Kenny, Maurice - Paula Gunn Allen (essay date 1978)
Paula Gunn Allen (essay date 1978)
SOURCE: An introduction to Dancing Back Strong the Nation: Poems by Maurice Kenny, Blue Cloud Quarterly Press, 1979.
[A Laguna Pueblo novelist, poet, nonfiction writer, educator, and critic, Allen edited Studies in American Indian Literature: Critical Essays and Course Designs (1983). In the essay below, which was originally written in 1978, she comments on the overall themes of Dancing Back Strong the Nation, nothing that as a Native American poet, Kenny allows Native and non-Native readers to "discover what our common journey is about and to understand each step as within a totality."]
Poets are a unique breed of people, and Native American poets are, perhaps, even more so because of the nature of the modern Native American experience. Poets must say things that others might not allow themselves to think; they must transmute the ordinary into the extraordinary, and the extraordinary into...
[The entire page is 696 words long]
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