Louise Erdrich

Louise is very well-known name for me because it is my favorite poet's name, but Erdrich is not. For the women poets class, Louise Erdrich is the first woman poet I need to study and focus on. Although a professor gave a brief introduction on her life, it was not enough. I needed to know more about her to understand, feel, enjoy, and analyze the poems she wrote. "Original Fire; New and Selected Poems" published in 2003 is the book I got for the class. Before I started to work on my paper, first, I wanted to make sure on her life, thought, and maybe philosophy, which I believed that it might be much helpful to amuse and analyze the poems.
In 1954, Louise Erdrich, the daughter of a Chippewa Indian mother and a German-American Father, was born in Little Falls, Minnesota. Influenced by their parents, her works mainly contain Native-American themes, and her main characters represents both sides of her heritage. In North Dakota, she grew up under the parents who teach at a school sponsored by the Bureau of Indian Affair. Later, she went to Dartmouth College. There were two coincidences that might affects on her writing career or life. She was a part of the first class of women admitted to the college and during her first year of college, college built the Native-American studies department. After Dartmouth, she became an editor for the Circle, a Boston Indian Council newspaper. During the interview with Writers Digest, she said, "Settling into that job and becoming comfortable with an urban community-which is very different from the reservation community-gave me another reference point. There were lots of people with mixed blood, lots of people with had their own confusions. I realized that his was part of my life-it wasn't something that I was making up-and that it was something I wanted to write about." In 1978, she attended Johns Hopkins University for an M.A. program, and at Johns Hopkins University, she wrote poems and stories related to her heritage. After M.A. program, she returned to Dartmouth and became a writer-in-residence.
There were three poem collections; Jacklight (1984), Baptism of Desire (1989), and Original fire: New and Selected Poems (2003). The first poetry collection was Jacklight was about the conflict between Native and non-Native cultures; however, also celebrates family bonds and the ties of kinship, offers autobiographical meditations, dramatic monologues and love poetry, and show the influence of Ojibwa myths and legends. Next collection, Baptism of Desire, was about spiritually and the hybrid form of religion, with Roman Catholic and Native values mixed, but conflicted, and also about motherhood and children because of written during her pregnancy. On her last collection, Original Fire: New and Selected Poems(2003), Donna Seaman from Booklist said, "Erdrich's fecund poems are seedbeds for her acclaimed novels deeply attuned to the sacred as it is manifest in everything from sunlight to stones to water to plants and animals, Erdrich grapples with both Native American and Christian beliefs, and the conflicts ignited by the friction between them, in poems of sweet gratitude, voluptuous ecstasy, cutting satire, seething grief, and fiery resolve."
With three pome collections, she wrote several novels; Love Medicine (1984), The Best Queen (1986), Tracks (1988), The Bingo Palace (1994), Tales of Burning Love (1997), The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (2001), and Four Souls (2004). They are about three interrelated families living in and around a reservation in the fictional town of Argus, North Dakota, from 1912 through the present. The unique styles of her novels are the multi-voice narration and non-chronological storytelling. Also as her first novel Love Medicine was written in collaboration with her husband, Michael Dorris, The Crown of Columbus (1991) also wrote and published together with her husband in early work, but it separated in 1995 and later it was hers alone. Dorris committed suicide in 1997. The first book Erdrich released following his suicide, The Antelope Wife in 1998, has a self-destructive husband. About The Antelope Wife, The New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani stated "Erdrich has returned to doing what she does best: using multiple viewpoints and strange, surreal tales within tales to conjure up a family's legacy of love, duty and guilt, and to show us how that family's fortunes have both shifted-and endured-as its members have abandoned ancient Indian traditions for a modern fast-food existence ... As for Ms. Erdrich's own storytelling powers, they are on virtuosic display in this novel. She has given us a fiercely imagined tale if love and loss, a story that manage to transform tragedy into comic redemption, sorrow into heroic survival. She has given us a wonderfully sad, funny and affecting novel." She also wrote non-fiction and children books, based on the lives of Native-American young people at the time of white encroachment.


"Many critics claim Erdrich has remained true to h Native ancestors' mythic and artistic visions while writing fiction that candidly explores the cultural issues facing modern-day Native Americans and mixed heritage Americans."

"Erdrich's accomplishment is that she is weaving a body of work that goes beyond portraying contemporary Native American Life as descendants of a politically dominated people to explore the great universal questions-questions of identity, pattern versus randomness, and the meaning of life itself." - An essayist for Contemporary Novelists

Based on [http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/louise-erdrich