[In the following excerpt, Ruppert assesses Rose's efforts to write poetry that serves as a "modern correlative to the traditional functions of song" in Native American culture.]

Wendy Rose's poetry outlines a growth process through which song becomes an important and determining aspect of modern Native American experience. The task posited is to find for the urban Indian a modern correlative to the traditional functions of song. In this she tries to merge the directions of the personal lyric with the communal song. Implicit in this endeavor, as with most of the poets here, is the assumption that the processes of modern poetry and the traditions of song are similar. The initial position of the growth process is one in which Indians of today—especially urban Indians—find themselves without the knowledge and cut off from song and the oral tradition; [as Rose notes in "Vanishing Point: Urban Indian" from Long Division: A Tribal History] they are metaphorically dispossessed of the elements of the tradition which would connect them firmly to an intact culture and place them inside social structures: "it is I / without learning, I without song, who / dies and cries the death time." Imagistically the traditional songs seem thrust into non-receptive space, powerless. The sense of the lost force of the songs looms large [in Long Division] because of the remnants of culture and song that now lie in ruin. "We die in granite scaffolding / on the shape of the Sierras and lay down / with lips open thrusting songs on the / world. Who are we / and do we still live? The shaman sleeps / and says no."

Here in the present the poet discovers she has been left out: she has not only missed the impelling continuity of an intact oral tradition, but personally she is too late, too old to be "kiva-whipped" and thus incorporated into the communal life, taught the songs and welcomed into the tradition. The poet dwells with a dual depletion, both of the individual and of the oral tradition as expressed by the present condition of the tribes. The poet sees the world animated by frozen words that confine growth and retard understanding. These words are politically powerful, but the result is devastating for the tribal cultures. Songs can only crawl out of the confines like worms out of the stomach of a decaying body. [She writes in "Trickster 1977" in Geary Hobson's The Remembered Earth that] "The whole world is made-up / of words, mountain-thick, that wait / to cave in with edges that squeeze / hurt and reason into separate sounds / The songs become tons / of bilingual stuff to reckon with." To the poet the songs are almost like painful understandings and knowledge that she shies away from because of the extreme effort needed to build on them. The effort would make her vulnerable while she tried to master the words and subsequently herself. The poet retreats internally. However, an important in-sight has been wrought away from the conflict—words are life, or bits of life, of food that sustains life, growth and insight. The function of the frozen words must be turned around. Indian poets must become what Vizenor calls "word warriors" fighting the "word wars" with "word arrows" to bring language back into the service of tribal cultures and the oral tradition.

As the poet moves inside herself, she sees that songs and words are integral to changes and growth and that the relationship between the two is dynamic. In "How I Came to be a Graduate Student," the songs lie just under the surface of her life, ready to burst forth as growth and understanding blossom. Here the poet realizes a modern equivalent to the older use of song as a codifier and guide for growth and change in a social setting. Personal changes such as birth, puberty, marriage, initiation and death are encouraged and structured by song, and the poet begins to identify her insights and changes with words and song. One might say that the poet is making herself out of words.

As this goes on internally, the image of the oral tradition changes. The songs trail after the people like whispers wherever they may go. Those who hear are tied back to the old understandings. As in "For a few Hopi ancestors" the songs are not lost, but ready to affect those who listen because they are an undercurrent of power and strength. It is left for the poet to discover the true power of the word and of song through the influence of other singer/poets. In two poems in Long Division, the poet is instructed by other singers outside the dominant word structure who effect miracles: one brings a dead child to life, another drags the stars around. Their language is powerful and effective. It expresses their cultural values and harkens back to the power of song in oral tradition.

The poet has now been instructed by her own growth process, by other word warriors and by those whispers of traditional song. Her own song is now brought back to the crucible of the people, for here it must be tested. It must stand with the people, help them understand the world, give them words to use, give them power, and bring them together. In "Hopi Overlay" [from Academic Squaw: Report to the World from the Ivory Tower] her unfinished songs are given to those who are most purely oral—the children, and it is they who weave them into a final shape.

My songs seem undone
when they stomp-dance naked
in the moonlight but
children peeping from under
dark porches laugh all
the ups and downs in together.
I'll take my old age early
and watch them
play my poems into
cat's cradles.

The interaction with the people tests and solidifies the words. They are true and strong. The poet's growth is confirmed in song, and as the individual grows the tradition becomes stronger. The miracle has been accomplished, for the understanding of one is the understanding of the many. The words and songs guide and confirm. The songs let all participate in the process. We humans have achieved harmony with each other in song and with the world around us [as she notes in "Walking on the Prayerstick" from Academic Squaw].

This is where we must learn
to sing as we walk
because our skin is
red sand, because our pain
is made up of burdens
bound in corn husks,
because our joy
flows over the land,
because
touching ourselves
we touch everything