The Ghost Dancers Poems

Thieme's first collection of nineteen poems is drawn from the lost magic of a waning romance. The poems are a search for meaning for "a love / that once, too briefly, thought the stars / and their fatal arcs made sense", but the answers are elusive. The tone of the poems is both intimate and haunted; seeking redemption through love, but tempered with a lament for its fragile impermanence and inevitability. Thieme's the ghost dancers offers nineteen fragments of a confession: an elegy for the vanishing of a love's sense of grace as it turns to the desolation of grief and the permanence of absence.

Based on a 2011 "Down in the Dirt" magazine chapbook from Scars Publications (http://scars.tv), "Ghost Dancers Leaping from a Tome" is a poetry book by Peter Magliocco (cover art compiled by Janet Kuypers, originally photographs by John Yotko, for Scars Publications).

Adrian C. Louis’s previously unpublished early novel has given us “the unsayable said” of the Native American reservation. A realistic look at reservation life, The Ghost Dancers explores—very candidly—many issues, including tribal differences, “urban Indians” versus “rez Indians,” relationships among Blacks, Whites, and Indians, police tactics on and off the rez, pipe ceremonies and sweat-lodge ceremonies, alcoholism and violence on the rez, visitations of the supernatural, poetry and popular music, the Sixties and the Vietnam War, the aims and responsibilities of journalism, and, most prominently, interracial sexual relationships. Readers familiar with Louis’s life and other works will note interesting connections between the protagonist, Bean, and Louis himself, as well as a connection between The Ghost Dancers and other Louis writings—especially his sensational novel Skins. It’s 1988, and Lyman “Bean” Wilson, a Nevada Indian and middle-aged professor of journalism at Lakota University in South Dakota, is reassessing his life. Although Bean is the great-grandson of Wovoka, the Paiute leader who initiated the Ghost Dance religion, he is not a full-blood Indian and he endures the scorn of the Pine Ridge Sioux, whose definition of Indian identity is much narrower. A man with many flaws, Bean wrestles with his own worst urges, his usually ineffectual efforts to help his family, and his determination to establish his identity as an Indian. The result is a string of family reconnections, sexual adventures, crises at work, pipe and sweat-lodge ceremonies, and—through his membership in the secret Ghost Dancers Society—political activism, culminating in a successful plot to blow the nose off George Washington’s face on Mount Rushmore. Quintessentially Louis, this raw, angry, at times comical, at times heartbreaking novel provides an unflinching look at reservation life and serves as an unyielding tribute to a generation without many choices.

White Ghost Dance was begun in Philadelphia in summer 1976 & expanded & revised intermittently during the intervening 42 years. It hangs upon the spine of a journey begun by a Conestoga wagon train in July 1975, from San Diego to Philadelphia, reversing the path of European imperialists: across the continent, across time, across boundaries between myth, history, and the astounding physical beauty of our vast, misshapen political fantasy. Memories, various & contradictory, seep from the landscape, & lead backward & inward to the moment of America's inception. At the periphery, cartoon figures from popular culture share the bardo with human relics scattered along the route. Along the return to origin, historical shades bubble up into the present. These spectral presences resonate against the original Ghost Dancers of the Nineteenth Century, whose ecstatic exertions asked the gods to reverse the catastrophe befallen them, against a high commercial civilization at Cahokia, based on astronomical design and ritual human sacrifice, & against a carnival of chaos at the 1976 Philadelphia BuyCentennial Sellabration.

American Ghost Dance is Kerry's long in the making second volume of poems since the publication of his first volume, Test Flights, in January 1995.

Two dazzling dramas on American themes from the Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, Walker and Ghost Dance. On a cold winter's day on the Dakota plains, Catherine Weldon receives a caller, Kicking Bear, bringing news of Indian rebellion. In the fort nearby, a tiny community splinters apart over how to react. In Ghost Dance, first performed in 1989, Walcott turns a story with a foregone conclusion -- Sitting Bull and his Sioux followers will die at the hands of the Army and Indian agents -- into a portrait of life at a crossroads of American history. In Walker, an opera first performed in 1992 and revised for its revival in 2001, Walcott shifts his attention east, taking for his subject David Walker, the nineteenth-century black abolitionist. In Walcott 's hands Walker becomes a classical hero for his people: a leader who is also a poet.

In his crystalline new collection of poems ghost dancer's dreams, t. kilgore splake captures and blends his personal history/memories with the public events of his seventy-five years of life into a tour de force of existential and poetic clarity. Varying in length from spare, haiku like gems to the major long poem trout dancing sonata, splake blends the impulses and energies of youth with the hard-earned wisdom of age. His unique poems ring true in a way that only a determined dedication to personal growth can produce. Unadorned and original poetry by a lifelong searcher. At the age of seventy-five, he is still a dynamo.

This collection of poetry spanning five decades is a fetching together of pieces from a larger assortment. Poems included range from lyrical and free verse, to lengthy narrative and miscellaneous poems containing dialogue. Such diversity normally suggests structural influences over time; however, the author preferred not to arrange poems chronologically, rather, to observe the sum as a present experience. 'Why would a collection of poems also contain an essay? Because a poem is compact: the meticulous workings of a tiny watch. But an essay: Well, that's like the wind blowin' pages out the back of an old rumble seat. Obviously, there's something I wish to say in my elder years.' Other books by the author include: Hold Fast to Quiet Things; Delphic Particle; Menitheos, the Skeptical Savior and Unstrained Mercy. Poems have appeared in various anthologizes including Lyrical Iowa.