Contemporary Poetry

182 contemporary poetry

socially, and politically’ (p. 6 ). For him ‘Indigenous language can
be a strong part of this consciousness, but it doesn’t have to be the
only or main ingredient’ since ‘language is only one part of cultural
consciousness, while physical engagement and involvement in
spirited activities is a bigger part of consciousness’ (p. 8 ). Central
to Ortiz is the sense of being communal beings within a holistic
universe and the ‘principle of continuance’ (p. 8 ).
Ortiz and Harjo’s poetry enables a sense of continuance through
their transfer of oral histories, ritual and mythology into text. This
approach to poetry has been read under the moniker ‘ethnopoet-
ics’, meaning writing that offers a questioning of the traditional
Western literary canon. Often combining an interest in anthro-
pology and linguistics, ethnopoetics considers a history of non-
Western and indigenous literatures while questioning the division
between so-called primitive and civilised cultural production. As
a general analytic approach, a form of ethnopoetics existed before
the twentieth century, but the term was fi rst introduced to public
attention by Jerome Rothenberg in 1968 as part of a momentum
guided towards issues formed by race and ethnicity:

Closely related to the primitive is the approach that focuses on

the idea of oral poetry – though the dominance of the oral clearly

continues in cultures that could by no stretch of the imagination

be thought of as technologically ‘primitive’. The approach

through ‘performance’ over a wide range of cultures might

almost be synonymous with that through the oral while spilling

over as well into cultures with a fi xed system of writing.^32

Rothenberg in this more recent revisiting of the term is keen to
emphasise that ethnopoetics must not be seen as a dichotomy
between so-called primitive and advanced societies and cultures.
Ortiz’s poem ‘Telling about Coyote’ uses ideas from the trick-
ster tradition to present his narrative.^33 In folklore and myth the
trickster is a fi gure or spirit (often represented anthropomorphi-
cally) who breaks rules and challenges hierarchies. Drawing from
the Coyote as a trickster fi gure in Native American folklore, Ortiz
presents a character who defi es multiple deaths. Gary Snyder sug-
gests that the Coyote in Native American folklore is: ‘a trickster...