(The book-length study devoted to the author, Gerald Vizen...)
The book-length study devoted to the author, Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition lays the groundwork essential for understanding his complex work. Kimberly M. Blaeser begins with an examination of Vizenor's concept of Native American oral culture and his unique incorporation of oral tradition in the written word. She then explicates Vizenor's method of linking the traditional oral aesthetic with reader-response theories and details Vizenor's efforts to produce a form of writing that resists static meaning, involves the writer in the creation of the literary moment and invites political action. She also explores the place of Vizenor's work within the larger contexts of contemporary tribal literature, Native American scholarship, and critical theory.
(Absentee Indians and Other Poems evokes personal yet univ...)
Absentee Indians and Other Poems evokes personal yet universal experiences of the places that Native Americans call home, their family and national histories, and the emotional forces that help forge Native American identities. These are poems of exile, loss, and the celebration of that which remains. Anchored in the physical landscape, Blaeser's poetry finds the sacred in those ordinary actions that bind a community together. As Blaeser turns to the mysterious passage from sleeping to wakefulness, or from nature to spirit, she reveals not merely the movement from one age or place to another, but the movement from experience to vision.
(Through detailed images of ancestors and wilderness place...)
Through detailed images of ancestors and wilderness places, through renderings of story, tribal history, and family ritual, award-winning Anishinaabe author Kimberly Blaeser explores our mesh of tangled origins. Apprenticed to Justice is a collection of vividly rendered lyrical and narrative poems that trace the complex inheritances of 21st century Native America.
(Copper Yearning invests itself in a compassionate dual vi...)
Copper Yearning invests itself in a compassionate dual vision - bearing witness to the lush beauty of our intricately woven environments and to the historical and contemporary perils that threaten them. Kimberly Blaeser's fourth collection of poetry deftly reflects her Indigenous perspective and global awareness. Through vividly rendered images, the poems dwell among watery geographies, alive to each natural nuance, alive also to the uncanny. Set in fishing boats, in dreams, in prisons, in memory, or in far-flung countries like Bahrain, the pieces sing of mythic truths and of the poignant everyday injustices. But, whether resisting threats to effigy mounds or inhabiting the otherness of river otter, ultimately they voice a universal longing for a place of balance, a way of being in the world - for the ineffable.
Kimberly Marie Blaeser is an American English and comparative literature educator, author, who writes about what life is like as a Native American in contemporary times. She does this, through her poetry, essays, short fiction, journalism, and scholarly articles.
Background
Kimberly Marie Blaeser was born in 1955, in Billings, Montana, United States. She is a daughter of Anthony Peter Blaeser and Marlene Dawn Blaeser, maiden name Antell. Growing up on White Earth reservation, northern Minnesota, Kimberly, her brother and cousins "fed on" stories: around campfires, in fish houses, over the kneading of bread dough they heard stories and a mixture of songs. Often the voices of aunties and uncles would fight one another to get the "true" accounts patched together like a crazy quilt. In the dark by kerosene lantern, their parents or older cousins would read aloud the back sections of The Farmer where spooky tales sometimes lurked amid the milder children's poems and stories. Sometimes they listened through the heating vents for family gossip they weren't meant to hear.
Education
Kimberly Blaeser studied at Mahnomen High School. She received a Bachelor of Arts from the College of St. Benedict in 1977, a Master of Arts (1982), and a Doctor of Philosophy (1990) from the University of Notre Dame.
From 1977 to 1979, Kimberly Blaeser was a reporter and photographer at Thief River Falls Times. She was a member of a teaching fellow at the University of Notre Dame from 1981 to 1984, of an information systems staff in 1983. She worked as a reporter at Daily Courier News in 1986-1987.
Kimberly Blaeser has been working at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee since 1987. She was a lecturer (1987-1988), instructor (1988-1990), assistant professor of English, and comparative literature (1990-1994). Since 1995, Kimberly Blaeser is an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where she teaches Creative Writing and Native American Literatures.
She also worked at Indian Relief, Inc. (board of directors, 1983-1984); Native American Literary Prize Commission (1988-1991); Native American International Prize in Literature (a member of the governing board, 1991-1994).
Although she writes in many different genres, Blaeser is most noted for two books, Trailing You, an award-winning 1994 collection of poems, and her critical study of fellow White Earth author Gerald Vizenor, Gerald Vizenor, Writing in the Oral Tradition, who was one of the most prolific Native American writers of the twentieth century.
She is the author of three collections of poetry: Apprenticed to Justice, Absentee Indians and Other Poems, and Trailing You. She focused her early poetry on giving a voice to Native Americans. She has recently introduced themes of family, nature, spirit, and motherhood into her work, as well as expanding into picto-poems, which were derived from ekphrastic poems, poetic descriptions of art used to expand its meaning. Blaeser's poems have a strong sense of history and the way in which history never "ends" but just becomes part of the never-ending past. One has a sense when reading her work, of a continuous stream, rather than a sharply demarcated past, present, and future.
She is the editor of Stories Migrating Home: A Collection of Anishinaabe Prose and Traces in Blood, Bone, and Stone: Contemporary Ojibwe Poetry. Blaeser is currently at work on a collection of "Picto-Poems" which brings her nature and wildlife photography together with poetry to explore intersecting ideas about Native place, nature, preservation, and spiritual sustenance.
Kimberly Blaeser says poetry has changed her own way of connecting with the world. In her work, she examines how differences are merged, by superimposing varied and oppositional elements. She accomplishes this by focusing on the little things that occur every day, thus expressing, through her writing, a celebration of life's common moments.
Some critics say her writing is informed by the natural world, but Blaeser is informed not only about nature or the wilderness but about city life as well. She knows as much about the complexities and challenges of living in an urban setting as she does about living in the country and on the reservation. She also recognizes the dichotomy present in the general struggle to maintain a relationship with her Native culture while attempting to build bridges to that outside, urban, white society. She often does this by creating images that help her explore her ambivalent emotions, such as her description of her jewelry. She writes, for instance, that on one arm, she wears the traditional Native jewelry of turquoise and silver; while on the other arm, she wears traditional European jewelry - diamonds and gold and a brand-name watch. Thus, she becomes a living metaphor for the different cultural forces that often pull in opposite directions.
Quotations:
"I experience things in a new shining way through the gift of poetry. It gives you a language for the ineffable, a gesture for things we think and wonder about deeply but are unable to state clearer. It's the pathway, not the destination, that makes poetry joyful."
Membership
American Studies Association
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United States
Modern Language Association
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United States
Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures
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United States
Minnesota Chippewa Tribe
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United States
Personality
Kimberly Blaeser's interests include wilderness expeditions, wildlife, and nature photography. To feed these passions she spends part of every year in a remote cabin adjacent to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northeastern Minnesota.
Interests
wilderness expeditions, wildlife, and nature photography
Connections
Kimberly Blaeser married Leonard Joseph Wardzala on August 17, 1985. They have two children - Gavin Leonard and Amber.