SOURCE: Wild, Peter. “Welch's Poetry.” In James Welch, pp. 9-24. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University, 1983.

In the following excerpt, Wild highlights the tendency of Welch's poetry to avoid an overly political tone.

Welch's Poetry

In his poem “Toward Spider Springs” (Going for the Rain [New York: Harper and Row, 1976], p. 25), Simon Ortiz writes:

Our baby, his mother, and I were trying to find the right road. … We were trying to find a place to start all over but couldn't. 

As the lines imply, Ortiz often blames white technological culture for its painfully disruptive impact on Native Americans, now displaced persons caught in a no man's land. As a solution, he advocates withdrawal into traditional ways. Granted, as Paula Gunn Allen points out (“A Stranger in My Own Life: Alienation in American Indian Prose and Poetry”), alienation perhaps is the major wrecking bar of contemporary Indian life. Yet as...