Best to choose carefully …

… Retaking Native Ground. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

There is a push in the academic community to showcase a new generation of indigenous poets, an effort which is admirable and overdue. The problem with that effort is that it tries to limit the style and range of the showcased poets in order to create the misimpression that all indigenous poets are writing the same kind of postmodern poetry that so many other poets are writing today.

An example of highlighting only poets with this limited esthetic is the June 2018 guest-edited “identity-based” issue of the venerable magazine Poetry. Except for some splendid innovative sonnets by Tacey M. Atsitty that open the issue, readers found only poets who rejected the rhythm and rhyme of William Jay Smith—and to a large extent rejected Smith’s accessibility to nonacademic readers.