After and Before the Lightning

by Simon J. Ortiz

Highway 18 between Mission and Okreek, South Dakota, is a stretch of no more than eighteen miles, but late at night or in a blizzard it seems endless. "It feels like being somewhere between South Dakota and 'there,'" says Simon Ortiz, "perhaps at the farthest reaches of the galaxy." Acoma Pueblo poet Ortiz spent a winter in South Dakota, teaching at Sinte Gleska College on the Rosebud Lakota Sioux Reservation. The bitter cold and driving snow of a prairie winter were a reality commanding his attention through its absolute challenge to survival and the meaning of survival. Ortiz's way of dealing with the hard elements of winter was to write After and Before the Lightning, prose and verse poems that were his response to that long season between the thunderstorms of autumn and spring. "I needed a map of where I was and what I was doing in the cosmos," he writes. In these poems, which he regards as a book-length poetic work, he charts the vast spaces of prairie and time that often seem indistinguishable. As he faces the reality of winter on the South Dakota reservation, he also confronts the harsh political reality for its Native community and culture and for Indian people everywhere. "Writing this poetry reconnected me to the wonder and awe of life," Ortiz states emphatically. Readers will feel the reality of that wonder and awe—and the cold of that South Dakota winter—through the gentle ferocity of his words.

Genres: Poetry

127 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Simon J. Ortiz is a Puebloan writer of the Acoma Pueblo tribe, and one of the key figures in the second wave of what has been called the Native American Renaissance. He is one of the most respected and widely read Native American poets.

After a three-year stint in the U.S. military, Ortiz enrolled at the University of New Mexico. There, he discovered few ethnic voices within the American literature canon and began to pursue writing as a way to express the generally unheard Native American voice that was only beginning to emerge in the midst of political activism.

Two years later, in 1968, he received a fellowship for writing at the University of Iowa in the International Writers Program.

In 1988, he was appointed as tribal interpreter for Acoma Pueblo, and in 1989 he became First Lieutenant Governor for the pueblo. In 1982, he became a consulting editor of the Pueblo of Acoma Press.

Since 1968, Ortiz has taught creative writing and Native American literature at various institutions, including San Diego State, the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, Navajo Community College, the College of Marin, the University of New Mexico, Sinte Gleska University, and the University of Toronto.

Ortiz is a recipient of the New Mexico Humanities Council Humanitarian Award, the National Endowment for the Arts Discovery Award, the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Writer's Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and was an Honored Poet recognized at the 1981 White House Salute to Poetry.

In 1981, From Sand Creek: Rising In This Heart Which Is Our America, received the Pushcart Prize in poetry.

Ortiz received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Returning the Gift Festival of Native Writers (the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers) and the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas (1993)

Reviews

[Heather Cox · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a teenager, I had this obsession with understanding Native American and Sioux People's histories more than anything. Maybe it's b/c my parents spent time teaching on a Native American Rezervation when they were younger... who knows? But my passion was so intense, that my highschool English teacher took me aside and told me about this book, just b/c she knew I would really appreciate it. And that I did. This book really takes you to what Winter on Pine Ridge Rezervation is like. Seriously, have a blanket near by when you're reading it. But I guess I also found this book insightful b/c the quiet and isolation is transparent but underneath the ice, you're the fire of the historical injustices suffered and the continual endurance of old and consistent repercussions of that history is undeniable in the poetry.

[Octavia Cade · Rating 3 out of 5]

This poetry collection was written during the time when the author spent a winter teaching in South Dakota - as such, it's impregnated with impressions of the prairie in winter. There's a lot of imagery spent on snow and wind and stars and blue light, and even more on driving through this frigid landscape. (I didn't count how many poems involved roads or highways, but there were a lot.) This meant that, even though I liked the poems individually, they could sometimes feel repetitive and began to blur together.

The poems I liked best were often focused less on that icy landscape in itself, and more on social issues such as poverty, especially as it related to farming and food and heating in such chilly environments. There was a paragraph-long reflection on Alice Walker's writing that made me gasp (you can find it immediately following the January 18 marker), and a small handful of poems about space exploration and the Challenger explosion that I found particularly affecting.

[Dominique Nicole Marsalek · Rating 5 out of 5]

LOVE. Poetry as beautiful as the Dakotas.