April is poetry month, when many people write a poem a day. Turns out February is haiku month, and my niece invited me to write a poem a day with her friends. We’ve had fun. Hearing a bit of each other’s lives each day for the month has been lovely, and I don’t want it to end. It’s a tender counterpoint to the stress flowing from the new administration.
I’ve just read Ponca poet Cliff Taylor’s latest self-published book of poems, The Creator’s Game: Poems celebrating the 30th Annual Ponca Powwow. The book captures the Northern Ponca’s celebration, which included an additional fourth day this year.
Taylor, who lives in Astoria, Ore., now, went home and camped with family. He built a sweat, saw old friends and made new ones. His poems describe all of that, and are easy to enjoy and familiar, accessible to a wide audience. They convey the joy he felt being at home in Niobrara.
The Creator’s Game is divided into each of the days of the gathering. Poems meander across meals, a story-gathering workshop Taylor gave, his meeting with the Ponca Elders Committee to discuss his upcoming books and a Cornhole tournament.
Poems captures the particular poignancy that living far from home carries. Taylor shares his experiences, bug bites and dreams, visiting the arbor with his father, and celebrating the regalia a friend has gathered to dance since the previous year.
In “Where’s Your Regalia,” while dancing a social dance together, an elder woman asks Taylor, who is 43, why he’s not dressed. She gives him permission, then direction, “‘You could get yourself a breechcloth,’ she says. ‘That could be your start.’”
Taylor has been a writer, storyteller and poet since he was a teenager in Nebraska.
He’s self-published several books, selling them across the Northwest and online.
Prior books include The Memory of Souls, a memoir of the Sundance, and a poetry collection, The Native Who Never Left. Prior to The Creator’s Game, Hyphen Press published Notes of An Indigenous Futurist in 2024. He has a new book, The Shining Hands of My Ponca Ancestors, coming out from North Dakota State University Press this fall.
You can find Cliff Taylor on Instagram and Facebook to hear him reading his work. Care warning: he writes and talks about the little people as helpers, a different perspective than Osages have.
Celebrating the Ponca powwow with Taylor made me think of Duane BigEagle, who is one of the many Osages who has also written about those beautiful moments together. Collected in an Osage Reconnection Zine that Chelsea Hicks and Aimee Inglis published in 2022, BigEagle travels similar ground.
In his poem “Inside Osage,” BigEagle, one of the founders of the Northern California Osage, says, “We find another land hidden here, glimpsed in the blue flash of a thunderstorm.”
“I feel it at the dances,
on the evening of the third day
during the last songs,
when the circle of women singers
stand up from their chairs
and sing behind the men.”
This moment sends drumsticks up like “beating wings of an eagle,” BigEagle says, and we know that sound, that moment.
I hope more Osages express themselves creatively, whether in poetry, visual arts, making our beautiful clothing, or the multiple ways we are blessed.
I’m sad to learn that our Morrell elder George Shannon passed. It’s sad to think about how much knowledge each of our elders takes with them, the stories we hoped to hear. Sending good wishes to his family.
