Essay Instructions: Basically, act as if you attended this reading.
Poets House present a poetry reading by Natalie Diaz & Orlando White
Orlando White is a Navajo poet whose first book is Bone Light. He currently teaches in the
English and Foundations department at Din? College in Tsaile, Arizona. He is the recipient of
both a Truman Capote Creative Writing Fellowship and a Lannan Foundation Residency.
Natalie Diaz is a poet whose first book is When My Brother Was an Aztec. She is the winner of a 2012 Narrative Prize for her poetry, a 2012 Lannan Fellow, and the recipient of the Nimrod/ Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry.A Mojave and Pima tribe member, she directs a language revitalization project with the Elder Mojave speakers in Arizona.
Friday, March 22, 2013, 12pm
The Lincoln Terrace, Refreshments to Follow
This is event is offered in conjunction with the conference
Native Innovation: Indigenous American Poetry in the 21st Century
Native American Poetry Reading
March 22, 2013
Student Name:___________________________________
What will you remember from the event?
Which poem was the most memorable and why?
After this experience, how would you convince a friend to attend a poetry reading?
Natalie Diaz
I Lean Out the Window and She Nods Off in Bed, the Needle Gently Rocking on the Bedside Table
While she sleeps, I paint
Valencia oranges across her skin,
seven times the color orange,
a bright tree glittering the limestone grotto of her clavicle?
heaving bonfires pulsing each pale limb
like Nero?s condemned heretics sparking along Via Appia.
A small stream of Prussian blue I?ve trickled
down her bicep. A fat red nasturtium
eddies her inner elbow.
Against her swollen palms,
I?ve brushed glowing halves of avocados
lamping like bell-hipped women in ecstasy.
A wounded Saint Teresa sketched to each breast.
Her navel is a charcoal bowl of figs,
all stem thick with sour milk and gowned
in taffeta the color of bruises.
This is to offer up with our flophouse prayers?
God created us with absence
in our hands, but we will not return that way.
Not now, when we are both so capable of growing full
on banquets embroidered by Lorca?s gypsy nun.
She sleeps, gone to the needle?s gentle rocking,
and I lean out the window, a Horus
drunk on my own scent
and midnight?s slow drip of stars.
She has always been more orchard than loved,
I, more bite than mouth.
So much is empty in this hour?
the spoon, still warm, lost in the sheets,
the candle?s yellow-white thorn of flame,
and night, open as autumn?s unfilled basket
as the locusts feast the field.
[originally published in Ploughshares]
QUIETUS
Orlando White
The zero is not a circle; it?s an empty clock. And the clock is an o which rolls to the other side of the
page. But the c stuck between the b and d eats itself and the page will taste how desperate language is. If
you peel a sheet of paper, you will find letters who have eaten themselves: the a who chewed itself until it
became a dot on paper and the z who ingested itself until it was a tiny line on a page. Within the white
spaces they have become inklings, miniature dark skulls, and black specks on paper. But they still move
like the tiniest gears in a clock. And their bones are scattered like dry grains of ink on a white sheet. I
think of their deaths: the stiff face of a choked letter, the broken jaw of an e, the throat of an f slit open, an
i swallowed up to its torso, the dot bitten from a j, the letters of a sentence removed with teeth; and a
sentence dipped in bleach until it becomes a skeleton, the bones thinning into calcium, the sockets of the
skull discoloring into pale ink. And you will hurt it more if you try to slip its bones back through the flesh
of ink or dress it back into its dry black clothes. So let the lower case i be a body under the dot: a naked
letter on the page.
[Originally published in Oregon Literary Review, Summer/Fall 07]
Natalie Diaz was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California. She
is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. She was part of the Old
Dominion Lady Monarch basketball team that made it to the NCAA Championship game in
1997. After playing professional basketball in Europe and Asia for several years, Diaz returned
to Old Dominion and completed a double-MFA in poetry and fiction. Her first poetry collection,
When My Brother Was an Aztec, was published by Copper Canyon Press in May of 2012. Her
work has been published or is forthcoming in The Iowa Review, North American Review, Prairie
Schooner, Black Renaissance Noire, Crab Orchard Review, and others. She is a 2012 Bread Loaf
Scholar, a recipient of a Lannan Residency in Marfa, TX, and was awarded a 2012 Lannan
Literary Fellowship. Diaz currently lives in Mohave Valley, Arizona, and directs the Fort
Mojave Language Recovery Program, working with the last remaining speakers at Fort Mojave
to teach and revitalize the Mojave language.
Orlando White is the author of Bone Light (Red Hen Press, 2009). Originally from T??ikan,
Arizona, he is Din? of the Naaneesht??zhi T?baah? and born for the Naakai Din??e. He holds a
BFA in creative writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA from Brown
University. His work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Omnidawn Poetry Feature Blog,
Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics, American Indian Culture And Research Journal, Evening
Will Come: A Monthly Journal of Poetics, and elsewhere. He is a recipient of a Lannan
Foundation Residency and a Bread Loaf John Ciardi Fellowship. He teaches at Din? College and
lives in Tsaile, Arizona.