Layli Long Soldier, _Whereas_

JUST A COINCIDENCE that I read this at roughly the same time as Tommy Orange's There There--Orange was the May selection in our book club, and Whereas was just the next book in my poetry queue--but they certainly worked together well, alike involved in matters of Native American identity and alike wielding some serious technique. It turns out both writers have degrees from the Institute for American Indian Arts, Orange an MFA and Long Soldier a BFA (she got her MFA at Bard).

Long Soldier's poems reminded me at times of Gertrude Stein (e.g., "Irony") and at other times of Jorie Graham (e.g., "Left"), but the most helpful comparison may be to Cole Swenson. Like Swenson, Long Soldier is a large-canvas poet; most of the poems are longer than a page, and the book is distinctly a book, a complex structure with interdependent parts, not simply a collection. (And Swenson, too, often gives her books one-word titles.)

The title poem occupies about half of the book's hundred pages. As the title hints, it borrows its structure and occasionally its language from legislative resolutions, the particular resolution in question here being the Resolution of Apology to Native Americans passed by the 111th Congress in 2009-10. Not even Claudia Rankine, I think,  could dismantle this particular piece of public hypocritical piety quite so thoroughly as Long Soldier does.

On first reading the book's opening lines, I thought Whitman might be in the mix, too--

Now 
make room in the mouth
for grassesgrassesgrasses

--but that particular ship capsized when I re-encountered the image in "38," the final poem of the book's first section, which retells as plainly as it can the story of Wounded Knee:

When the Dakota people were starving, as you may remember, government traders would not extend store credit to "Indians."

One trader named Andrew Myrick is famous for his refusal to provide credit to Dakota people by saying, "if they are hungry, let them eat grass."

[...]

When Myrick's body was found,

                      his mouth was stuffed with grass.

Made you suck in your breath, no? Not exactly "look for me under your boot soles."