I’ve been working on a series of concrete poems as part of my Wampum manuscript. This also includes the “Longhouse” poem that was turned into an installation in 2023. “Indian Country” “109 Bermuda” As mentioned at Poets.org, “I believe in poetry’s capacity to make and remake the world. I wanted to use the structure of
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Each line of the poem was written on portions of my body, mapping the origins of scars, photographed, and then worn throughout the day as I made my way through the city.
A calligrammatic poem using the concept of contour drawing (one continuous line where the pencil does not lift off the page until the drawing is complete), concrete poetry, and anaphora (“we build it, we build the longhouse, we build the longhouse as our ancestors have done”) as means of place-making. The central fire of the
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I’ve been at work on a treated book-length copy of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Hiawatha. Hiawatha was a story I read as a child (an updated illustrated version in my mother’s home). The story of Hiawatha is Iroquoian, but many of the images and ideas drawn upon by Longfellow were of Anishinaabe cultures. So I’m revisiting the book
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