranchised people and her people’s lands and rights. I was lost, looking for a wedding in the Valley of Fire, Red Rock, Nevada. The poet does the heavy lifting for the poem. 'I was blown away by Layli Long Soldier's WHEREAS.' Nothing.
Whereas is the place where Long Soldier can examine the officious language of oppression and apology. Email Address. Spring / Summer 2015 Fall 2013 Creation of a poem is then an act of faith and mutual trust. Maybe kick their sides when I want down. Yet I intend the comma to mean what we do possess so I slow myself to remember it’s true a child performs best when bonded with a parent before the age of five closely comma, intimately.
Her poetry makes literary language the place of existence–the way of people whose Native American descendants have been dislocated from their sacred places or who have seen their homeland shrink to the point of unsustainability.
. Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas is an ambitious book that speaks from her experience as a tribal member, as a person between languages, and as a poet.
In an even broader sense, Whereas promotes the tenet that the “giving” and “taking” of language should always be an act of trust. More by Layli Long Soldier.
Fall / Winter 2018 Often, Long Soldier uses an etymological approach with the intent to express how diction has the potential to become savior, for example in “̌W̌ahpa’niča,”, Because w̌ahpa’niča means to have nothing of one’s own. Fall / Winter 2019 We might call this a poem of loss, but Long Soldier reminds us that these children came together with her in the dream, and then in the poem, where things are regained. when I Now I’m thinking, years down the road, I’m thinking about that literary traditions such as these carry on with the poet Layli Long Soldier, a member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe who writes a poetry that is akin to the visionary surrealism of the Red Rock drawings. When it was clear I wouldn’t find the party, I parked the car and wandered into the crevices between the rocks. The discovery’s context is the blood that precedes it–the speaker’s miscarriage described in stanzas one and two.
She writes to purify: their mother in a dream wherein they visited, me in a stanza where we could be nearest each other. Therefore, I feel most responsible to the orderly sentence; conveyor of thought.
She makes important points about language and habitation, the body, and the creation of space. I am not an Oglala Lakotan, I have not experienced a similar disenfranchisement, but I can gain much from reading this volume. When it was clear I wouldn’t find the… In “though I’m told…”, as in many of her poems, Long Soldier uses deliberately fractured sentences. She continues, “But this is a spill-over translation for how I cannot speak my mind comma the meta-phrasal ache of being language poor.” This poem brings its rich spoken word of loss in full tones.
In Part II, the “Whereas” segment of this volume, Long Soldier uses effectively and repeatedly the language of legal documents.
Buy this book: Graywolf Press / Indiebound. . Long Soldier writes, “Whatever comes after the word ‘Whereas’ and before the semicolon in a congressional document falls short of legal grounds.” “Whereas,” by Layli Long Soldier
She lives with her husband in Parma, Ohio. sweat over I rock her back, forward. She decides in seconds to keep the infant and to heal his deformities. Next to you comma our, daughter closes her eyes and you rest your heads blue-black lakes comma historic glass across. Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts WHEREAS confronts the coercive language of the United States government in its responses, treaties, and apologies to Native American peoples and tribes, and reflects that language in its officiousness and duplicity back on its perpetrators.Through a virtuosic array of short lyrics, prose … Fall / Winter 2015
Whereas Layli Long Soldier Graywolf; March 7, 2017 120 pp; $16. Another “shape poem” presented in right alignment reads: be Stuck, I, What is most important about Long Soldier’s Whereas is how she speaks to the problem of place in the ongoing narrative of the Lakota tribe. Spring / Summer 2018 She says in “WHEREAS I tire…,”, Really, I climb the backs of languages, ride them into exhaustion—maybe I pull the reins when, I mean go. American Indian words included in this collection carry deep-felt meanings. In one “whereas” statement, the author shows us the great divide between a van driver on an ordinary ride to the airport and a tribal member who tries to explain the “living over there are people with their own nations each with its own government and flag they rise to their own national songs and sing in their own languages, even.” The telling use of the phrase “over there” inserts itself as a kind of scab on the patina of our nation.