LITR 5731:
Seminar in American Minority Literature
University of Houston-Clear Lake, fall 2001
Poetry Presentation Index
Jill Petersen
"November"
by Linda Hogan
Linda Hogan is a member of the Chickasaw tribe in
Colorado. She grew up in a military family and so did not grow up within an
Indian community but most of her childhood was spent in Colorado and Oklahoma.
She attended the University of Colorado and earned her Masters in 1978. For a
while she was a free-lance writer but by 1980 her success in writing led to her
appointment to the position of writer in residence for the states of Colorado
and Oklahoma. She then became an assistant professor at Colorado College in
1982. She is now associate professor of American Indian Studies at the
University of Minnesota. She has written six books of poetry, two novels, one
play and one book of essays and has won numerous writing awards. (www.bedfordbooks.com)
The main focus of Ms. Hogan’s writing relates to the traditional
indigenous view of and relationship to the land, animals and plants. (www.hanksville.org)
One of the ways she makes her work accessible to the mainstream, non-American
Indian audience is through her humor as is apparent in her publish conversation
with Elisabeth Sherwin (http://virtual-markets.net/~gizmo/hogan.html)
The poem "November" can be found in Hogan’s 3rd
book of poetry, Seeing Through the Sun. When reading the poem think about
objective 3B the Native American Indian alternative narrative and the premise of
loss and survival. Notice the red imagery as in the sundown and sunrise and the
pig’s blood.
Questions:
What part of the poem
signifies loss and what part survival?
Who is the old sky woman?
The sun? The Queen?
Student discussion:
Student 1: "God save
the queen" may be a reference to England.
Student 2: sounds like
humor
Professor: identifies it
with sun or sound; mentions ‘orange bird on book’
2: "queen"
could be the sow
Who is the pig? What is
the significance?
Student 3: Pig may be
loss.
Student 4: last stanza
allusion to rebirth ‘night rising…’
Professor: brings up the
idea of the phoenix
Student 5: Are queen and
sun synonymous?
Student 6 a lot of red
imagery: wine, bloody footprints
1: red is passion
Student
7: Indians couldn’t do anything about what happened to them; rustling corn
could be dead tribes; poem is the story of the Indian experience
1:
sun and woman are synonymous; strong belief that nature and animals have
spirits; "Corn is talking"
5:
corn is used for religious ceremonies and trade
3:
walk into sun; Life comes from the West (Black Elk Speaks); asks if the woman is
entering a holy place.
Professor
mentions Handsome Lake and his castle
1:
castle rises and then crumbles; reference to apocalypse: hope to have life back
Professor
mentions uniformity of tone
Stream
of consciousness – jumps from one metaphor to the next
Red
is a common thread through all images
All
visual