Going for the rain: Poems

by Simon J. Ortiz

This is the seventh book in Harper & Row's Native American Publishing Program. "Going for the Rain" is a four-part cycle beginning in the Indian world, leaving it for awhile for a cross country journey through white America and returning at the end to its beginnings.

Genres: Poetry

112 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1976

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

[Maureen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't often read a whole book of poetry, cover to cover. However, I was curious about Simon Ortiz because I'd heard his wife, Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, lecture on her book An Indigenous Peoples History of the United States. That book is very powerful. Going for the Rain proved to be a book of the high caliber, also. The poems are the story of journeying through life. They are beautiful and surprising. Each one is a gem and what shines through them is a culture, a mysticism, a deep humanity and soulful love of place. Go for it!

[Mills College Library]

811.54 O778g 1976

[Katrinka · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5.

[Lux Devereaux]

Simon J. Ortiz is one of my fav writers. I've read a few of his books. Awesome. I love how he ties his experiences into his culture.