This poem and introduction were created as the final project for the Native American Literature class taught by Heid E. Erdrich at the University of Montana in the Spring Semester 2025.
This poem, "The Shore," drew inspiration from many sources. First and foremost, the original concept of a concrete poem engaging with the space of the page and the shape of the words came to me after reading the New Poets of Native Nations anthology compiled by Heid E. Erdrich in 2018. More specifically, the poems "Warming," "Her/My Arctic," "The Weight of the Arch Distributes the Girth of the Other," and "She Travels" by dg nanouk okpik served as my foundation. Other poems in this anthology engaging directly with the forms of language and their relationships to water include "The First Water is the Body" by Natalie Diaz, "Song Syntax Cycle" by Trevino L. Brings Plenty, "Blackwater Stole My Pronoun" by Julian Talamantez Brolaski, and excerpts from WHEREAS by Layli Long Soldier, among others.
My vision was to find a way to make words move like water, or like things moving inside water. One of the most compelling and complex aspects of water is its versatility and movement: as streams, rivers, lakes, glaciers, oceans, vapor, aquifers, tsunamis, waterfalls, bays, clouds, swamps, floes, hurricanes, geysers, let alone inside living beings. Indigenous perspectives on the importance of thinking and acting with and for and in water — particularly as we are experiencing new forms of colonial blowback vis-a-vis climate change, itself so closely linked to water in the form of floods, droughts, and humidity — have been documented by many writers in recent years including Ailton Krenak, Nick Estes, and Amitav Ghosh. How do I begin to wrap my head around water?
At first I envisioned this project taking shape with physical pieces of paper, which might fold, spin, or slide to create movement. I was thinking of my experience in the fall with UM's Bear Scratch letterpress, donated by legendary printer Peter Koch whose work with Debra Magpie Earling on the various editions of The Lost Journals of Sacajewea provided further inspiration not only for its contemplation of water but also its use of color and faded text. However, I'm not a very crafty person, and I realized I would have more versatility with a digital attempt. Thus, the poem before us came into being.
My experience with JavaScript is limited at best, and proved to be one of the toughest challenges for this work. As anyone who writes code of any kind will know, it is extremely unforgiving and even the smallest imperfection can cause baffling issues. Clicking on the moon will not only change its phase but also change the capitalized pronouns in the text. I hoped to keep each pronoun cycling independently, but this ended up being beyond my capabilities in a narrow timeframe; instead, each cycle will gradually merge all of the pronouns into a single form. I decided that this could create its own "accidental" meaning and narrative to the interactive poem. Clicking on the sun or star will reveal or hide certain words, named in the code nightWords. As mentioned earlier, these were greatly inspired by the sacred or silent words expressed in Earling's Journals. Clicking on the river will subtly change its shape as well as the whitespace or padding on each side of the poem's text, evoking the ebbing and flowing of a tide; this too was more finicky than I had hoped, and I wasn't fully happy with its results. I experimented with writing the poem as both two columns and two columns of a table, and ultimately settled on the latter to keep the lines more closely aligned.
A final interactive element is the gradual "accumulation" of words beneath the river; after 24 cumulative clicks anywhere on the page, the poem "floods" itself. On the one hand, I didn't like the linear aspect of this timeline, in contrast with concepts of circularity and renewal which permeate most understandings of water. On the other hand, I wanted to evoke a sense of urgency and consequence to water, to acknowledge its overwhelming power over the earth and its inhabitants. I was inspired by the history of Glacial Lake Missoula, whose natural ice dam would periodically break and cause cataclysmic, canyon-birthing floods. These too are parts of the natural cycles of water, although human-created dams present their own unique problems. This element seemed to be a crowd pleaser when I presented this poem to the class, so I'm glad that it resonated with others.
Some lingering concerns with the poem involve accessibility, including on mobile devices. While most of the page is functional, the river and flood elements are awkward at best on these screens. In the future, I might try to address some of these concerns with further tweaks and additions to the code. It might be fun to consider what other kinds of poetry I can create using these digital and interactive modes of reading.
I hope you will enjoy this poem and contemplate all the ways in which we shape and are shaped by water.