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The Treatment of American Indian Materials in Contemporary American Poetry
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
Extract
The use of American Indian oral literature as a source of inspiration or as a guide to composition, and the continuing attempts at translation from this literature have grown rapidly in the past ten years. While there have been efforts at direct translation of Indian songs and poems for many years, it is only a comparatively recent development which has seen some contemporary American poets not only beginning to formulate new approaches to translation but also discovering the possibilities of using some aspects of American Indian oral culture in their own original poetry. Ethnopoetics has emerged as a general term to describe a poetic movement of sorts dedicated to the exploration of the potential of primitive oral literature and its translation into English. Like many general labels, it is an incomplete and unsatisfactory term with which to describe the wide variety, and varying quality, of work being produced by poets associated with the movement; however it is a term adopted by the poets themselves and is respected as such.
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References
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