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Simon Ortiz: Poet

This is an excerpt of a long interview I did with poet Simon Ortiz, first published in The Country and Abroad, September, 2000.

Kelly: Your first book of poetry was "Naked in the Wind," wasn't it?

Ortiz: Oh my gosh, that's going back a few years. How did you know about that? It was a little chapbook. Back then, a friend of mine. Randall Ackley, had a small press. At that time, Randall was teaching at Pembroke State University in North Carolina, and he invited me and a poet who's deceased now--his name was Ricardo Sanchez, a Chicano poet from El Paso, Texas--to be part of a Third World Literature seminar. Actually, a kind of two/three week thing during the course of summer school. Anyway, one of the ideas Randall had was to put together chapbooks, a part of his own literary dreams, I guess you could say. And so that was one of the books, "Naked in the Wind."

Kelly: What moved you to begin writing poetry?

Ortiz: Probably realizing the use of language. And then knowing that language was a way of seeing the world around you. You see what you are, or who you are, and what it means. Language is a way of connecting to things around you. I think that language did not have anything to do with writing...My first language was the Acoma language; it was the language we spoke at home.

Kelly: So you were very young when you started writing?

Ortiz: Well, I was six-and-a-half or almost seven when I went to the reservation school of the Acoma Reservation. At that time, my language was almost exclusively Acoma. That was my cultural source. This was the late 1940s. Obviously, the Native American world, the Indian world, is not isolated from the rest of the world. There's radio and people with changed ways who are part of your community. You become familiar with other [customs]. There is Spanish and the Spanish language; the Spanish were the first colonizers of the native peoples of the southwest. My world was pretty much the Acoma world...but I think I recall that because I knew or felt that language was the source of how I would come to know the world, that English was a way I could come to know another culture than Acoma.

Kelly: Could I ask you about recurrent themes in your work?

Ortiz: Love and death. Life, I guess. I write about continuance. Why do we live? I ask myself that. Why are stories told? Why is knowledge expressed? In order to engender life. And I suppose one world for it in the English language is "continuance." To continue life, in the sense of being a part of creation. It doesn't seem like we are alive for any other reason than to engender life. To be a part of the creative process of life. That's why God exists. That's why we are with a Sustainer, a Provider. We are part of the creative force of life. And so I see myself not necessarily as a writer or a poet but actually one with that function of life. And so, if there's a theme that recurs, and is basic to my work as a writer, it's that sense of continuance, for life to go on. Like anyone else's life, mine is limited physically...But I think the sense of "forever," in the Native American culture, is that we are always a part of life. And that as living people in the moment now, we are part of the eternal cycle of things. And so, as a writer, an artist, I acknowledge that by expressing it.
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