Duane Niatum

Duane Niatum Poems

Duane Niatum Biography

Duane Niatum (McGinniss) (born 1938-) is a Native American poet, author and playwright of Klallam descent. Niatum is often cited as belonging to the second wave of what critic Kenneth Lincoln has termed the Native American Renaissance. After his parent's divorce, Niatum's Klallam grandfather became his surrogate father. After serving in the United States Navy, Niatum graduated with a B.A. from the University of Washington, completed work on a M.A at Johns Hopkins University, and earned a PhD from the University of Michigan in 1997. Niatum has taught at Johns Hopkins University, The Evergreen State College, the University of Washington, Eastern Washington University, Seattle Central Community College, Western Washington University, Northwest Indian College, and the University of Michigan. He was editor of the Native American Authors Program, Harper & Row Publishers.)

The Best Poem Of Duane Niatum

Consulting an Elder Poet on an Anti-War Poem

for Elizabeth Bishop


You said to me that day,
"There's nothing you can do,"
and spoke of Auden's line:
"Poetry makes nothing happen."
And though I honor you,
especially your poems,
the objects you dipped in light,
then, left in the rainbow,
let slip from our sight,
I admitted, diving out of self,
a sweet woman's white caress,
the hundreds of lives and places
in books, failed to counter confusion.

You did agree that it
was Socrates who said
to his Athenian friends
that governments are only
governments with many heads
and cannot think as one.
That history continues to show
how they swing from war
to peace and back again,
in one wide gallow-sweep
just as the pendulum
of the world's clocks
returned its towns to craters.

Now I must ask myself,
fifteen cobalt-blue years later,
if the dust of each new war
that settles in our bones,
and deadens a generation,
is no more than negatives
of the Kennedys, King, and Lennon,
has less weight than what
we felt the day the Apollo
spaceship landed on the moon,
and Auden's line is true,
then why did you to the end,
live with the dark,
sing into your ruin?

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