Literary Explorations into the Poetic Sonority of Contemporary Diné (Navajo) Poetry

Abstract

Culturally and historically crafted poetics manifest commonalities across geographies, times, nations, and histories; there is also the specificity of voice that expresses the articulation of a people and their ancestral landscape. We can see this type of aesthetic commonality in some of the Diné (Navajo) rhythmical patterns in the work of four otherwise very different poets: Luci Tapahonso, Sherwin Bitsui, Laura Tohe, and Orlando White. Informed by a combined ecocritical and formalist lens that recognizes the centrality of language and land, this article offers a beginning literary exploration into Diné poetical expression that is spatially grounded within the sacred boundaries of Dinétah and orally storied through millennia of Diné lives, experience, history, ritual, belief, and song. Each of these four poets was raised on Diné lands, surrounded by family, clan, and tribe. It is inconceivable that their poetry would not be deeply shaped by the hues and sounds of place and community. 1 While this essay is clearly oriented through one tribe and its linguistic landscape, it is important to note that this is not an ethnopoetic approach that emphasizes ethnology over poetic craft. For work in this direction, anthropologist Anthony K. Webster has produced extensive ethnopoetic work on Navajo writing. 2 For the specific purposes of this article, I am interested in looking at the distinctive sonority and literariness of these poets' craft: their skilled utilization of strategic line and stanza breaks, caesurae and enjambment, indentation and centering, alliteration and assonance, rhyme and para-rhyme, parallelism and repetition, all to effect diverse writing styles that are nevertheless rooted within the rhythms and experiences of their indigenous Diné worlds (whether experiential or imagined, historical or personal, familial or mythic). Close focus on the craft of these writers demonstrates both commonalities and distinctions of sonority, resonance, and thematic undercurrents that 181 Downloaded by [Harvard Library] at 17:57 27 December 2014