Vanessa Skildum, Staff Writer
“You can survive anything if you write a story about it,” said Kimberly Blaeser, Indigenous poet, photographer, activist, and this year’s Mackey Chair, at the Mackey Keynote Poetry Reading on Friday, April 5.
Willard Mackey’47 started the Mackey Chair in the late 1980s to honor his wife, Lois Mackey’45. The program allows Beloit College to bring talented authors to campus to teach an advanced creative writing course. Along with teaching the Mackey Chair also holds a public reading. What was unique about this reading was that along with Blaeser were two other indigenous poets, Kalehua Kim and Halee Kirkwood.
Blaeser is the author of six poetry collections, a member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, and grew up on the White Earth Reservation. She is Professor Emeriti of English and Indigenous studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and is the founding director of In-Na-Po, Indigenous Nations Poets, which is a national indigenous poetry organization that is committed to “mentoring emerging writers, nurturing the growth of Indigenous poetic practices, and raising the visibility of all Native Writers past, present, and future,” according to their website indigenousnationspoets.org.
“The best part of being a poet is the journey of it… It’s language but it’s not only language. It’s what comes to you when you are paying attention,” said Blaeser when asked what being a poet is like. She discussed what it was like constantly swimming for the answers and how you change within the process of discovery. “We could never write a poem the same way as it changes us.”
“You carry certain literary encounters with you for a lifetime,” said Chris Fink, professor of creative writing and director of the Mackey program, when recounting his first experience with Blaeser. He also touched on how readers change throughout exploring literary works, “Just remembering the title often allows you to recall the exact place where you encountered it, and the feeling of expansiveness and wonder left you somehow altered by the experience. The text becomes woven with the reencounter of it, which becomes part of the story, which is you.”
Blaeser read some poems from her newest publication, “Ancient Light,” which was published earlier this year. The book, as she describes, opens by looking at the colonial project and what it has brought. The colonial project is a term used about “the ongoing colonial occupation and exploitation of Indigenous peoples, lands and waters,” according to IGI Global. The other thing that happens within the book is that it asks the reader to take account of ancient light and how it is being used as a force of survival. She also read from “Apprenticed to Justice,” her book published in 2007 as well as several tiny poems called “The way we love something small,” which were about looking closely at the world and the everyday transformations people experience when they pay attention to those things.
I don’t really know any other way to be,” Kalehua Kim said in response to the same question as Blaeser. “It’s part of the way my heart beats.” Kim is a 2023 In-Na-Po fellow. She has had her work published in Poetry Northwest, Denver Quarterly, A Native Hawaiian Journal, and more. She is the 2023 winner of the Poetry Northwest’s James Welch Poetry Prize, an award given for two poems each year written by indigenous U.S. poets. She is currently pursuing a Masters In Fine Arts (MFA) through the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University.
In her first year, she focused on rediscovering her roots and Hawaiian language, ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi. In her second year, she took a detour and has been focusing on epistolary poetry, which are poems that read as letters, and she started her night off by reading some of the letters she wrote. She finished her reading with her poem “Mystique,” which incorporated lyrics from the song “I Wonder If I Take You Home,” by Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam.
Halee Kirkwood shares a similar sentiment when talking about being a poet, “as though I have no edges. Like there’s no boundary between myself and the world.” Kirkwood is an Ojibwe Poet and is a descendant of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe. She is a 2022 winner of the James Welch Poetry Prize, as well as a 2022 In-Na-Po fellow. She has also been a mentor for the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop (MPWW). Some of their work has been published in Poem-A-Day, Poetry Magazine, and more.
Kirkwood read a variety of poems which included, “Ecopoetics,” and “I Wanted Her to be A Wolf.” One of her poems “Resume Highlights (Absolution),” stemmed from her time in Ashland, Wisconsin when she worked at the public library which she called a “vortex for all things weird, peculiar, and interesting.”
“It’s a special thing to have a community of writers,” Blaeser said after the reading. Along with being the founding director of In-Na-Po, she co-founded a writers organization at UW-Milwaukee called Word Warriors which Chris Fink was a part of during his time there. “I honestly wouldn’t have sent out my first manuscript if it weren’t for Word Warriors,” Blaeser said, remarking that writing is not a solitary activity.
Photos taken by Blaeser were presented along with the readings. Also presented was a short film titled “Poems for a Tattered Planet.” The short film was made by The Overpass Light Brigade, a group that is dedicated to peaceful protests and activism, at an eco-poetry retreat in Door County. The short film showcased sayings presented on boards that lit up to show letters, and in the background was a reading of Blaeser’s poem that shares a title with the short film.
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