Sherman Alexie has been published in the New Yorker. Alexie’s poem "How to Write the Great American Indian Novel" is linked with those New Yorker publications, and with Alexie’s well-documented, unprecedented (at least for an American Indian writer) rise to fame, and with his second (or third, or fourth, after poet, novelist, and short story writer) career as Hollywood filmmaker. In other words, Alexie’s work has pop-culture capital, and "How to Write the Great American Indian Novel" in part responds to that perception of his work and is in part constructed by it. 

If "In the Village" sketches a psychically successful journey from mourning to reparation, "Crusoe in England" delineates a similar trajectory with a more somber outcome. Like "In the Village," "Crusoe in England" describes a site of loss, but here invention, while it can temporarily stave off loneliness cannot survive the return home.

In the course of this dramatic monologue, Bishop disrupts generic expectations and traditions, reveals the child's vision behind the weary recollections of an aged exile, and locates the human bond in the very inadequacy of language. The voice of this poem argues that all knowledge, finally, is incomplete, and consists not of ends but of paths, processes, maps, ways. "Crusoe in England" provides the threshold to "One Art," an elegy for Bishop's attempt to grasp and possess her world through poetic achievement.

… Bishop seems to have recognized that she, like Moore, was far more observant than most people. Once she even assumes a tone of smug complicity, implying "you and I see what others carelessly overlook," when commenting on the obtuseness of those who label museum exhibits: "Some of their inscriptions baffle me – a perfectly sensible crystal fish, for example, something like a perch, labelled ‘Porpoise.’ And a young man on a Greek vase who is obviously cutting the ends of his hair with his sword, called ‘Boy Washing Hair (?)’" (letter of 25 January 1935).

1. Elizabeth Bishop to Marianne Moore: January 14, 1939

The other day I caught a parrot fish, almost by accident. They are ravishing fish – all iridescent, with a silver edge to each scale, and a real bill-like mouth just like turquoise; the eye is very big and wild, and the eyeball is turquoise too – they are very humorous-looking fish. A man on the dock immediately scraped off three scales, then threw him back; he was sure it wouldn’t hurt him. I’m enclosing one [scale], if I can find it. …

The Canadian artist Paul Kane, 1810-1871, whose oeuvre consists largely of sketches and paintings depicting landscapes and scenes of Indian life in Canada and the Pacific Northwest, plays a central role in Alexie's "Scalp Dance by Spokane Indians," named after Kane's painting of the same title. Much like Wendy Rose's "Truganinny," the poem begins with a quoted epigraph and subsequently takes on the voice of the woman portrayed in Kane's painting.

Sherman Alexie has been published in the New Yorker. Alexie’s poem "How to Write the Great American Indian Novel" is linked with those New Yorker publications, and with Alexie’s well-documented, unprecedented (at least for an American Indian writer) rise to fame, and with his second (or third, or fourth, after poet, novelist, and short story writer) career as Hollywood filmmaker. In other words, Alexie’s work has pop-culture capital, and "How to Write the Great American Indian Novel" in part responds to that perception of his work and is in part constructed by it.

With Sherman Alexie, readers can throw formal questions out the smokehole (as in resistance to other modern verse innovators, Whitman, Williams, Sexton, or the Beats). Parodic antiformalism may account for some of Alexie's mass maverick appeal. This Indian gadfly jumps through all the hoops, sonnet, to villanelle, to heroic couplet, all tongue-in-cheeky.

"[Alex Kuo’s poetry workshop] was the first place I ever read contemporary poems, especially contemporary American Indian poems. And I read one poem in particular that was revolutionary and revelatory. The line was, ‘I’m in the resrvation of my mind.’ It was by Adrian Louis, a Paiute Indian poet. For me, that was like, ‘In the beginning . . .’ It was , ‘Because I could not stop for death, death kindly stopped for me . . .’ It was ‘ I sing the body electric . . .’ It was all that and more.

(S.A.) I started writing because I kept fainting in human anatomy class and needed a career change. The only class that fit where the human anatomy class had been was a poetry writing workshop. I always liked poetry. I'd never heard of, or nobody'd ever showed me, a book written by a First Nations person, ever. I got into the class, and my professor, Alex K[u]o, gave me an anthology of contemporary Native American poetry called Songs From This Earth on Turtle's Back. I opened it up and--oh my gosh--I saw my life in poems and stories for the very first time.