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songs from an outcast john smelcer poems poem poetry Ahtna Athabaskan alaska alaskan myths Cherokee/Ahtna indigenous life Alaska Alaskan landscape ritual poet

Songs from an Outcast

By John E. Smelcer, 2000.

In these poems, written in the Ahtna language and then rendered into memorable English, John Smelcer conveys a strong sense of his ancestry (Cherokee/Ahtna), what poet Denise Levertov calls "his constant haunting awareness of indigenous life so grievously wounded yet still alive." Smelcer speaks from the Alaskan landscape, for the land, and for the people that belong to it. Smelcer has steeped himself and his poetry in his Ahtna traditions of language and ritual. As a result, his writing, with remarkable strength, succeeds in bridging his Native and English worlds.

95 pp.

$12 paper; ISBN 978-0-935626-45-X

selections from

Songs from an Outcast

INDIAN SUMMER
There are things measured in life by death.
The village girl's slow dying taught me this--
how false summer renders dim-witted
perceptions of nature's unpredicted ways
as morning rises
like a thin dark blue pencil stroke
blending into seamless sky.
After a time dawn thins,
while the measuring earth gathers
its victory of snow which soon will howl
through the bared bones of hollow forests.
I watch as the slow dance of summer is harvested,
knowing I've darker woods to walk than these.

THE RISE OF CHRISTIANITY
Plagues at the beginning of the
twentieth century killed more than
half of all Alaska Native peoples.
From a hissing tongue of plague
began our long night of suffering
and the silent abandon of a world
where in time even unburied dead
would be forgotten without eulogy
except a mournful rhythm of song
swirling in the contagious light
of a new faith
glistening on shadows
of the dead.

Table of Contents

Foreword by Denise Levertov
Introduction by X. J. Kennedy
Indian Summer
Easter Sunday
Sunday Drive
My Indian Grandmother Speaks to Animals
In the House of Blue Light
The Hunter
Mileposts
At the Edge of the World
Hymn Singer
Late September on the Russian River
The Road to Chitina
Weir Fisher
Durable Breath
The Surrounded
New York Subway
Rise of Christianity
Potlatch
Ceremony
Beading Poetry
Letter to Vincent
Landslide
Iris
The Snow Has No Voice
Spending the Night on the Klutina River