Start with “Jacklight,” because after spinning your wheels while flipping through Jacklight and Baptism of Desire, it gets to be the day before your first meeting with you Major Authors: Louise Erdrich class, and you still can’t decide. So, why not just go with the first poem in the first collection? Even though you don’t know what a “jacklight” is. Maybe because you don’t know what a jacklight is, and you want to wrestle with the poem and learn from it along with the students.
“Jacklight” turns out to be the perfect poem with which to start a class: an Erdrich class, a Native lit class, a poetry class, maybe any class. It holds many mysteries to unravel but isn’t so opaque as to overwhelm. Is the plural “we” speaker of the poem bears, animals, generic prey, Ojibwe people, Indigenous people, and/or Native authors? What about the addressee, the “they”? Could be generic hunters, Ojibwe hunters, white hunters, colonizers, and/or readers. The students surprise you with their insights, their questions, the formal features they notice, their willingness to meditate at length on the nature of a bear’s sense of smell. (And, yes, they also teach you what a jacklight is.) You leave the room feeling very grateful for this group and this poem.
“And now they take the first steps, not knowing
How deep the woods are and lightless.
How deep the woods are” (Louise Erdrich’s “Jacklight,” final lines)
Into the woods you go…
“Jacklight” turns out to be the perfect poem with which to start a class: an Erdrich class, a Native lit class, a poetry class, maybe any class. It holds many mysteries to unravel but isn’t so opaque as to overwhelm. Is the plural “we” speaker of the poem bears, animals, generic prey, Ojibwe people, Indigenous people, and/or Native authors? What about the addressee, the “they”? Could be generic hunters, Ojibwe hunters, white hunters, colonizers, and/or readers. The students surprise you with their insights, their questions, the formal features they notice, their willingness to meditate at length on the nature of a bear’s sense of smell. (And, yes, they also teach you what a jacklight is.) You leave the room feeling very grateful for this group and this poem.
“And now they take the first steps, not knowing
How deep the woods are and lightless.
How deep the woods are” (Louise Erdrich’s “Jacklight,” final lines)
Into the woods you go…