James Welch Prize

Poetry Northwest’s James Welch Prize is awarded for two outstanding poems, each written by an Indigenous U.S. poet. The prize is named for Blackfeet and Gros Ventre writer James Welch, whose early poems were featured in Poetry Northwest and who went on to become one of the region’s most important writers.The final judge selects two first-place winners. A small group of finalists is selected for print and/or online publication alongside the winner by writers and editors from partner organizations and the editors of Poetry Northwest. One of the two winning poets will be flown to Seattle to read with the judge as part of the fall Seattle Arts & Lectures series at Hugo House. The other winning poet will be flown to Missoula, MT (the city James Welch called home), to read with the judge at the Beargrass Writing Retreat. This event was for Kenzie Allen, the winner of the prize selected to read in Seattle, though due to Covid restraints, this event was entirely virtual.

The James Welch Prize was the first event I attended as a part of the SAL Super Fan Club and I wasn’t really sure how to approach this whole process at first. I watched the evening unfold on my laptop while preparing dinner, but didn’t really get to appreciate it fully. Most of my downtime was spent listening to people introduce the speakers, when Sherwin Bitsui first came on the screen dinner I was in the middle of the more complicated parts of preparing the meal. I had to take out a headphone to focus and by the time I realized I had taken them both out, Kenzie Allen was halfway through her poems. This is not a rare occurrence, I think most people attending digital events fail to appreciate them as they go live, which is why I’m so grateful to Seattle Arts and Lectures for leaving the video up until a week had passed. I was able to sit down and give this event my full attention, taking notes and taking in the poetry. I could even rewind to hear a poem or line of words a second time, when there were visuals, I was able to pause and read them at my own pace. There are downsides to virtual events, but Seattle Arts and Lectures has taken steps to give these events their own set of advantages, making them worth attending if you can’t make an in-person lecture, or their isn’t one to attend.

Before getting into the poetry and speakers, I wanted to highlight a few things I wasn’t expecting to stand out. Naturally we’ve all been doing these virtual meetings for a while now and usually fall into one of two camps. People either curate a background that frames their video and lights them well, or they just set the camera in the most unoffending direction of the room. While there were some office walls, which is fine and not the point of the video lecture, I wanted to highlight the youth speaker Saioa Ouyoumjian’s mantle background and prize recipient Kenzie Allen’s living room. Both poets featured plant life, Ouyoumjian a pothos plant that stretched across the screen and Allen whose room was full of a variety of life. Alongside the splashes of green was a well put together image that didn’t distract from either speaker while centering them both in a space that one could imagine poetry written within. I also wanted to call attention to Sondra Segundo’s beautiful afterword, adding another voice to Bitsui and Allen’s poetry alongside what I would call a closing song, though there may have been more cultural significance in what she sang. I am grateful to all who spoke for being so vulnerable and giving of their words throughout this evening. 

The first poem of the evening was by Saioa Ouyoumjian, a youth poet from Catharine Blaine K-8 school. Excerpts from some of her earlier poems were shared before she took the screen and the way she described the loneliness of a tree on a hill took me aback. She approached solitude through words I had never considered and spoke as any writer of words would hope to achieve much later in their career. When she shared her poem on words themselves, those spoken and others not, she brought to mind that words exist without giving them life in speech. By thinking of a word, even without speaking it, you are still bringing life to it and those that go unspoken die in silence. I’m not doing her justice, but I hope she has opportunity enough to do herself justice as she continues poetry in or outside of her education.

Sherwin Bitsui was the next poet to take to the screen. His poems Hover and an excerpt from his 2018 book Dissolve were full of visceral imagery. I struggled to fully appreciated his poetry watching him read off the same screen that was recording him, but when I shut my eyes I could see everything he described. Using words of the colonizer to bring to image a more subtle slaughter of indigenous people, how systematic eradication goes beyond the initial violence and exists today within “civilization”. I’m not sure what all of his poetry is like, but what he shared this evening was violently vivid, full of a sorrow for his elders, peers, and the younger generations just trying to live with the fallout that years of violence left on their lives. He spoke highly of both Kenzie Allen for her poem Oskʌnu·tú and the other James Welch prize winner, Brendan Shay Basham for his poem Do Not Drink from the Tailing Pond, who had a similar evening in Montana.

While the James Welch prize was awarded to two Indigenous U.S. poets, this evening was in celebration of Kenzie Allen and we all had the opportunity to appreciate a selection of her work. Allen introduced herself to the audience in Oneida, then both translated and explained what she was doing by speaking it into the room. She told us how she brings it to life by speaking it out loud when she is in a conversation and to hear her talk so lovingly of her language was a treat I am grateful to have been included in. She then began with a chilling poem titled Love Song For Our Great Demise that invoked the beauty of the world that once was against the horrific pollution and damage climate change has taken upon us all. Her words, like Bitsui’s, were visceral and immediately invoked a cathartic response for the audience. You knew exactly what to see when hearing them and how to feel about it. From there she transitioned into a lipogram, something written with the intentional absence of a letter or letters, removing all letters not found in the Oneida language. The lipogram Shape of Turtle’s Back was a visual poem in thirteen parts, representing the thirteen parts of Turtle’s shell that the Oneida people would use as a calendar. Her next two poems were written for her parents, Where Wind and Water Meet for her mother and Sand Mountain for her father. Both spoke to a relationship with each parent that personally invoked imagery associated with their names, careers, or memories she held with them. Kenzie Allen’s penultimate poems were in the vein of the way she finds poetry in the translation of words that don’t exist in the English language, words that require a sentence or phrase when translated. I can’t remember if it was then or later in the Q&A, but Allen spoke to the frustration of using the word translate because within poetry the translation of a poem from one language to another and poem to interpretation can often become confused, especially within a space of strictly English speakers. It was an interesting thought to put alongside everything this evening had in store, and one that comes to mind with her last poem, Oskʌnu·tú, which she won the prize for. Translated to mean Deer, she was told that it also meant Peace and that the two cannot be pulled apart. Oskʌnu·tú embodies the deer and who I assume is the Oneida hunter. Both being hunted and seeking that peace that seems forever out of reach forever more. It was a poem deserving of the James Welch Prize, one that will rattle around in my heart as well as my brain.

After Kenzie Allen finished, she entered a Q&A with Sherwin Bitsui, full of compelling thoughts that made me wish for any dinner table they were a part of. Some insights from this last section of the evening were: “we learn to read maps the way we learn to read poetry”, “I dream to write Oneida and have someone read Oneida without having to translate”, and Allen shared that she has poems she doesn’t publish because to remove them from those they are written with would be an erasure of the poems and people themselves, robbed of their meaning without one another. At the end of the day, I don’t know much about poetry and can’t comment on form or quality. What I do know is imagery, and what I feel when a writer of words invokes images, whether intentional or not. This evening was full of the types of phrases I wanted to madly dash into a notebook, only to drop my pen so as not to miss the next line. I’m not sure if I will always have this much to say, but I will certainly be looking to attend more poetry events in the future if they are anything like this one. 

I review events for #SAL as part of the #SALSuperFanClub; in exchange for a free ticket, I offer my unbiased review.