Kenny, Maurice - Edward Butscher (review date March-April 1985)

Edward Butscher (review date March-April 1985)

SOURCE: "The Historic Present," in The American Book Review, Vol. 7, No. 3, March-April, 1985, p. 18.

Kenny on oral tradition and "I Am the Sun":

I try to write in the oral tradition which is Indian, which is Iroquois. At the time I wrote "I Am the Sun," which was the time of the Wounded Knee confrontation in 1973, I personally was so angry and I physically couldn't do anything about it because I was suffering a heart attack…. [So] I had to sing it out of me. I sang it out in "I Am the Sun." I couldn't use an Iroquois traditional form because I was writing about Lakota people. So I chose a Ghost Dance song to pattern "I Am the Sun" after.

Maurice Kenny, in Survival This Way: Interviews with American Indian Poets, by Joseph Bruchac, 1987.

[Butscher is an American educator, poet, and critic. In the...

[The entire page is 583 words long]

Join eNotes

The above is a free excerpt. Get total access to this content with the:

eNotes Pass