Participation Type
Paper
Session Title
Session 5.02 Literature
Presentation #1 Title
“(W)e need another vision. We need it bad.” Marilou Awiakta’s Reclamation Project
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
Cherokee author Marilou Awiakta uses ancient Cherokee customs that are somehow distinctly East Asian, reflecting Feng Shui and Taoist orientations to envision a global strategy for reclaiming for the Appalachian region some of the lost positive energy of its Ch’i. For a region, in the words of Jim Wayne Miller, “Cut up and bleeding, the land lies breathing hard,/ in places torn and gouged beyond all healing,” Cherokee author Marilou Awiakta has discovered strategies for healing by encouraging a different “vision” both new and time-honored: the indigenous American worldview. In Abiding Appalachia: Where Mountain and Atom Meet, “Daydreaming Primal Space,” and other works, Awiakta looks at space circularly to curtail the straight line draining of Ch’i, essential life energy, from the land by the Western European power and dominion frame of mind. Robert Cummings, wondering about why Tennesseepoet George Scarbrough evokes the 8th-century Chinese poet Han-Shan in hundreds of poems, asks “How does one gain clarity about such a specific locality by reaching back over long periods of time to a very alien culture?” It may be, inScarborough’s case and Awiakta’s, that these “other” cultures are in fact bedrock American environmental consciousness, not “alien” at all. Moreover, Awiakta has developed a rhetorical style to counter the rigidly linear method of viewing (“conquering”) space, a personal. dreamlike, anti-logical form of “academic” writing alluding to and adapting Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space. The circle is the geometric form to oppose the box. Poetry can make something happen.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
Rob Merritt is Professor of English at Bluefield College. He is the author of, most recently. the book of poetry The Language of Longing
“(W)e need another vision. We need it bad.” Marilou Awiakta’s Reclamation Project
Cherokee author Marilou Awiakta uses ancient Cherokee customs that are somehow distinctly East Asian, reflecting Feng Shui and Taoist orientations to envision a global strategy for reclaiming for the Appalachian region some of the lost positive energy of its Ch’i. For a region, in the words of Jim Wayne Miller, “Cut up and bleeding, the land lies breathing hard,/ in places torn and gouged beyond all healing,” Cherokee author Marilou Awiakta has discovered strategies for healing by encouraging a different “vision” both new and time-honored: the indigenous American worldview. In Abiding Appalachia: Where Mountain and Atom Meet, “Daydreaming Primal Space,” and other works, Awiakta looks at space circularly to curtail the straight line draining of Ch’i, essential life energy, from the land by the Western European power and dominion frame of mind. Robert Cummings, wondering about why Tennesseepoet George Scarbrough evokes the 8th-century Chinese poet Han-Shan in hundreds of poems, asks “How does one gain clarity about such a specific locality by reaching back over long periods of time to a very alien culture?” It may be, inScarborough’s case and Awiakta’s, that these “other” cultures are in fact bedrock American environmental consciousness, not “alien” at all. Moreover, Awiakta has developed a rhetorical style to counter the rigidly linear method of viewing (“conquering”) space, a personal. dreamlike, anti-logical form of “academic” writing alluding to and adapting Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space. The circle is the geometric form to oppose the box. Poetry can make something happen.
