Simon J. Ortiz and Jennifer Elise Foerster: September 17, 2022

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The Poetry Center presents Simon J. Ortiz and Jennifer Elise Foerster, reading from their poetry, at Medicine for Nightmares in San Francisco. Foerster reads from her most recent book The Maybe Bird (The Song Cave, 2022) and other work. Ortiz reads from a span of his work, including the manuscript from his forthcoming book, Light as Light, poems from the omnibus volume Woven Stone (1992), and one story from Men on the Moon: Collected Short Stories (1999; all, in new editions, from the University of Arizona Press). Two days prior, he read from his poetry and stories and talked with the audience at The Poetry Center, San Francisco State University. Steve Dickison introduces the poets. On the walls of the gallery space is new work by San Francisco-based Salvadoran muralist Josue Rojas.

Note: quality of the audio for this Fall 2022 program is due to a loss of the original digital files; the program was fortunately salvaged from the live-streamed video document, with thanks to editor Jesus Rodriguez.

Publisher: DocFilm Institute
Location: Medicine for Nightmares, San Francisco
Date: 2022-09-17
Event Run Time: 01:12:59
Contributors: Steve Dickison
Rights: ©© American Poetry Archives. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. For all other uses please email poetry@sfsu.edu.
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Jennifer Elise Foerster (00:22:33)

Description

Jennifer Elise Foerster introduces and reads from her book The Maybe Bird, which presents a sequence of 64 poems, each titled from their first line.

Foerster reads a poem she'd written in the Muscogee language, which she's studying, and reads her translation ("Where are you going?..."). She talks about drawing on botanist William Bartram's writings, which documented among other things plants of Florida and other parts of the southeast, original Seminole and Muscogee country, that have since disappeared. She closes by reading poems from that sequence.

Simon J. Ortiz (00:43:03)

Description

Simon Ortiz greets his audience in his indigenous Acoma Pueblo language, and tells of English coming to him at six years in a federal Bureau of Indian Affairs school.

"I've been writing poetry since I was born, and probably before I was born. Because language is one of those spiritual energy systems or energy sources that continue on and on from the very beginning...."

Ortiz reads from a range of his writings, beginning with a poem from the manuscript of his forthcoming book, Light as Light, and following from the volume Woven Stone, which collects four of his books.

He closes with a short story titled "Feathers."