CMarie Fuhrman is the co-editor of Native Voices: Indigenous American Poetry, Craft and Conversations (Tupelo 2019) and author of poetry and nonfiction that has appeared in multiple journals including Cutthroat a Journal of the Arts, Whitefish Review, Broadsided Press, High Desert Journal, and several anthologies.
Dean Rader has written, edited, or co-edited eleven books, including Engaged Resistance: Contemporary American Indian Art, Literature, and Film from Alcatraz to the NMAI (University of Texas Press, 2011), winner of the Beatrice Medicine Award for Excellence in American Indian Scholarship and Speak to Me Words: Essays on Contemporary American Indian Poetry (University of Arizona Press, 2001, edited with Janice Gould). Recent books are Bullets into Bells: Poets and Citizens Respond to Gun Violence, edited with Brian Clements & Alexandra Teague (Beacon) and Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry(Copper Canyon),a finalist for both the Northern California Book Award and the Oklahoma Book Award. He is a professor at the University of San Francisco and a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry.
Kristina Marie Darling: You recently co-edited Native Voices: Indigenous American Poetry, Craft & Conversations, which launched at AWP this year and is newly available from Tupelo Press. What are three things you’d like readers to know before they delve into the book?
CMarie Fuhrman: I would like readers who are about to encounter Native Voices to do so understanding that this text is more than a book of poems. Inside the covers are generations of poetry bound together with conversations about craft and poetry. They should see themselves as part of the conversation, and I would hope, above all, they realize that this is not only a study of the art of poetry and of the poems but an examination of what it means to be Native and to be from what is now called the United States. This book teaches history and social science through poetry and conversations about poetry.
Dean Rader: Cindy is always so smart about these things. That was perfectly articulated.
KMD: What surprised you most as you curated the poetry, influencing texts, and craft essays for this volume?
CMF: I knew all along that we would receive outstanding poems and craft essays from our contributors, so I was not surprised by the depth, intelligence, and emotion written into the lines sent to us. I think what surprised me the most was the array of different influences each poet had. From origin stories whose authors are unknown to relatives to Dick Hugo, each poet chose a unique and fascinating story, poem, or person to pay homage to. In some cases, one contributor wrote about another, linking these essays together creates so many more layers to the book and deepens the conversations therein.
DR: If you read and teach and write about Indigenous American poetry, you know how diverse it is. But, there is something about seeing all of these poems and poets collected in one volume that accentuates the range of style and voice. I think many readers assume contemporary Native poems will sound more or less the same, be more or less about the same things, look more or less the same on the page. But the scope here is off the charts. I think readers will be surprised not simply by the variance but also by the richness of these poems. Their minds will be blown.
KMD: The anthology contains seminal texts by established Native writers, as well as poetry by exciting new voices. Tell us about some poets whose work you’ve included, whose writing you feel should be more widely read, anthologized, and taught.
CMF: It is so hard to narrow that down. Every voice in the anthology, we believe, is one that should be widely read, taught, and thus we anthologized them. Some poets whose work I am just becoming familiar with and am excited about include Sammie Bordeaux Seeger, Ishmael Hope, Bojan Louis, Ruby Hansen Murray, Michael Stonesweat Knapp, and Michael Wasson–and that is just to name a few! Heid E. Erdrich recently edited an anthology called New Poets of native Nations which I think makes an excellent companion to Native Voices as it focuses intensely on these newer voices.
DR: Yes, all of these folks. And more. I have been completely blown away by Michaelsun Stonesweat Knapp’s poems. I think others will be as well. Folks who don’t know the work of dg okpik or Laura Da or Molly McGlennen or Jennifer Foerster are really in for a treat. I’m also eager for people to read Leslie Marmon Silko’s poems. Most know her (and Louise Erdrich) (and LeAnne Howe) as fiction writers, but our book features poems by all three of these groundbreaking writers. LeAnne’s new poems about Mary Todd Lincoln are astonishing. In 1862, President Lincoln ordered the execution of 38 Dakota men—the largest mass execution in the history of the United States. One of her poems is spoken by the rope used to hang one of the men. It’s crazy good. Go from her poems to Layli Long Soldier’s and you’ll get a sense not only of how poets intervene in history but also just how powerful poems can be.
KMD: How do you see Native Voices being used in the classroom? What conversations do you hope this book opens up within workshops and writing programs?
CMF: So many of the reasons that led me to agree to be co-editor of this anthology had to do with the classroom. So often the texts that teachers of Native literature are offered have no conversation from Native people. Too often our work is theorized and critiqued by non-Native scholars and thus the work goes through a colonial filter before reaching students. Native Voices allows for the poets to speak directly to students and teachers. In this way the book teaches. I am hoping that Native Voices will open up conversations about where Native poetry belongs, about taxonomy, about the richness of poetry regardless of its heredity, or perhaps because of. Moreover, I hope that Native Voices speaks to those students who want to write. I hope it inspires. And I hope that it is a talisman for Native students who are often outnumbered in conventional classrooms and writing workshops– an object they can hold and know that they are not alone, that they have the voices of their storyteller ancestors with them.
DR: One of the great attractions of Native American literature is its interest in story, ceremony, history, and land. These are, indeed, fascinating topics, but I have found that readers often turn to Indigenous literature for “content” or “theme” rather than for its artistry. Rather than assuming contemporary Indigenous poetry is folklore or “culture,” we want readers and writers to look at these poems as art, the same way they would look at a poem by Wallace Stevens or Elizabeth Bishop or John Ashbery or Susan Howe. The poems in Native Voices exhibit superb talent and unrivaled vision. They reflect both traditional and cutting edge uses of language, line break, white space, fragmentation, repetition, and elision. These are true artists at the peak of their craft. So, for this reason, I think this book would be great in creative writing classes, poetry courses, and MFA seminars and workshops.
This is not to say the poems are value free. On the contrary. However, these poems don’t just address history or land or ceremony; they also take on colonialism, poverty, land rights, Indigenous genocide, sexuality, and cultural loss. Some of the poems are angry. Some are funny. Some are hard to understand. Some are easy to understand. Some ask you to rethink history. Some remake history.
KMD: In what ways has your editorial practice fueled your own work as poets? What has curating and shaping an anthology opened up within your creative process?
CMF: I worked on this anthology alongside my thesis and Native Voices was released only days before I defended. This same question was asked by one of my committee members, the poet Michael McGriff, during my defense. I explained how reading the essays and the words from our contributors enhanced every piece of the writing in my thesis. The depth of my thinking and the toolkit of craft was so rich after reading these offerings. I think so often of the craft essay written by Deborah Miranda on Wendy Rose’s piece, “Excavation at Santa Barbara Mission.” In the poem, the speaker, an anthropologist, talks about a mission built on and with the bones of Native people and the shock and heartbreak of this discovery. Miranda talks about the many ways this poem inspired her and as I read her work I thought of how this is so often the work of the writer, discovering these hard truths, carefully uncovering bones of the past and reporting on them. I carry both Miranda’s and Rose’s words with me and think of them often and try, as much as I can, to honor with such carefulness and humanity, those things which I uncover and the places and people I write about. That I passed my defense is certainly due in part to the contributors of native Voices and their teachings and inspiration.
DR: This is now the third or fourth anthology I’ve edited or co-edited. The practice of curation is now becoming de rigeur! However, the poems of this anthology are so invigorating, so inspirational, working on it never actually felt like work. As a poet, I found myself learning from the ways these poets were reimagining the lyric process. There are some astonishingly interesting examples of poems that mix high lyricism and high narrative. I felt like I was learning to see and hear lyric poetry’s capacities in new ways.
KMD: What are you currently working on? What can readers look forward to?
CMF: I just finished a wonderful collaboration on dignity with Pam Uschuck and Maggie Miller for About Place Journal which should be out this summer. My own work, a collection of essays part life writing and part nature writing, is coming together and I am excited to get it out, in part or full, within the coming months.
DR: Over the last year or so, I’ve been working on poems that I thought were three discreet projects. There are poems that take on controversial issues like climate change, gun violence, and race, while on the complete other end of the spectrum is an elliptical and somewhat experimental series of poems in response to specific artworks by Cy Twombly. Between these two modes is another unexpected series—elegies for my late father who died in 2017. My goal during my fellowship year is to figure out how they connect. Maybe my Twombly poems are elegies for our country; maybe the poems about the decline of our country are really threnodies for my father; maybe the poems about my father are actually interventions on the ability of art to articulate anything at all.