Denise Low, Ph.D., former Poet Laureate of Kansas, is winner of the Red Mountain Press
Editor’s Choice Award, among other honors. She is a free-lance writer/editor and teaches for Baker University’s School of Professional and Graduate Studies. She is a founding member of Indigenous Native Poets. Denise Low does individual consulting and editing, as well as professional workshops and readings. Her writing blog has over 600 entries.
AWP Panel Presentation Text for Feb. 8, 2024, KC Convention Center
A More Perfect Union in Extreme Times: AWP Kansas Poets Laureate Panel Outline
1:45pm – 3:00pm on Thursday Location: Room 2502A, Kansas City Convention Center, Level 2
Few people realize Kansas was designated by the U.S. government as “Indian Territory” before Oklahoma. Many eastern tribal nations had reservations in eastern Kansas, with corridors west into the high plains for buffalo hunting. During the Civil War, the First Indian Home Guard was a regiment of Delawares and other Indigenous people who fought against slavery. Kansas was a refuge for Oklahoma tribal people who allied with the Union, not the Confederacy. After the war, most reservations in Kansas, except four, were terminated and most, not all, of their populations were pushed to Oklahoma. Many families in the eastern third of Kansas have Indigenous traditions. This occluded history informs the poems for this presentation of selections from The Turtle’s Beating Heart, a memoir from the University of Nebraska Press, and House of Grace, House of Blood, forthcoming this fall from the University of Arizona Press. Selections are posted on my blog for this reading, http://www.deniselow.blogspot.com
Undocumented Stories
*A history lesson, I am four:
an old White man rides into town
looming on a horse-drawn wagon.
Hooves clatter on brick cobbles.
His wrinkled face is a museum,
a frontier relic. His parched cheeks
and creased fists grasping reins
show time’s tracks in flesh.
*
A man living in western Kansas tells me this story:
The village was by the Mississippi.
When the killing ended, two toddlers
cried under a cookpot. An army recruit
did not bayonet the girls but instead
defied guns trained at his back.
He took them home to his wife.
The soldier was his grandfather,
the younger baby became his mother.
*
My Irish-and-German grandmothers
recount worries of the world wars.
They describe no rubber, no steel.
One leaves diamonds, the other lace.
*
My Christian grandfather urges
me to rise early in the morning,
“Atone. Say your prayers.
Forget our Indian past. It is over.”
The Lenape grandfather stares
at me from the mirror at daybreak.
I cannot escape his eyes. We know
the continuing grief of Gnadenhutten.
Geography Lesson: Diaspora
Some Lenape refugees settle upstream from the Little Muskingum River
site of the Gnadenhutten massacre.
Some are my relatives.
Some travel to Canada
Some return to mountains of New Jersey
Nowhere are they welcome.
My family is driven west to a Kansas farm
until they are chased off by the Klan
to Kansas City, Turtle Hill,
always refugees.
Trails of My Relatives: Ohio to Kansas
*
[A forest trail runs to my twice-great-
grandparents’ farm, their apple orchard,
a Lenape settlement on Sugar Creek
in Ohio, beyond the reach of militia.
When Whites arrive my relatives
sell corn and apples, buy land deeds,
dress in fitted, sewn shirts at census time.
Mark graves with stones, not crosses.]
*
In Kansas, bushwhackers rob
homesteads, shovel “live coals
from the fireplace onto mattresses,
setting fire to their [Lenape] cabins.”
Veterans of the Indian Home Guard,
2nd Regiment-Delaware company,
return to more violence at home:
war on women, children, and elders.
The abolitionist governor arrives
from the Civil War and seizes
Lenape cornfields. He destroys
the Big House, a place of prayers.
The governor uses the scrap lumber
for a pig pen. Charred spars rise
over emptied Delaware lands.
He hopes no one will remember this theft.
*
Great-Grandfather plants apples
for cider, raises corn and hogs.
He avoids the tough railroad workers,
roughneck oilmen, and local cowboys.
Great-Grandmother carries a derringer
in her pocketbook. She always wears a coat
and never enters a church. On her gravestone
they etch a floral beadwork design. No cross.
A Mixed-Blood’s Questions
Which hand do I choose? So quick am I
to say the clean one. Not the bloody one
that prevailed. Only blameless martyrs
made my body, I say. Not brutes.
Which grandfather rides a wagon
on red-brick streets and never arrives?
Which grandmother sets aside sewing,
banks embers, and cannot sleep?
Both Lenapes and Whites live in
wooden frame houses. Both fight
Southern slave holders. Both tend
apple orchards and homesteads.
They farm corn, beans, and squash—
plants alive in my flesh. Whose
bodies are untainted? What blood
passes to me only in acts of love?
House of Grace, House of Blood
These white ribs are crossbeams.
Prayers are breezes blowing through lungs.
Two nests of my knuckles and phalanges
center each grasp each hunger.
Ears are portals for hearing pleas
and scriptures— words of possibilities.
Eyes are sentries judging friend or not
and who may be safe in this house.
This soft tongue is sensor of flavors
singer of memories and an organ of thirst.
This heart powers blood through flesh
also anger— the fierce kindling of murder.
Scent of mother’s milk is the first miracle—
the body’s red streams turned white and sweet.
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NEW BOOK! from Meadowlark Press, JIGSAW PUZZLING: ESSAYS IN A TIME OF PESTILENCE. Online discount 20% off. Click on this link: → PAYPAL LINK HERE
The 15 essays in this book document the pestilence that impacted our entire world. Low also explores the pop culture of jigsaw puzzlers while reflecting on art, geography, history, and more. She considers mosaics, reassembled pottery shards, play as rehearsal for life, and more. PRAISE FOR Jigsaw Puzzling: “What is a sane, reasonable response to an insane, unreasonable Pandemic? Unlike some of us who lurched into bread baking, home renovation, or exploring the life of the hermit, Denise Low instead challenged a world of logic and symmetry by setting out to master the domain of the jigsaw puzzle. This is a realm of surety: logic within defined boundaries. Solving a puzzle demands concentration and leads to a higher contemplation of morality and ethics, as well. Denise Low has brilliantly accomplished this unfolding of the simple into the multifarious with insight and charm.” —Sandy McIntosh, author of Plan B: A Poet’s Survivors Manual
This site has order information for out-of-stock books by Denise Low: Wing, Shadow Light, Thailand J. Scroll down or use the Poetry Books tab.
Poetry Unbound’s audio (and transcript) reading of “Walking with My Delaware Grandfather,” is by Pádraig Ó Tuama. The poem is in Mélange Block, which is out of stock at SPD; but I have some copies to sell directly. Contact me at kansaspoetry [at] gmail [dot] com.
Denise Low is a co-translator (among 30+) of this amazing publication, the last untranslated Greek epic, by Nonnus of 
Panopolis, Tales of Dionysus (umich.edu) . Thanks to Stan Lombardo and William Levitan for corralling poets to individually translate sections. The Online journal Blackbird will publish an excerpt and an essay about the translation process in December, 2022.
Purchase WING: Poems by Denise Low 
Wing:Poems, is from Red Mountain Press (2021).
Imagined and real worlds intersect as lyric poet Denise Low dances between mortals and the dead, humans and animals, her European and Indigenous heritages. Real pandemics and wildfires set the stage as she illumines connections between the rational and intuitive. This former Poet Laureate of Kansas mourns the lost buffalo herds and celebrates the irresistible and beautiful material world of art, from Renaissance paintings to recent works by Nick Cave, Julie Buffalohead, and Peter Max. History is a living entity in the works: English lords court on teacups; a spirit woman walks Cimarron Breaks. Two hands and vestigial limbs—including wings—are tools for understanding the dualities of existence. Low’s rich work sings a healing song, knitting opposites together into a whole. Publication date:4/1/2021, Red Mountain Press ISBN978-1-952204-10-4; SKU #: F18A, 74 pages, 3 oz. Available at a discount from the author, 50 copies available.
Shadow Light: Poems, winner of the Red Mountain 
Press Editor’s Choice Award, a SPD Recommended Book
BUY ON PAYPAL CLICK HERE
SHADOW LIGHT shifts poetics into the natural world–laws of optics. Words are lenses to sort lineages—Lenape (Delaware), European, Cherokee—into harmony. This beautiful assemblage uses inter-textual dialogues, silences, and explosions of images to celebrate an unlikely personal and historical survival.
“Denise Low’s SHADOW LIGHT extends her poetics to the realm of natural magic: Lyric embedded with Story. History embedded with Myth. English challenged with Native languages. Imagery enriched with Sound. Pop Culture meshed with ritual Culture. The built Environment genuflecting to the natural Environment. SHADOW LIGHT is masterful poetry.”—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish
Online discount for Moods in Poetry: A Guidebook for Writers by Denise Low, (retail $16.95) for $11 email mammothpubs@gmail; or order here:
PayPal for single copies, Multiple copies Email See book details on this site.
A Casino Bestiary: Poems by Denise Low is available
Spartan Press of Kansas City ONLY A FEW COPIES REMAIN of this small-run edition. Keven Rabas, Poet Laureate of Kansas: “A Casino Bestiary continues Denise Low’s 
exploration of the frontier West, what it means for Indigenous and settler citizens, its myths and boundaried realities. This is the most personal of Low’s books, full of wit, sting, surprise.Denise Low-Weso, a prolific polymath, is the author of 25 books of poetry and prose. She has a poet’s heart and a scholar’s mind, and she sounds the depths of where she’s researched and been and lived, capturing moments [in Casino Bestiary] with Wm S. Burroughs, Thelonious Monk, and rooms of ghosts.”
- Poetry Unbound’s audio (and transcript) reading of “Walking with My Delaware Grandfather,” is by Pádraig Ó Tuama. The poem is in Mélange Block, which is out of stock at SPD; but I have some copies to sell directly. Contact me at kansaspoetry [at] gmail [dot] com.
- Hear a story from Jackalope (Red Mountain Press) on High Plains Public Radio “Jackalope Walks into a Truck Stop.”
- Now available: art history from the University of Nebraska Press by Denise Low, Northern Cheyenne Ledger Art by Fort Robinson Breakout Survivors, a Kansas Notable Book, co-authored with Ramon Powers, 2020. Here is information and an interview: Indigenous Art As Powerful Resilience and Resistance: Insight from Denise Low | Lawrence Public Library (lplks.org)
- See the archival catalogue of Denise Low manuscripts and papers at the Kenneth Spencer Research and Special Collections Library, New American Poetry Collection,
- See Poetry Out Loud video clip and featured poems by Denise Low
Thank you to Shirley Braunlich for this review essay about Jackalope, A Casino Bestiary, and Turtle’s Beating Heart: One Family’s Story of Lenape Survival.
The University of Nebraska Press published a memoir about Denise Low’ Native grandfather in: Bison Books-The Turtle’s Beating Heart.Watch for exciting news about an edition coming in 2023! Kirkus Reviews writes: “An engagingly written mix of research, reportage, and memoir, infused with the passion of discovery.” Library Journal writes: “Readers interested in the 20th-century American Indian experience will find this to be a valuable account.” In the Minn. Star-Tribune Pamela Miller writes: Low does Americans with Indian ancestry a valuable service by illuminating the unique and often terrible circumstances and choices their forebears faced.” In Forward Reviews Letitia Montgomery Rodgers writes: “An accomplished poet, Low’s well-honed prose flows with lyric intensity. In Kansas, a place ‘where eternity has a real valence,’ she searches for documentary evidence of her ancestors’ passage through history and for the timeless threads of culture—familial and tribal—that could offer an unbroken legacy.”
Low reads from The Turtle’s Beating Heart at the Virginia Book Festival, with Lulu Miller 
and Ben Kessler: Soundcloud Audio. See her Academy of American Poets discussion .
A book of short fiction, Jackalope, is from Red Mountain Press (Santa Fe, 2016), also available from Small Press Distribution or this website: PAY PAL – JACKALOPE. See a video of Jackalope reading in KC. Cream City Review nominated Low’s flash fiction piece “A Jackalope Walks into an Indian Bar” for a Pushcart Prize.
Her book of poetry Melange Block (Red Mountain Press 2014), explores geological scales of elegies, celebrations, and American Indian and European histories. She has won three Kansas Notable Book awards, five Pushcart Prize nominations, the Lichtor Poetry Prize, fellowships from the Ks. Arts Commission, The Newberry Library and the NEH, and Roberts Foundation Poetry Prize, 2nd place.
Online publications are an essay on the poet Ronald Johnson, an 
essay on the Black Mountain-related poet Kenneth Irby in Jacket2, an online chapbook In the Direction of North with paintings by Thomas Pecore Weso and new poems, Numero Cinq, May, 2016. Excerpts from Melange Block are featured on the We Wanted To Be Writers website. An interview is in the Museum of Americana literary journal. See her Poetry Foundation biography and sample poems; and Academy of American Poets biography.
Denise Low 