The way Layli Long Soldier writes, I get lost in her words. It’s not until towards the end of the poem that it really hits what the subject matter of her poetry is, very real life events with massive impact. But the way she writes, free of structure and punctuation, the way her words flow into one another, allows for the reader to just get lost in the poetry and rhythm of it. But then, the subject matter is equally striking, from her thought processes regarding hunting to her experience with a miscarriage to her experience as a Native American woman. She strategically uses white space to create an effect on the reader that only emphasizes either apparent structurelessness or very intentional structure. My favorite poems from the book include Three (p. 8) in which she manages to construct the box in which she is kept through the various phrasing of the same words. I also enjoyed the effects of Tókhah’aη (p. 34), Left (p.37-39) and Talent (p. 41). These poems I read aloud to some of my friends and noticed the blurring of words prominently, but additionally the impact of their content.

I’d be curious to talk more about the effect of spacing between words in the same sentence. I think I understood more about her writing process through the poem Wahpanica (p.43-44) and how “When we speak comma question marks dashes lines little black dots don’t flash or jiggle in the air before us comma in truth it’s the rise and fall of the voice we must capture to mean a thing in writing.” But I’m curious what effect she intends with the radical spacing of her words.

At first, when reading through the Diction chapter, I wasn’t sure how much of the poems are related to each other besides all acting around experiments with language. The question as to whether I should read the work as a book or as a compilation of pieces hovered above my mind.

Reading the Whereas section, seeing some of the words be used in the longer sentences, I was appreciative of the exploratory definitions she laid out before. Even without remembering precisely what was written before or going back to refresh my memory, I felt the words embedded in the overall reading.

Provided that any person belonging to Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi or Christian community from Afghanistan, Bangladesh or Pakistan…

Provided that the Muslim population does not exist

Provided that the constitution has proven it serves a limited purpose

Provided that there is no regard for freedom from religious discrimination

Provided that this is a façade for continued capitalist exploitation

Provided that intoxicating interests of the people are divided

Provided that India has other problems

Provided that the Ministry of Law and Justice serves the interests of the people

Provided that citizenship is a necessity

Provided that protesters internationally have said “No” to CAA

Be it enacted.

Process notes: The document I chose was the Citizenship Amendment Act which amends the 1955 Citizenship Act in India. The amendment created pathways to citizenship for people of various religious descent, but excluded the prominent Muslim population. I went to a talk yesterday on Emergent Global Fascisms (mostly in India) which provided some inspiration. The “provided” and “be it enacted” is from the legislation.

I really enjoyed the way Long Soldier’s voice came through in her poetry. I found the emotions within the poem Wakĥályapi (sorry. google docs didn’t have the proper “h” character) particularly palpable. This poem uses the definition “anything that is boiled” and repeatedly gives examples starting with “As in…” which reminded me of the reading we did last week. In this poem, there is a slow build up of anger in the written language that eventually evolves into a rage, not unlike the act of boiling a pot of water. This feeling is brought on by her use of word repetition (i.e. “boiling and boiling…”) and variations in sentence length. This feeling of rage then transitions into a sadness, kind of like taking the pot off of the fire. Upon repeat readings, it becomes unclear whether it truly was rage the speaker was feeling in the beginning or if it was sadness the entire time, which I really enjoyed. I’ve always liked poetry that shifts in the feelings it produces and this poem for some reason really scratched that itch.

Official Document Poetic Exercise 

Link: https://nca2018.globalchange.gov/downloads/NCA4_Report-in-Brief.pdf

I was particularly moved by Long Soldier’s “Whereas” poem on page 75. To me, the poem brought up questions about cultural continuation and motherhood. In the first stanza she holds “the responsibility as mother to teach what it is to be Lakota,” At first, I read “as a mother” instead of “as mother” in the prose; the lack of an “a” suggests stepping into a larger, universally understood role of “mother,” and implies that motherhood might be viewed differently for Lakota people. She asks herself questions: “What did I know about being Lakota…What did I know of our language but pieces? Would I teach her to be pieces.” The period at the end of her second question stopped me in my tracks, despite there being no line break. After two questions — ones ending in question marks — in a row, phrasing the last question as a statement made it feel more weighty, more permanent. Her daughter would be pieces — it was not a question to Long Soldier. She ends the poem, after mentioning the national apology, which concerns “us, my family,” saying “my hope: my daughter understands wholeness for what it is, not for what it’s not, all of it            the pieces.” The spacing between pieces and the rest of the sentences makes it feel, to me, like a weightier statement, something that holds more space (literally) in the poem. I’m left thinking about pieces and wholeness, unsure exactly how to feel or what to think about what “wholeness” means for native people whose culture has been degraded and dismissed.

In this week’s readings the impact that the physical presentation of a text can have on its readers’/viewers’ interpretation stood out to me both in Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas and Solmaz Sharif’s LOOK. As Wren noted, the engagement of more senses than “just that of mental sight” is something I don’t often take into consideration when reading poetry; however, in these writings the influence of visual perception felt prominent. In considering this, I was reminded of numerous psychological studies that demonstrate the powerful emotional responses that can occur in relation to the orientation, color, sizing, and font selection of text, with results such as red text leading to a stronger negativity bias and connected cursive lettering often conveying unity or collectivism. In applying this to Layli Long Soldier’s work, I was interested by the construction of Three in He Sápa, the empty void constructed within the boundaries of her text led me to perceive a mixture of feelings: a sense of entrapment in viewing the connected, 4-sided walls of words as well as a sense of loneliness in being forced to view the blank center, making the core of the piece emptiness rather than a contextual moment in the writing. In considering Sharif’s work, I felt as though the particularly straight, angular, and uppercase font that he utilized when stating words related to warfare such as torture, thermal shadow, look, pinpoint target, etc. impacted my perception of those words as seemingly connected in a shared place of formality, durability, and power.

Originals 

“Hysteria is a kind of pathological by-product of the Victorian-Wilhelminian bourgeois social system with its sexual confinement, emotional oppression, and social suffocation.” (On the “Disappearance” of Hysteria: A Study in the Clinical Deconstruction of a Diagnosis, Mark S. Micale)

“If we show emotion we’re called dramatic. If we want to play against men, we’re nuts. And if we dream of equal opportunity, delusional. When we stand for something, we’re unhinged. When we’re too good, there’s something wrong with us. And if we get angry, we’re hysterical, irrational, or just being crazy. But, a woman running a marathon was crazy. A woman boxing was crazy. A woman dunking, crazy. Coaching an NBA team, crazy. A woman competing in a hijab. Changing her sport. Landing a double cork 1080. Or winning 23 grand slams, having a baby, and then coming back for more? Crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy, and crazy. So if they want to call you crazy, fine. Show them what crazy can do.” (Serena Williams)

Exercise

Process Notes

Powerful women addressing the prevalence of being shamed and gaslit is something I wanted to explore thoroughly in this course. When it comes to people whose success depends on what others think of them, such as public figures, it makes sense that it’s instinctual to cover up or gloss over threats to their mental integrity or sanity. However, I loved how Serena Williams directly addressed the people who have dubbed her as “crazy” due to her reactions in games / to certain depictions of her in the media, tying her experiences to those of women all around and specifically athletes. I integrated her statements into the historical definition of hysteria, while also incorporating interiority from an anecdotal experience to add the element of a present narrator. Layli Long Soldier’s poetry inspired me to play around with the formatting and add spaces where I felt them necessary to manifest the knee-jerk reactions which could not be put into words. 

I feel as if Long Soldier stresses in the importance of spoken word throughout the entire book; one poem that I was stuck on for a while was Vaporative, where in one of the sections she states that writing was only important to the author’s memory, and not to anyone else. This is followed by a definition of the word opaque just from how it sounds. The idea that words precede speaking and that hierarchy feels like it is being attacked constantly. Long Soldier even mentions in the Introduction of the Whereas section that “President Obama never read the Apology aloud, publically” which leads me to believe that one particular source of tension was this importance of the written word, which then only makes the various edits like the use of strikethrough even more powerful. In addition, on page 92 she states that there is no word for apologize, but there are actions, which the resolution doesn’t have a clear counterpart. For me, reading 38 was jarring both because of its straight-forwardness in telling the reader exactly what was being done with stylistic choices but also because it felt like every poem preceding had a place in setting it up. Lines like “everything is in the language we use”, “there’s irony in their poem”, and “‘real’ poems do not ‘really’ require words” just makes this particular poem feel like one giant condemnation of the use of written language, which maybe was the point.

Keeping with our discussion of being strategic about what is left unsaid, I found Layli Long Soldier’s use of strikethrough to be particularly powerful. For example, she employed this technique on p. 36, crossing out the word “through” to say “all experience is the body” rather than “all experience is through the body.” The revised version is a much more powerful statement, but rather than simply stating her line this way, Long Soldier uses the strikethrough to draw attention to her conscious artistic choice. I thought this was a nice ode to the intentionality behind every decision a writer makes, and it allowed me to notice some of her choices that I’m not sure if I would’ve picked up on otherwise. She shows readers that what writers elect to omit is just as important as what they choose to include.

Overall, I think Long Soldier’s poetry leading up to Part 2 of the book (“Whereas”) all works to make the reader especially sensitive of the consequences of even the smallest decisions regarding language, punctuation, and form. This makes her critique of specific documents/writings in “Whereas” particularly salient, and helps readers understand the gravity of the modifications she makes and language she picks apart. I found Long Soldier’s response to the fourteen-year-old girl on p. 84 to be particularly poignant and effective. She is very specific about the word choice of the girl and highlights why it is inadequate or not representative of reality.