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Marketing and University Communication UW-Green Bay, CL 815 2420 Nicolet Drive Green Bay, WI 54311-7001 (920) 465-2626 E-mail: hildebrs@uwgb.edu Last update: 9/27/07 |
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In
the News Archive - Year:
November 13, 2004 State's poet laureate echoes sounds of the earth, her heart By Geeta Sharma-Jensen Water, poet Denise Sweet tells them, has a voice.
Listen.
"What I try to do is personify water," Sweet says when she talks about
her work with grade school students in Green Bay. "I try to give it voice,
to allow it to have human qualities. When we look at the bay we listen
very closely to the voice of water.
"It's not difficult to get them to imagine that the wilderness, the
trees, the plants, the animals can speak to us — that's not the difficult
part. The difficult part is to get them to write about it."
Sweet, an associate professor of Humanistic Studies at the University
of Wisconsin-Green Bay, became the state's second poet laureate in September,
succeeding Ellen Kort. She was appointed by Gov. Jim Doyle, and her term
lasts four years.
She hopes to help readers, particularly the young, "find a voice in
poetry" during that time. Her proposed statewide project, "Here @ Home:
A Community Calendar," will take writing workshops into urban and rural
communities to encourage people to create and share their work.
"I see a direct relationship with young students' ability to read and
to write and communicate," she said in a recent phone conversation. "If
perhaps poetry is the genre that reaches them as readers, then this is
just another way to help them be good communicators."
Sweet's project in the Green Bay schools is called "River of Words."
It's a way, Sweet said, of trying "to increase the awareness of water,
the environment and children's sensitivity to the outdoors."
'Way of remembering'
Sweet, 52, herself has long been in touch with nature. An Anishinaabe
(White Earth) poet, she writes lyrically about her heritage and tribal
connections to the environment, but she also sings of motherhood and pride
and the right of people to be treated decently.
She believes the language, the stories, must be kept alive. She sees
poetry as "our way of remembering, from voice to voice, from person to
person, one story at a time."
In her poem, "Constellations," she writes:
"These are the stories our response to the sorrow of light arriving
and dying the stellar maps of story and myth where writers find their
way back to beginnings. . . ."
And she had her older son, Damon Panek, a park ranger in the Apostle
Islands, translate it into her ancestral language of Ojibwe. (The poem
is part of a permanent etched installation at the Midwest Airlines Center.)
Sweet's poetry, her high-profile work with students and Wisconsin's
Indian tribes, her public readings throughout the country and her workshops
have earned her recognition not only from readers and listeners but also
from other poets in the state.
"She is a Native American who writes not only as a poet of her ethnic
heritage, but also as a contemporary woman, facing contemporary concerns,"
says Milwaukee's poet laureate, Marilyn Taylor. "In my opinion, her poems
are relevant, accessible, lyrical — and they consistently reflect
a quiet sensitivity as well as careful craftsmanship."
Grew up in St. Croix Falls
Sweet began writing poetry — or, as she says archly, trying to
express herself through poetry — just before her teens. When she
was born, her family lived on the White Earth reservation in Minnesota.
But the family soon moved in with her grandparents near St. Croix Falls.
Her grandparents farmed; her father worked as a machinist in a nearby
town; her mother stayed home caring for the three children.
At grade school in St. Croix Falls, Sweet was aware of her otherness.
She endured a lot of teasing, but her favorite aunt encouraged her to
be proud of her Indian identity. Sweet learned that though the early fur
traders had called them Chippewa in connection with the types of moccasins
they wore, they were Anishinaabe, which means "the first people."
Quietly, Sweet began writing about native peoples.
"I thought if only people would listen to me we could learn to get along
better," she says.
In the '60s she was deeply affected by the civil rights movement and
the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
"To understand my own feelings, I would often write poetry, but I kept
it to myself," she recalls. One day her teacher took her poem, "Home of
the Brave, Land of the Free," a work about Martin Luther King, and entered
it in a contest. It was read on Wisconsin Public Radio.
"I was sort of overwhelmed, and a little self-conscious," she remembers.
"But I was also taken with the idea that I was going to be a writer, and
that I had something worthwhile to say. Poetry came very naturally to
me. I didn't know how poetry worked. It just worked for me."
She adds that now that she knows more about creative writing, "it comes
harder to me."
Throughout high school in the small Polk County town of Luck, she tried
to find her place, writing constantly. She describes it this way: "I was
sort of a dichotomous figure in that I was treated poorly by some of my
peers but at the same time I was a cheerleader and a prom queen. I was
a doer and committed to doing. I wasn't going to let anyone hold me back.
"I realized I had a gift and no matter what anyone said, it was worth
doing, and what I had to say was worth sharing. I wasn't going to go away.
I wasn't going to blend into the woodwork. One way or the other I was
going to survive and I would not be silent, either."
Her poetry reflected her preoccupations then: the courageous struggles
of people in the forefront of the American Indian movements.
"My poems were political, as political as they can be at that young
age. But they were social criticism at an elementary level."
Then, her preoccupations changed and her poems petered out. She took
classes spottily at a community college in St. Paul, Minn., and began
working as a secretary in an insurance company and an agent for vocalists
and musicians.
There was rent to pay, fun to be had, new waters to be tested. In 1971
she fell in love. By 1974, she was married and the mother of a son. She
and her husband had another son two years later and Sweet settled down
to being a full-time mother.
She returned to the land, made apple cider, grew vegetables, picked
berries, baked bread, raised her children.
"It was the happiest I've ever been," she says. She returned to college
in 1980. Her marriage fell apart, but by 1987 she had a master's degree
from UW-Eau Claire and a job as the university's director of conferences
and institutes. Two years later, UW-Green Bay offered her a teaching job
in its Humanistic Studies department — and she threw herself into
her job as a poet and writing teacher.
By 1992 her poems were getting published. A small chapbook of her poems
came out that year and her work also appeared in "Days of Obsidian, Days
of Grace," a collection of works by four American Indian poets. Sweet
has been published in five books of poetry, including "Songs for Discharming."
Her short stories and essays have also appeared in various periodicals.
Inspiration from life
Much of her poetry has been inspired by her children, by the years spent
working the land as a young wife and mother, by the projects associated
with tribal history and oral traditions that she coordinated at UW-Eau
Claire, by her concern for the environment, and by her social activism
during Wisconsin's ugly fights over tribal hunting and fishing rights.
One of her better-known poems, "In September: Ode to Tomatoes," deals
with domesticity and the universality of food and the persistence of life:
Yes, even though we walk through valleys of shadowy Death, we will
always can tomatoes we will ladle together."
Asked if poetry ever was an outlet for her anger against discrimination
or injustice, she said, "I don't think I've ever exploited poetry to vent
anger. To raise awareness, for sure. One does not have to be angry to
protest the way humans treat one another. One does not have to shout to
get the attention of others. And one does not have to be brutal in words
to be kind and to insist on kind treatment of all living things. . . .
You can do that in a very graceful but inspired manner through poetry."
As she ages, Sweet feels the urgency to communicate some important issues
— "the state of the land, the diminishment of people who are able
to speak our language, and the public school education of people of color"
— through poetry.
"Poetry is the kind of genre that increases both our wisdom and our
capacity for compassion," she says. "Poetry is a prayerful act. . . .
Poetry is not a sound bite, it is not harsh media. It is as honest as
you can be with the rest of the world in sharing your personal experience."
And that is what she hopes to do as poet laureate.
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