The Memory Poetry of Simon J. Ortiz

I was lucky enough to attend Mr. Ortiz's poetry reading tonight, and it was amazing. First of all, kudos to everyone who came out, I'm really glad they had to open up the second ballroom. Too often a great speaker gets a small audience and then EVERYONE loses out a little.

But back to main point: The reading was amazing. Ortiz's poetry deals FREQUENTLY with memory. Te two poems that stick out most for me were "My Mother and My Sisters" based on a mempory of his mother's from 1910 or 1911, and "A New Story" based on his own experiences during the mid '70s.

The poem about his mother gathering pinon was beautiful and very straightforwardly about memory; the memory was captured as an image of a dark valley and an older way of life. "A New Story" on the other hand was about a memory as well- here the memory of a silly woman asking indelicate questions and treating native peoples like float decorations. Throughout the reading of the poem, I was humiliated for every stupid white person who ever- even in a spirit of kindness- asked a native to join their parade for authenticity as a kind of curio. This poem was much more about feeling and emotion, but still couched in the memory form.

"My Mother and My Sisters" could have been written about the Acama-Pueblo people at anytime in the last two hundred years. It features pinon gathering in a very traditional way. On the other hand "A New Story" seems very clearly imbedded in the Native Power movement of the mid '70s. So the memories in these poems are both community oreiented and personally grounded. Which seems fitting for a poet who bothe writes in English and his native tongue and reads in both English and his native tongue. A merging of the literate and oral cultures in a single individual.