SACRAMENTAL LANGUAGE RITUAL IN THE POETRY OF LOUISE ERDRICH

As an intensely personal genre, poetry intimately reveals Louise Erdrich\u27s voice as her well-known fiction does not. Evident in that voice are elements of the mosaic of cultural experiences that comprise Erdrich\u27s life: Catholicism, German ancestry, working class, university education, and Turtle Mountain Chippewa. Erdrich\u27s poetry is her first published work, her own writing without the collaborative effort and editing of her husband, Michael Dorris (Modoc). While some of Erdrich\u27s poems garner their cultural rhetoric from differing points of view and values, most exhibit the variety of experiences that result from marginalization inherent in the omnipresence of race in North American society