On the Line: Episode 7 - Whereas by Layli Long Soldier

On the Line: Conversations About Poetry
Episode 7
Whereas
by Layli Long Soldier
 
In Episode 7, Kate Sutherland discusses Whereas by Layli Long Soldier with Jordan Abel, Sonnet L’Abbé, and Shannon Maguire.
 
In the course of the conversation, references are made to a few sources outside the book, including interviews with Layli Long Soldier in the Kenyon Review, The Creative Independent, and On Being.
 
The first poem in the “Whereas Statements” sequence read with permission from Graywolf Press. All rights reserved.

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Whereas
by Layli Long Soldier
Graywolf Press, 2017
 
Description from Graywolf Press:
 
“Whereas confronts the coercive language of the United States government in its responses, treaties, and apologies to Native American peoples and tribes, and reflects that language in its officiousness and duplicity back on its perpetrators. Through a virtuosic array of short lyrics, prose poems, longer narrative sequences, resolutions, and disclaimers, Layli Long Soldier has created a brilliantly innovative text to examine histories, landscapes, her own writing, and her predicament inside national affiliations. ‘I am,’ she writes, ‘a citizen of the United States and an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, meaning I am a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation—and in this dual citizenship I must work, I must eat, I must art, I must mother, I must friend, I must listen, I must observe, constantly I must live.’ This strident, plaintive book introduces a major new voice in contemporary literature.”

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Episode 7 Guests

Jordan Abel is a Nisga'a writer from BC. Currently, he is pursuing a PhD at Simon Fraser University where his research concentrates on the intersection between Digital Humanities and Indigenous Literary Studies. Abel’s creative work has recently been anthologized in Best Canadian Poetry (Tightrope), The Land We Are: Artists and Writers Unsettle the Politics of Reconciliation (Arbiter Ring), and The New Concrete: Visual Poetry in the 21st Century (Hayword). Abel is the author of The Place of Scraps (winner of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize), Un/inhabited, and Injun (winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize).
 
Sonnet L’Abbé is the author of two poetry collections, A Strange Relief and Killarnoe, and edited Best Canadian Poetry 2014. She teaches creative writing at Vancouver Island University. Her next collection, Sonnet’s Shakespeare, will be published in 2018 by McClelland and Stewart.
 
Shannon Maguire is a poet, editor, and an Assistant Professor (LTA) in the Department of English at the University of Calgary. She is the author of two full-length collections of poetry: fur(l) parachute (BookThug 2013)—shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry—and Myrmurs: An Exploded Sestina (BookThug 2015). Her poetry has also been shortlisted for the bpNichol Chapbook Award and the Manitoba Magazine Award for Best Suite of Poems. Shannon edited and wrote the critical introduction to Planetary Noise: Selected Poetry of Erin Moure (Wesleyan University Press 2017). With Lesley Belleau, she is the guest co-editor of a special issue of Contemporary Verse 2 on Northern Ontarian Innovative and Indigenous Poetics (Winter 2017). Her third collection of poetry, Zip’s File: A Romance of Silence is forthcoming from BookThug in spring 2018.
 

Kate Sutherland, On the Line, Host and Producer
Kate Sutherland is the author of two books of short fiction, and one collection of poems: Summer Reading (winner of a Saskatchewan Book Award for Best First Book), All In Together Girls, and How to Draw a Rhinoceros. Her work has also appeared in a number of magazines and anthologies including Best Canadian Poetry 2016. She lives in Toronto.