One of the most important Native American writers of the post-1968 generation, James Welch, to a large degree, established a genre. What he gave us was Native American Literature: literature unmistakably about Indian subjects, written by an Indian writer. His characters were never drawn from sensa
'Coming Close' begins with a somber description of a worker who has been toiling with a polishing wheel for the previous three hours. As the poem hones in on the scene, the question arises: 'Is this really a woman?' Suddenly you are in the poem, probing the buff, mechanical body of this worker and ma
In contrast to the political poetry that epitomized so much of the 1970s, Martin Espada's work kicks aside the pulpit and abandons the megaphone. Espada calls his readers to action in a more indirect fashion -- he envisions a free world without idealizing and describes social horrors without repriman
In a 1909 essay called "How to Write a Play," George Bernard Shaw argued that the great playwright must "pick out the significant incidents from the chaos of daily happenings and arrange them so that their relation to one another becomes significant, thus changing us from bewildered spectators of a m