I remember when poetry giant (and neighbor) Robert Bly was enshrined as the first poet laureate of the state of Minnesota. “OK,” he told me,” but I’m not going to do anything.” Nor did he, aside from carrying on his global poetry impact.
Heid Erdrich happily did not offer the same response to the City of Minneapolis and the Loft Literary Center when they asked for applicants for the first-ever Minneapolis poet laureate. Not only were deep artistic experience and credibility required, which Heid dominates, but the Loft required certain very specific public obligations that might have intimidated lesser beings.
Heid is the perfect poet to fulfill them, smart as a whip, clever as a coyote, committed as an angel to illuminating our shared life on Mother Earth. The neighborhood and city are hugely lucky to have her reverence for words, word play, word magic, humor and spirit in our city’s ceremonial life for the next year.
The daughter of teachers Ralph and Rita Erdrich, Heid grew up mostly in Wahpeton, North Dakota, near her mother’s Turtle Mountain reservation, where her family is enrolled. She attended Dartmouth College, Johns Hopkins for an M.A. and sneaked in a Ph.D. from Union Institute.
She and her husband John Burke joined her sisters Louise and Angie in the Kenwood neighborhood from which the extended family set out to enlighten the city, state, nation and planet on Anishinaabe and other native languages, speech, values, humor, arts and more.
Poetry is Heid’s major medium. She is the author of “Little Big Bully” (Penguin, 2020), for which she won the prestigious 2022 Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry awarded by the Library of Congress, “Curator of Ephemera at the New Museum for Archaic Media” (Michigan State University Press, 2017) and four other collections, for which she received two Minnesota Book Awards as well as numerous other fellowships and awards. A highly valued teacher, she has taught in colleges and universities around the country, and as a committed advocate for native arts helped found All My Relations Gallery, produced short plays and films, curated many exhibitions of Native American Art and was on the advisory board for the massively influential “Hearts of Our People” exhibit of Native American women’s art at Mia, the Smithsonian and elsewhere.
On January 8, she will open the new City Council year with an original poem. I am not at all sure the Council has any idea what’s coming its way. And on January 18, the Loft Literary Center at Open Book will host a public celebration for Heid from 6:00-8:00 p.m. I’ll be there!
