Hart, a former college professor, is a freelance writer and copyeditor. In this essay, she projects the theme of Rose's poem "For the White poets who would be Indian" onto the larger screen of ethno-poetics, the movement in poetry that inspired the writing of the poem.

The first impression a person might have after reading Wendy Rose's "For the White poets who would be Indian," might be that Rose has a dislike (or worse) for all white poets who write about Indians.

But this is not true. In an interview with Laura Coltelli (1985), Rose says that she has "no difficulty with people taking on an Indian persona and trying to imagine through their work what it would be like . . . to be a man or a woman in Indian society. Fine. As long as it's really clear that that's what it is—an act of imagination." What troubles...