May Feature: Interview with Sherwin Bitsui
- blueshiftjournal
- May 11, 2016
- 3 min read
We are proud to feature Sherwin Bitsui as our featured artist of May!
Sherwin Bitsui, a Diné (Navajo) from the Navajo Reservation in White Cone, Arizona, received an AFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts Creative Writing Program. He is the author of the poetry collections Shapeshift (2003) and Flood Song (2009). Steeped in Native American culture, mythology, and history, Bitsui’s poems reveal the tensions in the intersection of Native American and contemporary urban culture. His poems are imagistic, surreal, and rich with details of the landscape of the Southwest. Flood Song is a book-length lyric sequence that explores the traditions of Native American writing through postmodern fragment and stream of consciousness. Bitsui has received a Whiting Writers’ Award, a grant from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, a Truman Capote Creative Writing Fellowship, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship.
Q: Tell us about your background and how you started writing.
A: I started writing seriously as a creative writing major in the late 90’s at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. I was fortunate to study with my mentors Arthur Sze and Jon Davis. Though I started writing a few years earlier when I was living on the Navajo Reservation in Northern Arizona, I feel I found my “voice” at the Institute. I attended a community college after high school and was introduced to poetry. My connection to poetry was all encompassing and difficult to ignore. I never again veered far from this particular path. As a Diné, poetry was one way for me to speak to my experience—I was compelled to write into the silence that permeated every aspect of the relationship I had with these seemingly divergent worlds.
Q: What do you think you would have been if not a poet?
A: I would have liked to have been a painter.
Q: Can you speak on the importance of sound in your poetry, especially in Flood Song?
A: I composed the structure of Flood Song by hearing it read back to me. My approach to sound and meter was intuitive and organic—it evolved during the process of ordering the book. Sound, image and clarity were important for me at that stage in its development. I wanted the poem to enact a flood in the imagination. Flood Song is most alive when read aloud.
Q: How do you begin the process of composing a poem? When do you know if it is finished?
A: The poems happen and eventually a collection appears. It’s a long and arduous process for me. There are always detours and false paths when writing my books. I search for soundness and clarity. A poem must reach past my expectations of what a poem should be before I start believing in it. It has many faces. I simply wait out its dance and not become easily seduced by its early incarnations. I’m finally seeing a glimpse of the completion of my new poetry manuscript. I’ve worked it to death and back. It survived, and now I’m finally allowing myself to take it seriously as a work of art.
Q: Where do you root your poems in English, and where do you root them in Navajo? As in, what do these shifts in language represent?
A: My poems are rooted in both perspectives simultaneously. Navajo thought inspires much of the structural aspects of my work. Both languages make me aware of what cannot be translated. My work is about imagining into the space between languages, and arriving ever closer to the realization that even poetry fails to give presence to that space. My poems feel most beautiful and bright when leaping against the backdrop of nothingness.
Q: What scares you?
A: The villanelle.
Q: Who or what inspires you?
A: There is always something new each day that reminds me of how important it is for all of us to appreciate the wonder of living. Inspiration comes mostly from knowing that each day passes; poems are written to try to capture those moments. A poem is sunlight one minute, a shadow on a wall the next.
Q: What advice would you give your younger self?
A: I’d tell myself to not always wait for inspiration to happen. The act of writing or making art happens by willfully marking the surface of a page or canvas. Daydreaming is good and worthwhile, but sometimes it is all about doing the work, and accepting the fact that the endeavor might ultimately fail - but failure is also a part of the beauty of making art and growing as an artist.
