Interview with Navajo poet upstart
By
SPECIAL TO WWW.NAVAJOSQUARE.COM
Window Rock, Ariz.—A recent evening at the local Quality Inn’s Dine Restaurant, Mr. Orlando White, noted Navajo author of Bone Light (2009, Red Hen Press) and English faculty at Dine College in Tsaile, Ariz., had time for an interview with NavajoSquare.Com.
The work Bone Light, his first book, is a collection of poems heavily influenced by mainstream “Black Mountain Poetry Movement”/BMPM, whose manifesto, titled Projected Verse (1950), was written by Charles Olsen. The BMPM style introduced the “open field” composition to surpass the outmoded, traditional closed poetic forms predating BMPM.
The majority of poems emerged as organic ideas, said White, adding he takes to the idea that one may not plan a poem, but rather “the poem is smarter” than the poet.
Flipping through the 64-page book, the pages contain a lot of spaces between words and stanzas. About this, White said that his “economy of language” and use of abstract is important to the work. “What illuminates … is silence: the white space of margins, between words and stanzas,” he said, adding with a laugh, “Which means [at live readings] I read at a very slow pace.” White said he reads to go beyond theatrics, with the goal to bring about a appreciation for things beyond us.
The form of a poem emerges in the moment, as before it was academics influencing the scene in the 1930s and 1940s (E.g., metered verse). The BMPM maintained that what motivated the line comes from the breath/sentence, which was motivated by music, as music broadsheets have words scattered across the page.
He also has other literary devices at his command, as he gave another example of his writing approach: Put one-hundred people in a room, and if someone had a microphone and said the word “tree,” those one-hundred people will each be thinking of a different tree. And, perhaps, one would be thinking of a pinon tree, then pinon picking, then his/her grandfather, then who he/she ate corn on the cob with in memory, leading to a friend talking of poetry, and this network of thought goes on and on. This infinite notion of the meaning is another influence to the author. “Language can’t settle on a meaning because it has too much meaning,” he said.
The approaches used in Bone Light play with the limitless, endless relationship with language. White confesses that Bone Light does use this process in a negative manner with “the human deconstructed through language … I try to bring that experience to the reader … language begins to dehumanize and strip away the self/reader.” The irony behind this use is to bring to light that language is a physical being, more than in a abstract way, he said.
The literary theory of “deconstruction and structuralism” played a big role in the book, hence the title Bone Light. “I was interested in the human skeleton,” he said, adding that the skeleton laid down on the back from left to right would appear as a subject-verb-oject and “the skull is like the period.” Further, he was influenced by another writer named Edmond Jades, who taught White to see the blank white page as a Band Aid, and when you put the pen to the paper, you start to reveal the wound. This sounds eerie, at first, but he elaborates that ink equals existence, and a shadow can be equated to ink because it is a mark of existence.
From a different aspect, Navajo medicine men or hatathlii sing things into being with songs and prayers. Language is existence, it could be equated or said.
He said Dine language operates in the same way, as it is very verb-oriented. One of his contemporaries, Sherwin Bitsui [Navajo writer and author of Shapeshift (U of A Press, 2003) and Floodsong (Copper Canyon Press, 2009)], shared with Orlando that Navajos do not say “There is a man standing outside … you have to use a verb to describe him … dancing, singing, not just standing.”
Further, White cites a joke by the former Navajo comedian/songwriter/musician Vincent Craig: “If you gave a rock to a white boy he would just throw it down. If you gave that same rock to a Navajo boy, he would go, ‘VRRRROOOOOM-VRRRROOOOOM… K’RRRRRRT! like playing with a car [and animating the otherwise inanimate object]’.”
The young Navajo/Dine writer, at 32-years-young, admits he was never influenced by any Native American writers.
However, he did say Sherman Alexie is a master of short story and his best work was The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight In Heaven (Perrennial/Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003). “
I ask the writer if he has time to write, and he quickly responds that there is no time because, in addition to being a happily married father, he teaches ENG 101/102, Poetry, Short Fiction, Native American Literature, and Literature of the Southwest at
In essence, White believes everyone has an inherent process [for language, writing, poetry] and it is spontaneous, unexpected. Which is why the young author has a dedication to his hectic teaching schedule at
His poems have appeared in
Of course, there is a second manuscript he has been carrying around for years and looks at time to time, so the forthcoming ETA is TBA, but it will be a work of poetry and prose.
Orlando White is Dine/Navajo, originally from To’likan,
[For more information about the author or to hear his poems see: www.fishhousepoems.com and www.orlandowhite.com .]
