Examining the Poetic Pantoum - Essay - 1237 words.
Natalie Diaz (ND): I like writing at the Ace Hotel — they tend to have good food and drinks, and the rooms are laid out well for working, even in a small space. I stay there a lot. This poem became a spark on a night that began at the bar — the residency came with a hundred-dollar bar tab.
Natalie Diaz was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. Her first poetry collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was published by Copper Canyon Press.
In Natalie Diaz’s poem “My Brother at 3 AM” the author is able to relate it to what she quoted on her interview, “to return back to the body because as an indige nous person, as a Latina, as a queer woman, I haven’t been given the permission or the space, to be fully in my body.” I was able to relate this quote because they both share the same idea of the the true trying to fit it.
Natalie Diaz When My Brother Was an Aztec Copper Canyon Press reviewed by Mark Schoenknecht. When My Brother Was an Aztec, Natalie Diaz’s first book of poems, finds a poet working with the materials of her past in imaginative and often unexpected ways.Praised by critics for its startling imagery and precise, lyrical language, the collection draws heavily from Diaz’s experience as a Native.
A free bird leaps on the back of the wind and floats downstream till the current ends and dips his wing in the orange sun rays and dares to claim the sky. But a bird that stalks down his narrow cage can seldom see through his bars of rage his wings are clipped and his feet are tied so he opens his throat to sing. The caged bird sings with a fearful trill of things unknown but longed for.
For example, as suggested by the title When My Brother Was an Aztec as well as the first poem of the collection Diaz uses the metaphor of her brother being an Aztec. By characterizing her brother as a fallen Aztec king, Diaz becomes, by extension, the warrior sister fighting to rescue her brother from the negative influences, drugs, corrupting him.
How that nesting doll of exclusions breaks open into the living reality of this Earth, how it breaks into becoming, into belonging, is what Mojave American poet and MacArthur fellow Natalie Diaz — an artist exploring the permeable membrane between language and landscape — explores in her stunning, sweeping poem “lake-loop,” commissioned for the New York Philharmonic’s inspired.