LAYLI LONG SOLDIER

Day Poem: Sun Mirrors 2023
steel and glass

In January 2023, Long Soldier released a series of eight poems, commissioned by the Holt/Smithson Foundation in Santa Fe. This project was partly inspired by the late artist Nancy Holt’s interest in concrete poetry and how language and vision help us know the world. Long Soldier’s poems play with conceptual pairings such as official and casual language, looking and sensing, trust and mistrust, concern and letting go. 

Long Soldier is known for her keen attention to how a poem’s visual language can contribute to its content, just as written language does. Her piece for Tinworks Art uses excerpts from her Day/Night series to create a dynamic, spatial experience of language. You can read the complete poems here.

Day Poem: Sun Mirrors is currently on view on the concrete pad at Tinworks Art (719 N Ida between Cottonwood and Aspen).

I don’t trust nobody but the land 2023
refurbished light cabinet, vinyl letters

The light cabinet now installed on the mill building was reclaimed from a former RV park and café on the Gallatin River.

The quote comes from Long Soldier’s poem, “Steady Summer,” published in 2017 as part of a collection of poems written in direct response to S.J. Res 14, “an apology to all Native Peoples on behalf of the United States.” While much of the book is concerned with relationships between the Lakota people and the U.S. Government, “Steady Summer” explores Long Soldier’s experience during her annual solstice trip back to Lakota homeland from her current home in Santa Fe.

The following is a longer excerpt from the poem to place her statement in context:

potent
grass songs
a grass chorus moves shhhhh
through half-propped
windows I swallow
grass scent the solstice
makes a mind
wide makes it
oceanic blue a field in crests
swirling gyres the moving
surface fastened
in June light
here I’m certain
that certain
kinds of talk
only = pain excusing
myself I paddle deep in high
grass waves I’m safer
outdoors than in / in those
heady grasses the mouth
loosens confesses:
I don’t trust nobody
but the land I said
I don’t mean
present company
of course
you understand the grasses
hear me too always
present the grasses
confident grasses polite
command to shhhhh
shhh listen

I don’t trust nobody but the land is currently on view at on the southern facade of the Mill Building on Cottonwood at Tinworks Art. (Tinworks Art is located 719 N Ida between Cottonwood and Aspen).

ABOUT LAYLI LONG SOLDIER

Layli Long Soldier earned a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA with honors from Bard College.

She is the author of the chapbook Chromosomory (2010) and the full-length collection Whereas (2017), which won the National Books Critics Circle award and was a finalist for the National Book Award.

She has been a contributing editor to Drunken Boat and poetry editor at Kore Press; in 2012, her participatory installation, Whereas We Respond, was featured on the Pine Ridge Reservation. In 2015, Long Soldier was awarded a National Artist Fellowship from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation and a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry. She was awarded a Whiting Writer’s Award in 2016.

Long Soldier is a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation and lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.