Bone Light

by Orlando White

Overview

Orlando White explores language from a Diné (Navajo) perspective. One idea that interests him, inspires him to think and write, is the idea of the English language as a forgotten language.

Imagine if we as a people, all people in the United States, are speaking an Indigenous language rather than English; that the English language exists merely as a language of the colonial past. White explores and experiments with this particular colonizing language, because that language remains a kind of cultural/intellectual/social threat to Indigenous thought, as English was imposed to dehumanize Indigenous peoples from their culture, language, and consciousness.

White's Diné perspective poetically reveals audience notion of linguistic dehumanization within the Bone Light volume. Non-Natives, throughout American history, have documented the Indigenous Americas using the dominant written word of English. Thus, as an artist, White writes what he writes to document as well, but also to create something a bit more beautiful (intriguing) than harmful (erasing). White is not attempting critique of the English language; he is working with it to gain a better understanding of viewpoints, veritably creating a relationship by way of exploring language.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781597091350
Publisher:	Red Hen Press
Publication date:	02/15/2009
Edition description:	1
Pages:	64
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Orlando White is Diné (Navajo) from Sweetwater, Arizona. He is of the Zuni Water Edge People and born for the Mexican Clan. He received his A.A. and B.F.A. in creative writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico and his M.F.A. from Brown University. He is a recipient of a Truman Capote Creative Writing Fellowship, a Zora Neale Hurston award from Naropa University, and many other poetry scholarships from the Idyllwild Arts, Napa Valley, and Taos summer writing programs. He has been involved with many mentor programs and has taught creative writing to elementary, high school, and college students in New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, New York, and Rhode Island. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Red Ink Magazine, To Topos, 26 Magazine, and Ur Vox. 

Table of Contents

CONTENTS  TO SEE LETTERS                                                                                                       7.

THE i IS A CRICKET                                                                                                  11.

 BONE LIGHT                                                                                                                                                  12. SENTENCE                                                                                                                 14.

ATS’ÍÍSTS’IN                                                                                                              15.

FILL IN THE BLANK                                                                                                 16.

LIGHT BULB EYE                                                                                                      18.

DISSOLVE                                                                                                                  19.

CIRCLE SHAPE                                                                                                          20.

OPEN DARK                                                                                                              21.

HUMAN CLOCK                                                                                                        22.

FROM SKIN TO BONE                                                                                               24.

BLEACH INK                                                                                                             26.

BLANK CIRCLE                                                                                                         27.

ON THE ZERO’S EYE                                                                                                            28.

SKIN OF LETTER                                                                                                       29.

SKELETON                                                                                                                 30.

SQUARE LIPS                                                                                                                        32.

IMPERATIVE                                                                                                             34.

BONE MILK                                                                                                               37.

IMAGES OF MYSELF                                                                                                 39.

BLANK SKULL                                                                                                          40.

LOWER CASE iAND j                                                                                                41.

                                                                       

i WITHOUT j                                                                                                               42.

i-j                                                                                                                                 43.

ANALOGY                                                                                                                  44.

i NEXT TO j                                                                                                                 45.

ARS POETICA                                                                                                                        46.

DOT FLY                                                                                                                    48.

DISCOURSE                                                                                                               49.

MEDITATION                                                                                                             51.

QUIETUS                                                                                                                    52.

WRIT                                                                                                                           53.

Editorial Reviews

Orlando White's Bone Light recreates poetry from the molecular level.
His vision presents language letter by letter: as body, as recipe, as
originary myth, as admonition. Here, poetry moves stealthily through
the smallest increments, in the "pause between ink and letter when
words are silent, unclothed." In that bare space, poems keep time
through their own arcane measure and the reader sees a "human
clock"emerge, one whose face is as much halo as empty zero.   This
astonishing writing dissects language with surgical and magical
precision. White peels back our assumptions like a skin and gives us
the irradiated, irreducible light of the bone.

Elizabeth Robinson

Orlando White's poetry glimmers with Diné notions of “thought creating thought” while re-configuring saad (language) into floating archipelagos of states which mutate into flashes of images that compel and startle. His work then peels forth a new perception of what language might be if we eliminate our own desires to maintain stasis in a changed world. Bone Light is an occasion marking the illumination of the body’s silence, the blank areas in which our breathing shadows the stains of letters punched onto the surface of a blank page, where the poet pages back a blank sound, filling it with the “open dark”  as he  “amputates one letter to fix another” so that we too may be changed in the act of the recoding of language.   - Sherwin Bitsui

From the Publisher

"Everything I write requires this: Alphabet." A child sees letters first, "shape distinguishing itself from its background," but soon we lose the innocence of that first encounter to ideas of sound, sequence, and sense, some fixed order separating right from wrong. In this debut, White, a Diné (Navajo), never gives up the innocence of the icons: the stars he saw in his rattled head took the shape of the Alphabet, and "years later, my fascination for letters resulted in poems." White tries to remain true to the core, the bones, of language. His hope is to explore an indigenous thought that has been corrupted by the cultural, intellectual, and social threat that English has imposed. He thus experiments with line, space, and syntax: "A man in a black suit with a zero/ for a head follows me. He carries a gun/ shaped like language; wants me written/ and dead on the page." Such original, and even daring, ideas are clearly not intended for every reader and not meant for every collection, but for those who are up to the challenge, White's poetry will provide a curious twist.
—Louis McKee

Library Journal