>> Rob Casper: Welcome. Good morning. Welcome to the National Book Festival. My name is Rob Casper. I'm the head of the Poetry and Literature Center at the Library of Congress and we're thrilled to have you for this panel celebrating new poets of Native Nations. I should say it's both a panel and a reading, so you'll hear all sorts of poems in the next hour and 15 minutes. We'll have a great wonderful conversation up on stage, and you'll have the opportunity to ask questions. There should be mics on either side that you can step up to. When we get to that point I'll redirect you so we can make sure that works. All day here at the Library of Congress National Book Festival we are recognizing and celebrating the importance of reading and authors and books. The Library of Congress makes it seem easy to do this every year, but the truth is the National Book Festival is a huge undertaking, is a huge financial undertaking, and it is free for everyone because of the generous support from our sponsors and supporters. One of our great sponsors and supporters is the National Endowment for the Arts which makes this poetry and prose pavilion possible. You should find out about the National Endowment for the Arts. The staff from the Literature Division is in the back. They have materials you can check out. They are a great supporter of poets and writers in this country and have been doing so for a good long time. You can also spread the joy of reading with a gift online at loc.gov/donate from the festival app or when you purchase books today. So let me tell you about this panel in reading. We have a good amount of time today to get into a great conversation. And I'm thrilled to have two wonderful poets including my good friend Heid Erdrich. I've had many conversations with Heid over the years about new poets of Native Nations and I want to say how honored I am personally to be part of its launch. Special thanks also to Graywolf Press and Editor Jeff Shotts for supporting this panel. We were supposed to have a third panelist and reader, Natalie Diaz. She is in transit. We're hoping she makes it, so we're just going to kick off and then we'll see what happens. Let me tell you a little bit about this event. Our other poet, Jennifer Foerster, will read her poems from the anthology, then Heid will talk a little bit about the anthology and read poems by other contributors. Then she'll invite Jennifer to ready selections from new poets of Native Nations as well, and I'll lead a moderated discussion. Let me say a little bit about the Poetry and Literary Center as well. We are home to the U.S. Poet Laureate, and in fact, you can see our current Poet Laureate, Tracy K. Smith, talk with former Poet Laureate, Robert Hass, at this stage at 2 o'clock. The Center also hosts a wealth of poetry programming throughout the year at the Library's Capitol Hill Campus and around the country. For more information, visit loc.gov/poetry. And so now I'm going to sit down, and there will be a little bit of rejiggering my mic, and then Jennifer Foerster will kick things off. So, thanks for much for coming. ^M00:03:31 ^M00:03:59 >> Jennifer Elise Foerster: Sorry, I -- oh, right there [laughter]. Hello. [Foreign words]. Jennifer Foerster [foreign words]. My name is Jennifer Foerster. It's wonderful to be here. ^M00:04:11 [ Speaking in Foreign Language ] ^M00:04:14 It's good to see all of you. I'm a member of the Muscogee Creek Nation through my mother, and I'll say a few things more in Muscogee just to introduce myself. ^M00:04:28 [ Speaking in Foreign Language ] ^M00:04:46 So it's wonderful to be here. I just mentioned my clan through my -- I'm a daughter of the Beaver Clan. And it's been such an honor to be apart of this incredible anthology that Heid Erdrich put together. I think it must have taken a lot of work to put this together. I know it did. And I admire her so much for her incredible contributions over the years and all the work that she's done for Native literature. Truly bringing Native writers to the landscape, the literary landscape, which is so important because we've always been a part of the literary landscape. We just haven't been included in it. But so much of the literature of this country and the idea of the country is -- involves all of the peoples of this country and our stories. So this is a great contribution, and I'll read a few poems of mine from this anthology. ^M00:05:57 ^M00:06:03 All right. ^M00:06:04 ^M00:06:08 There we go. ^M00:06:10 ^M00:06:14 So my mother us Muscogee Creek, and our family is from Tulsa, and one of the early founding families of Tulsa. And arrived there during the removal in the mid-1800s. And my father is Dutch and German and was in the Air Force, so I grew up moving around a lot as a kid. So I only got to spend summers back home in Oklahoma, and the rest of the time -- he was a diplomat in the Air Force so he worked in the -- for the embassies and we lived in Vienna, Austria, and Brussels, England, and various states. So, you know, because we worked for the government, they were kind enough to send us home every summer, and so I got to go home to Oklahoma every summer. I always felt a little out of place because it was my home and yet we were the ones that were always moving around, you know. And not a lot of people there moved around. So I felt like I was always leaving. So the first book I titled, ^IT Leaving Tulsa ^NO because I always wanted to stay, but I also always wanted to leave. And it's that place of being in-between culturally, linguistically, historically, that informs this poem. "Leaving Tulsa." Once there were coyotes, cardinals in the cedar. You could cure amnesia with the trees of the back-forty. Once I drowned in a monsoon of frogs. Grandma said it was a good thing, a promise for a good crop. Grandma's perfect tomatoes. Squash. She taught us to shuck corn, laughing, never spoke about her childhood or the faces in gingerbread tins stacked in the closet. She was covered in a quilt, the Creek way. But I don't know this kind of burial -- vanishing toads, thinning pecan groves, peach trees choked by palms. New neighbors tossing clipped grass over our fence line, griping to the city of our overgrown fields. Grandma fell in love with a truck driver, grew watermelons by the pond on our Indian allotment, took us fishing for dragonflies. When the bulldozers came with their documents from the city and a truckload of pipelines, her shotgun was already loaded. Under the bent chestnut, the well where Cosetta's husband hid his whiskey -- buried beneath the roots her bundle of beads. They tell the story of our family. Cosetta's land flattened to a parking lot. Grandma potted a cedar sapling I could take on the road for luck. She used the bark for heart lesions doctors couldn't explain. To her they were maps, traces of home, the Milky Way, where she's going, she said. After the funeral I stowed her jewelry in the ground, promised to return when the rivers rose. On the grassy plain behind the house one buffalo remains. Along the highway's gravel pits sunflowers stand in dense rows. ^M00:10:00 Telephone poles crook into the layered sky. A crow's beak broken by a windmill's blade. It is then I understand my grandmother -- when they see open land they only know to take it. I understand how to walk among hay bales looking for turtle shells. How to sing over the groan of the county road widening to four lanes. I understand how to keep from looking up -- small planes trail overhead as I kneel in the Johnson grass combing away footprints. Up here, parallel to the median with a vista of mesas' weavings, the sky a belt of blue and white beadwork, I see our hundred and sixty acres stamped on God's forsaken country, a roof blown off a shed, beams bent like matchsticks, a drove of white cows making their home in a derailed train car. ^M00:11:08 ^M00:11:13 [ Applause ] ^M00:11:20 "Canyon. I also lived for a long time in New Mexico and went to the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. And now I'm there with a low residency MFA Program at that school. And some of the poets in the anthology are involved with that school, too. So keep your eye out. "Canyon." So, anyway, so I spent a lot of time in the desert which has influenced me a lot, especially the Southwest and the sense of the ocean that is always there in the desert. The past is always a part of where we're at, even if we don't see it, even when it's invisible in our landscape. It's here. "Canyon." Brush over stars dust, up thrust shale, erosion stripped script of leaches. Sloughing scales off our hands' finned imprints. Slow, ageing metamorphic skins, quartz, schist, gypsum, marine bones bedded in the drainage. The basin overflows with wind, horizon, phantom barges, a shore once lush with cane. Moon, a relic in the azure sky. Grey face cut from the mountain spine. A line of dust divides us, [inaudible] and ghost, ancient stream whose sound remains, flood land, arroyo, yucca, sowoaro [assumed spelling]. I dive with pipe fine swallowtails down winding stairs, crenulated lava, scrolls fossilized in radiant strata, reed, prickly pear, silver cholla, spicules of sponge. Here in this rain shadow's stark flanked gully, two blue-bellied lizards streak across sand, vanish inside a conch shell, arrived at the bottom of the world, I write. Buried in the canyon's spiraled larynx, a raft for the coming storm. ^M00:14:09 [ Applause ] ^M00:14:15 Want me to go on? ^M00:14:16 [ Applause ] ^M00:14:18 Okay. I'll read one piece from my second book that just came out. That kind of follows -- that poem is in this book, but it's called ^IT Bright Raft in the Afterweather ^NO, so since I'm talking about rafts. This is called "Hookdalwe's [assumed spelling] Crow." Hookdalwe is a Muscogee word for an elderly woman. It doesn't have the personal pronoun attached to it so it can't be a relative because a relative always has that attachment. So it' an elderly woman who has -- it's kind of close to a grandmother. And she informs this book. She's kind of the character. The first book is following a woman named Magdalena and she is like the chimera of the book. And so this one is -- takes place at the edge of the continent in California where I've moved to and where I now live. And it's following this elderly woman named Hookdalwe who I've seen various places on the beach and around. So she's who I write to. Hookdalwe's Crow. There were still songbirds than nesting in hackberry trees. And a butterfly named Question. I remember ivy trembling at the vanishing point of your throat. Then the timelines crashed. California split into an archipelago, orchards withered under blooms of ash. Now there is no nectar, no rotten fruit. The air is quiet. Once in Russia, ornithologists trapped a population of hooded crows, transported them 500 miles westward. Winter came. They never caught up with their flock. ^M00:16:50 ^M00:16:54 With crests of calcified algae we catalog each day lost. Hot thermals, cirrus vaults, fistfuls of warblers hurtling into dark. There was no sound to the forgetting. We knew the heart would implode before the breath and lungs collapsed. That the world would end in snow. An old woman walking alone, empty birdcage strapped to her back. ^M00:17:39 [ Applause ] ^M00:17:48 >> Rob Casper: That's a beautiful poem. >> Heid E. Erdrich: Thank you so much. Am I on? Is my mic working? Yeah? >> Jennifer Elise Foerster: Yeah. >> Heid E. Erdrich: Okay. Thank you so much, everybody, for being here. Thank you, Jennifer. That was just beautiful. I am Heid Erdrich and I wanted to say just a few more things about Jennifer before we move on. Jennifer has recently been a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow. She is working as Managing Editor of Joy Hardrow's [assumed spelling] project to create a ^IT Norton Anthology of Poetry of Native American Poetry ^NO, the first. ^M00:18:26 [ Applause ] ^M00:18:31 And if that's not enough, she recently stepped in as the Director of the MFA Program, the Low-Res MFA Program for the Institute of American Indian Art, so she's quite an accomplished person aside from having a new book out, which is enough work as it is. And so I'm really grateful to you for coming in and reading from ^IT The Anthology ^NO. I really appreciate that, so. >> Rob Casper: Do you want to read a few poems from ^IT The Anthology ^NO that you love? >> Heid E. Erdrich: Yeah. I'm going to read the first and last and then as we have time between things I will add a few of the shorter poems. I'd like to read the first poem because, you know, we have a book where I created this umbrella, Native American Poetry, and I don't believe that Native American Poetry actually is a thing. It's just a term that we use to bring the original peoples of this place together. And when I move around the country reading from my own work and ^IT The Anthology ^NO and teaching, I like to think about the original people who lived in the place that we're all inhabiting, so I want to think about those people now. I want to recognize them in OccuNations of Virginia who recently came into a relationship with the Federal Government after, of course, having known people from Europe for hundreds of years. So I want to recognize those people. And then I want to read -- ^M00:19:50 [ Applause ] ^M00:19:56 Thank you. Then I want to read the first poem in the book which is by Tacey M. Atsitty , and Tacey's a Dine poet. She also a graduate of the Institute of American Indian Arts with an MFA from elsewhere. But she did her undergraduate work there. Tacey is writing about the ancestral group that is known as the Anastasi [assumed spelling], you know, that's sort of a made-up term for people's ancestors. And the conventional wisdom is that they just disappeared, right? This group in the Southwest, the Hohokam, the Anastasi, all these people. Nobody knows where they went. Well, the people who are descended of them know where they went. So this is a very short poem. "Anastasi." How can we die when we've already been prone to leaving the table mid-meal like ancient ones, gone to breathe elsewhere? Salt sits still, but pepper's gone, rolled off in a rush. We've practiced dying for so long a time. When we skip-dance or town, when we chew. We've rounded out like dining room walls in a canyon, eaten through by wind. Sorry we rushed off. The food wasn't ours. Sorry, the grease sits white on our plates. And the jam that didn't set. Use it as syrup to cover every theory of us. ^M00:21:27 [ Applause ] ^M00:21:32 So that was Tacey M. Atsitty who gave me permission to read that poem. When I put ^IT The Anthology ^NO together I wasn't sure how I was going to do it. I knew I wasn't going to look for themes because I believe that all these representatives of their own Native Nations, their particular culture groups or their relationship to their descent from those culture groups which is a whole other category of being, were too distinct to represent. I couldn't, you know, put it in a category of here's Creek poets or here's Dine poets. What I wanted was a sense of when these writers entered the American mainstream of poetry by publishing their first books. So when I read that poem of Tacey's, I realized I wanted it to be the first poem in the book, and because it responds to and calls out our ancestry, our origin in this place, this continent. And because it was the last book published. And I realized I had to go backward from the 2018 book, Tacey's book, ^IT Rain Scald ^NO, and forward to the first book published in the year 2000 to have 21 poets from the 21st century. So the last poem in the book which I had always wanted to be the last poem in the book is from Janet McAdams who's of Creek descent from Alabama. And this poem is called "Earthling." That winter, that warm winter, no one wanted to be ordinary. We sat on a pile of plastic, threatened as a farm where the dog is tied up barking. Land, we meant to say we were sorry. We are so sorry to the red dirt of your body. We meant to say meat or dirty water. We meant to say before our bones became lace, before we had to lean forward to swallow. You remember how the story goes. We came in peace. But tell that to a drop of water trying to linger. ^M00:23:39 [ Applause ] ^M00:23:45 So those are the first and last poems. And I think in my conversation with Rob, I'll get to some of the other things I want to tell you about ^IT The Anthology ^NO, so. >> Rob Casper: Well, thanks for reading those poems, both of you. And talking about timelines, I felt it appropriate to start with a timeline for this anthology which is the timeline of 20 years ago, the last major ^IT Anthology of Native Poetry ^NO and the forthcoming ^IT Norton Anthology ^NO which I just learned about which I'm assuming is coming in the next few years. >> Heid E. Erdrich: Mm-hmm. >> Rob Casper: And here between the future of the "Nortonizing" of Native poetry and this last anthology that people could refer to when they wanted to find out who are the exciting Native poets writing great work today sits new ^IT New Poets of Native Nations ^NO, and I think it's a really interesting title. And I wanted to talk to you about what this title means, especially in relation to the sort of past and the imminent future. >> Heid E. Erdrich: Mm-hmm. Well, you know, I'll tell you how I -- the poetry anthology came to be. I was looking at social media, as I'm want to do, and I saw a prominent critic of American Poetry, Contemporary American Poetry, post the question, who are the Native Poets I should be reading today? And the answer this person got back were the names of 19-century orators like Chief Seattle, Gary Snyder, who is not Native but who can -- some people think of as writing Native American Poetry. The names of, you know, well-known and established poets like Joy Harjo, and then the names of several people who are not Native but use names that sound Native in English. And that really concerned me. It took many comments before Layli Long Soldier's name came up, before some of the poets who published books in the past three years, Sharon Bitsoi [assumed spelling] who did the cover image for this anthology. And I would love to talk about that image if I get a chance. And, you know, the folks we wanted in there. I don't think I commented. I just sat back and thought about that. And I had the gall to write to Jeff Shotts and go, Jeff, there has not been an anthology of Native Poetry from a literary press. There have been anthologies of indigenous poetry from university presses that cover the whole landscape, the whole continent, North and South America and Central America. But there hadn't been a literary book about whose poets were publishing books today, and there was nothing that wasn't themed or set together in what I feel is sort of an artificial apparatus. So I sent this audacious note to Jeff Shoots at Graywolf and he kindly said that's a great idea. Let's talk about it. And then I got scared and I started like who am I? Do I know all the poets? You know, who do I know? And I made a list of 43 poets that I thought would be good for this anthology, and then I started to research who was coming next and added to the gaps that I had. I didn't realize how many gaps I had. One gap I had that became apparent very early on was that there is a division between the literatures of academic writers, writers who wrote for university presses or Native series, and writers who wrote perhaps to their audience whether it be gender or class, race, issues that had more of an audience in specific niches. So I ended up really looking beyond what was comfortable for me and creating, I think, a pretty eclectic book but that holds together in ways that are apparent to me, so. >> Rob Casper: Jennifer, I wonder if you could talk about what you see this anthology as doing in relation to the anthology you're charged with helping edit. >> Jennifer Elise Foerster: Well, first of all, I love the title of this anthology because that's really what it's doing -- to state new poets of Native Nations is a first step in changing the way that the literary world responds to literature by people of Native Nations, is I feel like there has been, you know, this -- part of the response to literature by people who are of Native Nations is to lump them into -- oh, my gosh, first of all, there are more -- there are many Nations inside this Nation. Yeah. There's a lot. And people write, yeah. And people from the many Nations inside this Nation have not only been telling stories, which is literature, and singing songs, which is literature forever, but have also been writing. And that's often not thought about. But, actually, we have written literatures from people of many different Nations since, I'd say -- I mean, it depends also if you're thinking of what kind of written -- about 1600's. So there's an amazing history and heritage of literatures of people from the many Nations with this Nation, the Indigenous Nations. And it's time that it gets recognized. That's part of the story. If we're going to tell a story, what is our national literature? What is the story of assassinations? And, you know, when that first started coming to be, you know, late 1800s, so we need a national literature, and Whitman and, you know, this kind of -- wow, the country is being identified by a national literature. In-between World War I and World War II there was that -- we need to have an identity as a people with a literature. ^M00:30:02 Those writers were held up. And not that that wasn't important, but those people became the literary ones. And meanwhile there are so many others. And it's just time that we start responding to that. And that will change the stereotypical narrative of who we are as a nation in relation to, you know -- there's always this we as a nation and then there is the Natives, you know? Like us, we, them, one other. And, in fact, it's we are multiple nations with different languages and different customs and different stories. So this book -- that's what I love [inaudible] I love so much about it, but what I would just say what's captured in the title, ^IT New Poets of Native Nations ^NO. It's such an important change. >> Heid E. Erdrich: That makes me think I didn't really answer the question about the title [laughter]. >> Jennifer Elise Foerster: Oh. >> Rob Casper: We had time to have that question answered. But I did want to follow up and say what struck me most, especially when you consider the sort of ^IT Norton Anthology of Poetry ^NO model, is that it began with new and new poets that have foregrounded that this anthology -- I shouldn't speak of it in the past tense. This anthology foregrounds the writers of these poems and pronounces them as new in a really beautiful and wonderful way. And maybe you could talk about that. >> Heid E. Erdrich: Yeah, thanks. I mean, you know, it's 18 years ago that the first book was published, but there were very few Native poets published, especially by literary presses, and I make that distinction because there's a different audience. You're more likely to see a book of poems published by a literary press as opposed to a university press just on a shelf somewhere in a bookstore. And so there were just, there were just a very few until the beginning of this century. There was just a moment, a divide, after the late '90s where people started to publish in numbers, and some presses would have not just one Native poet, but two. And I say in the Introduction that I -- when my second collection of books, I was actually told by some of the presses, well, we already have a Native poet so we can't consider your work. Somebody not from my Nation, not from my perspective, and so forth. But there was that lumping together. So I really wanted the idea to like look at, well, you couldn't -- it's enough to represent in some way your nation or hold that nation in your body and have it be part of your work for these poets, much less to try to fit into some category of thematic, you know, work by Native Nations. So I think -- I mean, I really was thinking about those things. I was also thinking about that problem of these poser poets, [inaudible], pretend Indians as we call them, people who have made a career off of writing Native-sounding poetry but have no connection to a Native Nation whatsoever. And they don't even pretend to when asked. But that is -- you know, I really wanted people to begin to see a difference, so the craving for a 19th century voice that has a particular sound was put to rest as being something that maybe Longfellow did after he ripped off James Rhonson's [inaudible], the first Native poet who published in 1824, so. ^M00:33:37 ^M00:33:43 >> Rob Casper: I'm interested also in talking specifically about these poems and the wealth of themes and images these poems contain, and the images and themes that how you talk about in the Introduction as those that the publishing world, the sort of mainstream publishing world expects of Native poets. Reading through this anthology, what should I and everyone here come to expect about the latter? What should be understand about these sort of themes and images we've been told or been reinforced from the publishing world that are Native themes, Native images? >> Heid E. Erdrich: Well, that's always a problem, right, like if I recapitulate them then they're in your head because -- and then I tell you but I can't tell you what, you know, what subject will strike Native contemporary, new Native poets. But, you know, the expectation of spirituality, constant spirituality, you know. We have poems for -- anti-spiritual poems. We have, you know, agnostic, even atheistic poems in this anthology. You know, animals aren't always talking. People aren't always in ceremony. They might write, you know, beautifully about canyons and the relationship to ancestors, but with the sensibility that we have as Americans, to be skeptical to think, you know, how is our education being produced, what's our critical take? So those are the poets I was attracted to. There are many other kinds of Native poets, and I did try to include some in the edition of ^IT Poetry Magazine ^NO that I edited for June. So that's online. So if you want to see some poets who are not contained in this anthology, you can see in ^IT Poetry Magazine ^NO, even newer writers who have -- maybe don't have their first book yet. But these writers, like Jennifer said, are national poets in the American scene in general. They've won virtually every major award this year. Jake Skeets, who's not in the anthology, just won the National Book Award? No. The National Poetry Series. >> Jennifer Elise Foerster: Yeah, yeah. The Poetry Series. >> Heid E. Erdrich: Yeah. >> Jennifer Elise Foerster: I know that [inaudible] to me, but that's awesome. >> Heid E. Erdrich: Yeah. And, you know, every -- if you ask about it, there have been awards -- Joshua Whitehead actually turned down the Lambda Literary Award, but he was nominated. And there were many other awards just recently that went to Native poets, not in a special category, just the American Poetry Awards in general. >> Rob Casper: Well, there's also that interesting sense of multiple identities that you talk about, the essence of -- our connection to different Nations that the poets of this anthology are negotiating with. At one point you say that no one in this anthology defines himself solely as Native American. Can you back that up a little bit, Jennifer? Maybe I -- maybe you could talk about how your work and the work of the poets that you admire in this, negotiate with those dual or multiple identities maybe in connection with one another or in opposition to one another. >> Jennifer Elise Foerster: Hmm. I have a sense -- I feel lucky that I am friends with most of the poets in here, and those are not -- it's just because I haven't had the privilege of getting to know them very well yet. But one thing about this collection that Heid has brought together is that as -- this collection of poets, including so many who aren't in here, we're in conversation often. >> Heid E. Erdrich: Mm-hmm. >> Jennifer Elise Foerster: We know each other. We dialog. We read each other. We teach each other. So in that sense it's a small -- well, it's an intimate community. >> Heid E. Erdrich: Mm-hmm, I agree. >> Jennifer Elise Foerster: And this is just a beautiful rising up of some of those voices, kind of like a cross-section of that community. And you can read in here how people are talking together. There are so many echoes among the poems. And I think related to theme, it's hard, you know, reading it through so many times, you're going to find layers and layers of themes and conversations that are happening among the poems. And one of those, of course, does have to do with identity and how we are multiple, how we are able to be rooted and centered in a place or a people, a community, a Nation, and at the same time be multiple. And I think that's, that's probably how I would talk about that, you know? Also for me it's -- I went to the Institute of American Indian Arts as an undergrad, and that was really illuminating to me because I grew up living, like I said, you know, summers in Oklahoma and school years in -- mostly in Europe, actually. And so I felt very close to my heritage, you know, because I just knew my relationship with this country was -- on one hand it was just kind of like a -- you know, my father was in the Embassy, so it was a very formalized relationship to the United States, being representative of that abroad. And at the same time, my relationship with this country was -- I knew I was from the land, too, and I knew the stories. I thank my mother for telling me the stories and the history. So since I was young I -- we knew, you know, our family was part of who we are. Our family's dialogues, where we came from. So my sense of multiplicity in being -- I wouldn't say being divided, because I don't feel like it's a division. ^M00:40:00 And when I went to the Institute of American Indian Arts, it was like -- it was great. I mean, as a kid, I got to go to international schools, and I met people from all over the world, the different languages and cultures and religions. And then I went to the Institute of American Indian Arts and I got to be with people from different languages and cultures and ways of being in the world. And I just think that's a beautiful thing. And I think that's reflected in this book, too. >> Rob Casper: Yeah. Could you read a poem that might reflect that? >> Heid E. Erdrich: Yeah. I was thinking when she was answering of this poem by Sy Hoahwah. And Sy is -- he's Comanche and Southern Arapaho. He's lived all over Oklahoma. I'm just reading this through real quick. But he is also currently living in Arkansas. And I always think it's interesting that people don't think of Native people in certain parts of the country. They're like, oh, they don't have any Natives here when I visit. But there he is in Arkansas. And I think like it helps to think of this poem as a graphic novel, so each section is like a little cartoon, so if you can draw it in your head while I read it. I'm going to switch glasses. Sorry. I'm old. Oops [laughter]. Throwing my glasses around. These are my grandpa glasses. "Anchor-Screws of Culture." After watching the deceased Comanche Nation princess get snagged on an anchor screw as she crawled out of the mausoleum, the first groundskeeper retrieved a pair of hedge-clippers. But was chased by a swarm of bees in the shape of a big hand. Second groundskeeper brandished his brand new cordless drill. He just had a birthday. Third groundskeeper quickly made the oil and gasoline mixture for the weed-eaters. Fourth groundskeeper put out his cigarette on the back of a concrete lamb. And the fifth groundskeeper hooked up water hoses, but stopped to help a spider loosen its fangs from an empty grasshopper. The clouds went by like a Two-Step dance. Instantly I fell in love with the Comanche culture all over again [laughter]. So to me that kind of answers that question of how do you negotiate things you think about. And Sy has like lots of vampires and zombies in his poetries, very much the contemporary, you know sensibility of that goth or post-goth, you know, post-apocalyptic kind of worldview. But also centered on Comanche culture, so. >> Rob Casper: Yeah. Let's talk about the cover. Since you asked, is there a way to show it up on the screens where you can see it. This beautiful, beautiful image. >> Heid E. Erdrich: Yeah, the image -- >> Rob Casper: Shamenda Tui [assumed spelling]. >> Heid E. Erdrich: Yeah, Shamenda Tui who is a Dine poet who couldn't be in the collection. He was working on a new book-length poem essentially, and it just -- he didn't yet feel he could be part of the collection, or it could separated it out.. Sherman -- Sherwin was showing his photographs on, I don't know, Instagram or somewhere, and I really got intrigued by them, and I said, oh, I didn't know you were an artist. He said, yeah, I paint and I do photographs. So eventually when they asked about a cover, I suggested this piece of artwork with his permission. It was taken in Hawaii and it was just a piece of driftwood found on the beach. And I thought it was really beautiful and full of hope and kind of a sense of uplift, you know, uplifting of us as people. It wasn't until we were actually in production that I found out that the hand is not Sherwin's, which I assumed. It is the hand of Laura Ortman who you performed with. She's a concert violinist? >> Jennifer Elise Foerster: Yeah. >> Heid E. Erdrich: And a composer. >> Jennifer Elise Foerster: In Brooklyn. >> Heid E. Erdrich: And her Native Nation is? >> Jennifer Elise Foerster: Oh, I don't know. >> Heid E. Erdrich: I can't remember. But she's a Native woman as well. So I just -- >> Yeah. >> Heid E. Erdrich: -- you know, I thought that was just so perfect that, you know, this art and music and, you know, we holistically -- cultures don't separate those things. Ojibwe people, we sing our poems. You know, we may not have great voices, but that doesn't matter [laughter]. You sing your dreams, your living poems, your -- you know, that's what you do, that's what you're supposed to do, and that's what people did for, you know, millennia. And that's true of many cultures, so like I love it the -- you know, the separations are not there. A lot of the poets are also visual artists -- >> Rob Casper: Yeah. >> Heid E. Erdrich: -- musicians, among other things. >> Rob Casper: Yeah. I should say that if you'd like to see Laura Ortman perform, you can watch the webcast of the Witter Bynner Fellowship Reading with Allison Hedge Coke who brought Laura to the Library and performed the poem with her and a whole band. It was an amazing experience and it clearly made true what you're talking about about this multi genre approach to poetry. ^M00:45:40 ^M00:45:44 You talked a little bit about being surprised by the poets you didn't know about. Can maybe both of you can talk a little bit more about what surprised you in this anthology -- poems, poets, themes, ways of negotiating, questions. >> Heid E. Erdrich: Yeah. I didn't know about Jillian Telemontes Beraski [assumed spelling] who uses the pronoun "itch" and it has this amazing use of all types of English language as well as some of indigenous language and many of the poets that I got attracted to use indigenous language, too, in their work or -- I shouldn't say used because it's, you know, evoked it, expressed within their own languages. And that was a part of my taste in the work was to look at those poems and be inclusive of them. Some are not translated such as Gwen Westermann's -- one of her Dakota poems. Some are translated within the text. Some are just meant for an audience of those who could read the language and I couldn't read them all. So -- but to me the -- our language teachers tell us that we want to speak the original languages of this place, and it's part of our future. It's not part of our past. It's part of our future and our continuation. So however you need to do, whether it's through poetry or teaching kids, you know, it doesn't matter. So that surprised me. You know, playfulness. A lot of the people think of the sadness and the sort of backward glancing or nostalgia made of poetry. And these are playful poems. These are poems with serious intent but funny, so. >> Jennifer Elise Foerster: Yeah. I think what I love about it and that always surprises me -- and the poems are good poems because they're surprising every time you read them. And I think I did an excellent job of choosing the poems nd choreographing a book because it reveals just the diversity of poetics, not just themes, but poetics. >> Heid E. Erdrich: Mm-hmm. >> Jennifer Elise Foerster: You know, we have a range of poetic modes going on in this book, from documentary poetics and different kind of syntactical play and narrative work and different even like typographies and, you know, using -- some poets use the page in a very open way and others are very lyrical with stanzas and -- I just love that. It shows a variety of poetics as well. >> Heid E. Erdrich: Yeah. I think I was attracted to that, too. Just, you know, getting a sense of the voice of that poet. So from their first book -- I include something from everybody's first book except for one person. I just couldn't. But all the way through to their most current work and unpublished works, so. I'm going to read one of the poems from [inaudible] first book. It's really quick and it's -- I'm going to try -- Trevino's got a great voice. It's very deep. I can't quite do it, but -- For the Sake of Beauty. On the phone, I asked her to wear a full buckskin outfit and she could be the beauty that would make me steal horses. She said, She didn't have a buckskin outfit. I said I would make her one, but use the pages from books. A week later, when she came over to my place, she asked if I'd made an outfit. I said no. I couldn't bring myself to hunt the books on my shelf [laughter] even if it were for food or clothing. I couldn't bring myself to kill even if it was for the sake of beauty [applause]. >> Jennifer Elise Foerster: Amazing. >> Rob Casper: That's a lovely poem [inaudible]. >> Heid E. Erdrich: That's Trevino -- ^M00:49:52 [ Applause ] ^M00:49:54 But, yeah. I mean I was surprised by many things and attracted to things that were different, you know. ^M00:50:03 Had I done the book in year two if I'd finished the manuscript, it would have been very different from what I was able to finish in 2017 because my taste broadened, my ability, my understanding of poets, especially GLBTQ plus two spirit poets really changed and I was more appreciative of the works. And found them because they'd been marginalized, too, so. >> Rob Casper: It's interesting that you bring that up. What I meant, publishing this anthology now. And, of course, you're not only an editor, you're a great poet yourself. I'm interested in how the two of you felt -- how you felt about having -- doing this anthology now for you as a poet. And, Jennifer, I'm interested in what this anthology meant coming up now for you as opposed to, say, when you were working on your first book or first discovering the great wealth and new writers around the country. >> Jennifer Elise Foerster: Well, I'm glad it came out when it did [laughter]. I think because some of the poets in this book, their first book did just come out. Tacey, right? Her first book -- >> Heid E. Erdrich: Tacey, 2018. >> Jennifer Elise Foerster: -- her first book ^IT Rain Scald ^NO just came out. And so it allowed those voices to be in it, too. >> Heid E. Erdrich: Mm-hmm. >> Jennifer Elise Foerster: I was grateful for that. >> Heid E. Erdrich: And then -- I mean, these poets have been writing for 10/15 years most of them. They just couldn't get published. Tommy Pico now has three books, boom-boom-boom, right in a row, and he -- and winning national awards. But he could not get published. I think [inaudible] that -- I think he sent it out 27 times, which is a lot of work. Sending a book of poetry out takes a -- you have to wait for it to come back, you have to produced the manuscript, you have to fill out an author form. You have to do so much to get those books out there, and you know, with no hope of getting any money out of the deal. >> Jennifer Elise Foerster: No [laughter]. >> Heid E. Erdrich: So, you know, it's something, it's a contest, et cetera. So these poets were out there struggling to be heard, a lot of them. And I was just grateful that they shared their first successes with me. I was really grateful for that because they didn't have to. A lot of them didn't know me. They weren't maybe even hooked in with the Native Writing Community until -- which is still forming. It really has grown a lot in the past 10 years, so -- I don't think we're a school of poetry because our poetics are not prescribed, but we are a community, an intimate community as he said for better or for worse. >> Jennifer Elise Foerster: Yeah. >> Rob Casper: There is that larger question, though, of what's happened in the even five years. It's interesting to see in the September, 2018 issue of ^IT The Atlantic ^NO. They had a big article by Jesse Lichtenstein called "How Poetry Came to Matter Again," which is a play off of Dana Gioia's "Can Poetry Matter" article that was so foundational. And he talks about all sorts of poets including Layli Long Soldier. But it was very exciting to feel that after many years of seeing articles about the death of poetry, about poetry as elitist, and not connected to the lives of "ordinary Americans," quote/unquote, to see a kind of sea change in the major media and at that same time there's an explosion of all sorts of exciting young poets from all sorts of parts of the country who are, I think, expanding our sense of what poetry can mean. But why do you think suddenly there are a bunch of exciting new poets or poets who have been writing and something, as you say with Tom Pico, boom-boom-boom, three books in a row? >> Heid E. Erdrich: Mm-hmm. Well I think the -- just the diversity of the -- or our country, of America, of the U.S., and the diversity and growth of Native Nations is allowing for that possibility. And I think people are interested in hearing voices that are not their own. And there's more of an openness to that, especially in poetry. The audience is much younger and we now know from the NEA study the performed work of poetry has come back into play. And for Native poets, I think that has always been a thing, the idea of performance of poetry, although it's perfectly fine to have somebody who doesn't perform. It's a little harder, but I perform my work more than I publish it in journals or magazines because I want a relationship with the people I'm performing to and with. I want to have that moment of human connection. So I think part of it is that. But probably the main thing is just social media and the Internet. You could get a following. You could get some way to -- if I couldn't just throw an email off to Jeff Shotts, this never would have happened because I wouldn't have dared to go like knock on the door and make an appointment and talk to Jeff who is the greatest, sweetest, most humble person in the world who's made a huge impact on American poetry. Yeah. >> Jennifer Elise Foerster: Yeah, I agree with all that. And I think that what's happened in the last some years is -- you now, we're living in the place -- time of pretty numbing rhetoric. And poetry is a language like none other. >> Heid E. Erdrich: Hi, Natalie. >> Jennifer Elise Foerster: It's a language of the imagination and it's a language that opens the apertures of insight. And we need that. and with that, we're so glad that Natalie Diaz is here. >> Heid E. Erdrich: Natalie Diaz arrived, yeah. ^M00:55:36 [ Applause ] ^M00:55:41 >> Natalie Diaz: [Inaudible] that's also late apparently [laughter]. Better late than never as my grandmother would say. >> Heid E. Erdrich: Yes. Well we have -- we're at our 15-minute mark. I'll let you catch your breath. Should we do questions for a minute until Natalie is ready to read or should we -- >> Rob Casper: How do you want to jump in? >> Natalie Diaz: Whatever. At this point I'm not sure [laughter] whatever it is we want to do. >> Rob Casper: Let's have you jump in, yeah. Thank you for, thank you for getting here. Poor Natalie had a mysterious plane issues. She arrived at past midnight last night into Washington, D.C. >> Natalie Diaz: Yeah. That's [inaudible]. I mean, I'm here, which is lucky [inaudible]. >> Rob Casper: Well, we're thrilled to have her, and here you go. >> Natalie Diaz: Just [inaudible]. >> Rob Casper: You want some water? >> Natalie Diaz: I'm glad Heid and Jennifer love me. >> Heid E. Erdrich: Oh, yeah. >> Natalie Diaz: And I hope some of you -- >> Heid E. Erdrich: I love you for getting here. >> Rob Casper: Come on. >> Natalie Diaz: Thank you. >> Heid E. Erdrich: Yeah, you're -- ^M00:56:31 [ Applause ] ^M00:56:35 >> Rob Casper: Since we're thinking about the importance of this new anthology, it's great to have a dramatic entrance [laughter]. >> Natalie Diaz: Yeah. >> Yeah [inaudible]. >> Natalie Diaz: Well, had a dramatic history, so -- >> Heid E. Erdrich: I don't think your microphone's quite working out. But I just want to say, just in introducing Natalie while she catches her breath and drinks, that one of the poems that I love in this collection is sort of an essay in American arithmetic by Natalie Diaz. And I -- like I said, I have a critical taste. I have a taste for the critical, the reading within poetry, the conversation, the dialog. It's really just my style. There's many, many other styles of writing. But I so appreciate that poem in particular. I don't know if you want to read it or not. And -- >> Natalie Diaz: Yeah, yeah. >> Heid E. Erdrich: Yeah, though would be great. ^M00:57:25 [ Speaking in Foreign Language ] ^M00:57:29 >> Natalie Diaz: Good morning [foreign words]. American Arithmetic. Native Americans make up less than 1% of the population of America, .8% of 100%. Oh, mine efficient country. I do not remember the days before America -- I do not remember the days when we were all here. Police kill Native Americans more than any other race. Race is a funny word. Race implies someone will win, implies I have as good a chance of winning as -- who wins the race which isn't a race? Native Americans make up 1.9% of all police killings, higher than any race, and we exist as .8% of all Americans. Sometimes race means run. We are not good at math. Can you blame us? We've had an American education. We are Americans and we are less than 1% of Americans. We do a better job of dying by police than we do existing. When we are dying, who should we call? The police? Or our senator? Please, someone, call my mother. In Arithmetic and in America, divisibility has rules -- divide without remainder. At the National Museum of the American Indian, 68% of the collection is from the United States. I am doing my best to not become a museum of myself. I am doing my best to breathe in and out. I am begging -- let me be lonely but not invisible. But in this American city with all its people, I am Native American, less than one, less than whole. I am less than myself. Only a fraction of a body. Let's say, I am only a hand, and when I slip it beneath the shirt of my lover I disappear completely. ^M00:59:56 [ Applause ] ^M01:00:06 >> Rob Casper: That's such a wonderful poem because it shows how poems can both contain what we seek in prose, which is the statistical analysis, and total subvert it and explode it with a kind of lyrical intensity. So, thank you so much for reading that. Do you want to read another one? You up for it? >> Heid E. Erdrich: Yes. ^M01:00:27 [ Applause ] ^M01:00:30 >> Jennifer Elise Foerster: Please do. >> Natalie Diaz: Yeah. Don't forget, you don't have to feel poor for me. This happens to people in much worse ways. My trip here was so much easier than people's trip trying to cross the border right now, to -- >> Heid E. Erdrich: Yeah, exactly. >> Natalie Diaz: -- to save their lives, so this is quite lucky. ^M01:00:44 [ Applause ] ^M01:00:48 >> Natalie Diaz: This one kind of goes fast, so I'm hoping I have enough hydration in me for it. This actually began with a line -- I was reading Orlando Wright's book, ^IT Bone Right ^NO. That's a book that's made a big impact on me, and you'll hear a line in here that says Orlando Zero. And I was thinking about that little white skull of space that he images so powerfully in his book. So you'll hear that little section. Dome Riddle. Tonight I am riddled by this sick soul, this right bowling ball zipped in the sad sack carrying case of my face, this over-round bone Jack-in-the-box, this Orlando's zero -- ^M01:01:38 [ Speaking in Foreign Language ] ^M01:01:47 This sticky, sweet guilt type. ^M01:01:49 [ Speaking in Foreign Language ] ^M01:01:52 This small town mania dispensary, prescribed cranium pill, this electric blue tom-tom drum ticking like an acne bomb, hypnotized explosive device, pensive general scalp strapped worrier, soldier with a loaded god complex, this Hotchkiss obliterated headdress, Gatling-lit labyrinth, this memory grenade, and death epithet, death epitaph, mound of momento mori, this 22-part talisman wearing a skirt of brass, giant ball of masa, this god patella in the long leg of my torso, zoo of canines and Blake's tigers, this red-skinned apple, lamp illuminated by teeth, gang of grins, spitwad of scheme, this jawbone of an ass, smiling sliver of smite, David's rock striking the Goliath of my body, this library of Babel, homegrown Golgotha, nostalgia menagerie, melon festival, this language mausoleum -- ^M01:02:52 [ Speaking in Foreign Language ] ^M01:02:58 -- this hidden glacier hungry for a taste of titanic flesh, this pleasure alter, French-kiss sweatshop, abacus of one night stands, hippocampus whorehouse, oubliette of regret, this church of tongue, chapel of vengeance, cathedral of thought, bone dome of despair -- ^M01:03:16 [ Speaking in Foreign Language ] ^M01:03:19 -- this museum of tribal dentistry, commodity cranium cupboard, petrified dreamcatcher, this sun-ruined basketball I haul, rabid gray along the seams, perpetual missed shot, this insomnia podium, little bowl in a big fish, brain, amphitheater, girl in the moon, this 3 a.m. war bell doing day vision prison, this single scoop vanilla headrush, thunderhead, fastball, lightening rod, this mad scientist in a white lab helmet, ghost of smoking mirror, this coyote beacon, calcium corral of pale palomino ponies, this desert seed I am root to, night-blooming [inaudible] rattle, this Halloween crown hat-rack worry contraption, rainbows, drunken boat, blazing chandelier, casa [foreign words], this coliseum [inaudible], bore his other tiger licking the empty shell of locus white Tortuga, this underdressed god head forever hatching egg, this mug, again and again at my lips. And all this because tonight I imagined you sleeping with her the way we once slept, as intimate as a jaw, maxilla and mandible hot in the skin, in love, our heads almost touching. >> Beautiful. ^M01:04:37 [ Applause ] ^M01:04:45 >> Could I just say that my collaborator in reading that was incredible. That's like -- ^M01:04:53 [ Applause ] ^M01:05:01 >> Natalie Diaz: Like I [inaudible] get such a gift that we get to see poetry as physical as it is. Sometimes we forget it's physical, we forget it's about the body. We get stuck on this like eye to ear thing that we do with text, but that was like sometimes -- this to me is like the highlight of anything I could have read, was watching language in motion. So, gracias. ^M01:05:21 [ Applause ] ^M01:05:27 >> Rob Casper: And so I'd love to give you a chance to ask any questions you'd like to ask. There are mics on either side. Please come up. We have about 10 minutes. Of course I could talk all day with these three, but I'm sure you have questions to ask. >> Heid E. Erdrich: And we have a sign-in -- >> Rob Casper: We have a sign-in, yes. >> Heid E. Erdrich: Yeah, it's 12:30 I think. Is that right? 1:00? 1:30. So if you want to -- >> Rob Casper: So the mics are -- yeah, the mics are over on either side. >> Natalie Diaz: [Inaudible] is at 12:30 [laughter]. >> Heid E. Erdrich: Great at that. >> Rob Casper: So, go ahead. >> My question is for the editor of the anthology. Did you have difficulties in -- did you have difficulties in selecting the poets? What was your criteria for -- how did you decide that these words are going to be in and did you have a sort of timeline or are you -- >> Heid E. Erdrich: Yeah. >> -- looking at the criteria of their work? >> Heid E. Erdrich: Well, first they had to be poets who engaged me in general, beyond the list that, and that I felt that had an audience. That was important to me, too, that there were folks who were reading these poets and were interested in them. It wasn't about the age of the poets. It was about when they published their first book from the year 2000 forward, and, in general, I make decisions very quickly. I knew what I wanted and I just chose -- and luckily I was allowed to just choose out of my own taste and my own sense of how the whole was going to come together. ^M01:07:01 ^M01:07:06 I did require that people have some specific connection to a Native Nation however. That was one of my -- I'm not about blood [inaudible] or descendancy or race or anything about that. And I also wanted people from different directions of geography in the country so that I got a sense of the land, you know. Physically people who live and have relatives on the borders of the U.S. as well as folks from all over, and Guam and Hawaii and Alaska, to make sure that we understand ourselves as part of Native Nations that are connected under this political entity of the U.S. It's really important to me because I think that more and more we will face challenges to our Nationhood, and I want us to have bodies of expression that can meet that and to teach the American public that we persist as Nations regardless of who's going to come for our resources or our physical bodies. ^M01:08:06 [ Applause ] ^M01:08:10 >> Hi. There's a lot of talk these days about cultural appropriation, but I'm sure that you also want many people to read this anthology far beyond, you know, from all cultures, nationalities, and that you want those people, if they're writers, to be influenced by the writers in the book. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about being influenced by writers of other nationalities or other cultures besides your own, and cultural appropriation on the other hand. >> Jennifer Elise Foerster: I got just my first thought, I'll just speak to that, is that when I'm influenced by other writers, influenced poetically, then it's because I'm engaged with their poetics. And that may or may not -- of course, one's poetics is always about who they are, which includes culture and all of that. But I think the richness of poetry in the world is that we can be influenced by one another in our poetics and that love of each other's poetics, whether it's -- we're resonant with it or we have differences with it is another way that we can be a conversation and be in conversation as humans with our differences. And so I don't think that it has to do necessarily -- it doesn't have to do with appropriation to be, to listen, and listening is part of that influence. >> Heid E. Erdrich: One of the things that I did a little differently with the anthology was to have in the biography people answer certain questions in the author bio, so they talk about who their influences are in those bios or they talk about who mentored them so you can see the connections. ^M01:10:05 Mostly Native writers mentoring one another, even some of the people in the book mentoring one another. But also, you know, the poets that are meaningful to them, so you see that sort of generational influence I think. >> Natalie Diaz: And appropriation -- we always forget this, like appropriation has a lot to do with the fact that you're erasing the people who you have taken from. You know, like America loves to wear a headdress and they would much rather -- I mean, they do nothing to take care of Natives or to give them a place to -- you know, we couldn't even practice our religion until 1978, yeah, you know, like some of us weren't even born then. And so I think that's something, too, is like -- and always to ask yourself why, like why, why is this necessary to write? Like I think in the book you can see the necessity, like these things had to be written for these writers. And so I think that's something to consider, too, with influences like when you find something that, you know -- it has -- so we always use that word like, I like this. But, really, it's because it showed you something of your life or it showed you something of your own world. And you don't have to be Native to see our world we're all living in in this book or the pains that we sometimes suffer, you know, even if it's across culture or across Nation. And so I think that's something important, too, is that appropriation is not just the influence or engaging in a conversation. But it's also like the obliteration or erasure of the person who that came from, whose work that came from. So I think that's an important thing to jump into the equation. >> Rob Casper: Okay. >> Heid E. Erdrich: We're at time. >> Rob Casper: We're at time. One more quick question. Your one quick question. >> Well, I just heard you talk around about having the discussion within the poetry community and that a lot of the poems in the book are sort of a discussion back and forth. And I'm wondering what the mechanics of that discussion are. Is this when you get together in person? Are you communicating through email? You know, how is this discussion going on and how are you helping each other? >> Heid E. Erdrich: I'm going to say the simplest answer, yes and no [laughter]. And I'm so sorry. I have to happily talk to you about what I mean by that. It's more of a poetics than it is an actual thing. But I wanted to say in the Nishnabe we say [foreign words] which means thank you for listening to me. That's about enough. ^M01:12:35 [ Applause ] ^M01:12:46 >> Rob Casper: Thanks all for coming. Thanks all for coming. The booksigning should be on -- I think its at 12:30/1 o'clock. It should be on your app, the National Book Festival app. Hope to see you soon. >> Jennifer Elise Foerster: Thank you.