Translated by LOREN GOODMAN
In my town there’s a big rock
called Tum Ab’aj.
The sun and the moon take care of it.
This month, we’re featuring two authors with new poems from Guatemala and Greece.
Curated by: STEPHANIE SOSA
In August 2013, Amherst College acquired one of the most comprehensive collections of books by Native American Indian authors ever assembled by a private collector. This collection, from Pablo Eisenberg, consists of about 1,500 books that include poetry, fiction, history, philosophy, and many other works. Even texts by some of the first Native American Indian writers to be published in their lifetimes, such as Samson Occom, William Apess, and Elias Boudinot, are a part of this vast collection. The Robert Frost Library seeks to show as much as possible of the history of Native American writing and philosophy in their exhibit: The Younghee Kim-Wait Pablo Eisenberg Native American Literature Collection.
S. TREMAINE NELSON interviews RON WELBURN
Ron Welburn is a Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he teaches American Literature, Native American Literature, and American Studies. His ancestors include Gingaskin and Assateague from the Delmarva Peninsula, Cherokee, Lenape, and African American. Professor Welburn received a B.A. in both Psychology and English from Lincoln University, an M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona, and a Ph.D. in American Studies from New York University.His research and teaching interests include ethnohistory of eastern Native America, cultural studies, and jazz studies. S. Tremaine Nelson spoke with Ron over the phone about poetry, New York City, and two authors whom they both very much admire, Ralph Ellison and Leslie Marmon Silko. Ron’s poems “Seeing in the Dark” and “When You Know a Hard Sky” appear in Issue 06 of The Common.
By RON WELBURN
for Francis Martin (Nauset/Nipmuc)
Blind at night in the forest,
you are right about fear and
what it does to you there,
how fluids and adrenaline fix the eyes
on what the mind cannot accept.
Maps are one way humans make sense of their environment. In this age of Google Earth, where a few mouse clicks call up a satellite image of almost any inch of the globe, it can be difficult to imagine a time when maps were often based as much on hearsay and guesswork as scientific surveying.
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