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.

I've always been picky about heroes. Like most American males, I've always admired athletes, particularly basketball players. I admired Julius Erving and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar not only for their athletic abilities, but for who they seemed to be off the court. They seemed to be spiritual, compassionate, and gracious people. Neither has done nor said anything over the years to contradict my image of them.

Alexie's poems and stories in First Indian on the Moon embrace both discursive and conversive styles in a conjunction that is inevitably disjunctive, disconcerting, and effective in communicating his worlds and words. Alexie . . . writes in a powerful voice that speaks of the realities of worlds that continually push each other to the point of discursive and actual implosion.

There is a combativeness that distinguishes Alexie's often polemical poems, for he is, in a way, at war. In most of his writing, sooner or later, Alexie is a "polemicist," which is to say, a "warrior," and there is nearly always controversy and argument, implied or direct, in his poems and stories. . . . "Do you ever worry about anger becoming a negative force?" the Bellante brothers asked [in a Bloomsbury Review interview].

Reflecting oral storytelling traditions, in which repetition exists not for memorization but to deepen meaning with each iteration, Alexie’s writing returns to certain themes, such as the fire that killed his sister and brother-in-law. In his most recent collection of poetry, The Summer of Black Widows (Hanging Loose Press, 1996), one section is entitles "Sister Fire, Brother Smoke." . . .

EK: Would you speak to what you see as our responsibility is as Native Writers? Do you see that responsibility restricting/constricting certain avenues of creativity?

Alexie . . . here emerges as a Native poet of the first order. He captures the full range of modern Native experience, writing both with anger and with great affection and humor. Detailing the continuing deprivation and colonialism, the poet pointedly asks, "Am I the garbageman of your dreams?" and defines Native "economics": "risk" is playing poker with cash and then passing out at powwow.