"You, too, might be reckoned by your bones": Kenzie Allen on Her Debut Poetry Collection, "Cloud Missives"

By RS Deeren on August 20, 2024

Kenzie Allen's forthcoming debut collection, Cloud Missives (Tin House), starts with what the poet calls an "invocation," a single poem that looks to "revive or reconvene one's connection to earth and to the self and to each other." These connections come from a cycle of construction and deconstruction, recovery and reclamation. Poems here highlight colonial oppression of Indigenous peoples. Others uncover the speaker's own power. Allen's training as an anthropologist, her identity as a first-generation descendant of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin, and her role as an educator inform these poems and bring to them a layer of life, much like the numerous generations of a family's past, present—and even future.

Cloud Missives is a promise, to the reader, the speaker, the poet, and every generation before and to come. A promise not just of what to expect from Allen's career, but a promise that the future will look back on this collection, and the time in which it was written—hopefully—with as much skillful attention as Allen has. Below, Allen and I discuss time, power, and finding oneself.

RS Deeren

Could you talk a little about the structure of Cloud Missives? It opens with the lone poem "Light Pollution," then poems are sectioned into PATHOLOGY, MANIFEST, LETTERS I DON'T SEND, and LOVE SONGS. What movements do you wish your readers to see as they make their way through these sections?

Kenzie Allen

Recently, I've asked folks what they call those lone poems, and the answers ranged from "proem" to "prologue poem" to "frontispiece" to "anything but proem." My favorite response to the question lately came from Millissa Kingbird (Anishinaabe – Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe), calling it a "harbinger poem." The augur of "Light Pollution" is the idea of constellations, the clearing away of industrialized noise, and an attempt to revive or reconvene one's connection to earth and to the self and to each other.

It took a while for me to understand this, but the book returns to that idea of revival and reclamation throughout each of its sections. In PATHOLOGY, we witness the burial site of memories and the body itself, the materials of the life and the potential story that explains or completes them. In MANIFEST comes a further reconstruction of self and identity, foiled or bordered on either side by the pop culture stereotypes or erased histories that suppressed it. In LETTERS, the speaker is reclaiming her power and legacy through inhabiting the harpy femme fatale she's been labeled. And in LOVE SONGS, what is regained is the wider world and one's place among it. To me, this is also a chronology of healing and renewal, starting from the aftermath and moving back into the past that caused it, reclaiming the history, reclaiming one's personhood and purpose, and then giving oneself back to community. Each of the sections or poems has an individual arc, that way, too.

RS Deeren

Throughout this collection, there is a sense of uncovering and recovery. Early on, in "Breaking Ground," the speaker has "left the world behind/to find the world still/sheltered in dark," where they wonder what it is of themselves they thought they might find. Poems like "Pathology," and "Forensics" work with these themes while later poems like "Convergent Evolution" and "Quiet as Thunderbolts" show a speaker who appears to have found answers. Maybe an unfair question: Does the speaker find what they are looking for?

Kenzie Allen

I love this question. And you're making me think that perhaps they do! By the time we get to the end of each section, there's a recognition of self and a gentleness toward self, established through this process of uncovering and recovering. But I think that might be the answer the speaker is seeking all along. It's not just about finding strength, it's about how that also includes coming to terms with limitations and opening up to new possibilities. How it wasn't enough to have found the self alone, the fuller journey was to have come to understand your place within the spokes of the great wheel. That you are part of a larger whole, and that you yourself are—and deserve to be—whole.

RS Deeren

At times, the collection makes conscious choices to work in, but also against, certain poetic forms, such as in "Elegy against Elegy" and "Love Song to Banish Another Love Song." What role does reclamation play in these poems and your broader work as a poet?

Kenzie Allen

I've been very interested in the idea of "open forms" in general—things like prayers, pastorals, nocturnes, where the form lies in whatever concepts the word evokes, or where established forms are opened up again, like modern odes or the altered sonnet. You can reduce the form down to its phonemes, the essential elements that will play into or against reader expectations for that form or idea (a plea, a sense of landscape, shades of night), and you can build back up from there. Elegies and "love songs" can seem so open as to include anything at all, with their form more of a suggestion than a destination. And for every form, there is an anti-form, and in some cases you can define or foil something via negative space, drawing the object by drawing the air it pushes up against.

The specific form I'm trying to oppose, or to elegize, in "Elegy against Elegy" is what I call the "dead and gone Indians elegy," a type of poem historically written by well-meaning (or merely fascinated) non-Indigenous people commemorating or lamenting the "vanishing race," a kind of performed imperialist nostalgia, an indulgence of hand-wrung and often hand-made grief. As far as reclamation, I'm looking to reiterate the very much alive peoples, ways of knowing and being, and communities, that those poems elide. Or in "banishing" another love song, the speaker there has come to a realization that the kindness she needs most is her own.

I think I'm always trying to reclaim something, through poetry—words from silences, silences from noise, loam from silt, memory from relics, reliquaries from ruins. But maybe it's a more collaborative process than the word reclamation might imply on first impulse. You give the remains back to the earth, and the earth gives you something new.

RS Deeren

In an earlier interview with The 92nd Street Y, New York, you mentioned that, growing up, you didn't talk much about your identity as a descendent of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin. Indigenous identity/ies, and specifically how they have fought to maintain themselves in the face of Western takeover, come through in this collection. How do you see this collection grappling with identity at an individual and social level?

Kenzie Allen

In the 10 years since I started writing the poems in this book, I've developed different vocabularies to describe my diasporic Oneida experience and the historical and social circumstances that inform it. That's probably some of what's happening in the book itself—there are poems that find their entry point in the specters of colonialism or the pop culture figures that have dominated so much of the public conversation about Native peoples, like Tiger Lily or "Ten Little Indians," and there are other poems that begin in ways more directly rooted in lived experience, like those about MMIW (missing and murdered Indigenous women, two-spirits, and children), or NAGPRA (the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act). Some of the poems reflect on governmental policies and systems of assimilation, allotment, and blood quantum, and their deleterious effects on communal relationships, but that's framed through a personal perspective, which is what I think the medium of poetry best affords. The entire collection expands on and complicates identity, not through a microscope but through an additive, prismatic lens.

NAGPRA and other similar acts, like those protecting the use of Indigenous languages, were only passed in the early 1990s. The reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act that started to finally close the jurisdictional loopholes that contribute to MMIW (2013) and violence against children (2022) happened during the time Cloud Missives was being written, so even our public and shared vocabulary has been changing, all along. And there are still ghosts that remain to plague us—the British Empire, the ignoble savage, the insistence on a singular land bridge theory that seemingly will never die—and those things still have effects on what narratives can be publicly imagined about Native peoples and on the rights of Indigenous peoples. So, something I also think about nowadays (and while editing the book) has been how to shift from a language of deficit toward a language of power, wonder, and hope. At this moment in time, I'm not interested in more elegies about us. I'm interested in futurisms.

RS Deeren

Time is potent in this collection. Some poems look to the past to help explain the present or chart a potential future. Others have the speaker looking to the past then thinking about what someone in the future might think of the speaker. The uncovering of the past early in the collection returns at the end in poems such as "Ribbons," where the speaker says "Now my tongue is my own again,/past and present the same, sweet thing." Can you speak to that last line a bit, how the past and present are the same? And what about the future?

Kenzie Allen

There are a few different approaches to time at work in the book. There's an Indigenous sense of time as cyclical, looping, reaching back to the ancestors and forward to the descendants, seven generations in each direction. You'll see a bit of that in "Repatriation," for example, when discussing the bones of ancestors being "wrapped in skins in which we loved them"—the 'we' is both the present generation and the past generations, and these are dearly loved relatives whether they walked on yesterday or in time immemorial. There's the way time becomes fuzzy and slippery after trauma, typified by flashbacks and setbacks, a feeling of memory as something one both revisits and currently inhabits. I think it's possible to come back to that state of being even after you've healed, which is where the sweetness can come into it. And there's the cycle associated with excavation and restoration, and how, when you're sitting in front of the remains of a person or culture—a deeply affecting experience you'll remember all of your life—one can't help thinking of how you, too, might be reckoned by your bones, one day.

RS Deeren

Cloud Missives challenges the history of anthropology and archaeology—fields that have had their own battles with an overtly Western-centric past. How has the history of these fields influenced your work?

Kenzie Allen

After attending an archaeological field school at Cahokia Mounds, I fell in love with anthropology and chose it as my major and am still influenced by these fields. Through the reading and interpreting of cultural materials, anthropology and archaeology are ultimately a form of storytelling. The goal of these sciences is the same goal I have in much of my poetry, to gain a deeper understanding of context, culture, and meaning, and to help portray that understanding for others.

At the same time, Indigenous peoples have long been considered a "studied culture," rather than being welcomed as anthropologists themselves. Lewis Henry Morgan, who wrote a major ethnography on the Haudenosaunee (or Iroquois), is revered for his work on kinship, but his stair-step model of social evolution also entrenched a notion of immutable primitivism that continues to negatively impact the ways Indigenous people are viewed today.

While the programs I studied in were very active in discussing their colonial history, there were still plenty of alienating moments. I remember running my tongue along my teeth during a forensic anthropology class, trying to see if I displayed the markers commonly associated with Native peoples, and how I was always filled with dread when the "debate" around NAGPRA and repatriation was brought up.

RS Deeren

Violence is another theme in this collection, whether broadly in terms of one society onto another, or more intimately, like in poems where the speaker shows the readers their bruises, broken bones, and illnesses. The eighth poem in LETTERS I DON'T SEND is particularly brutal in this sense, but is also transformative, as the speaker looks to the knife rack. Is violence transformative in this collection, and if so, how?

Kenzie Allen

Violence was certainly transformative in my own life, regardless of my preferences. For the body poems, and while I was studying forensic anthropology, everything in the life made its mark through a certain amount of trauma to the tissues. Although I was also interested in what didn't leave those marks, depression and fear and even joy. For the colonial and kyriarchal violences, those, too, involved pressure, bad actors, or the wearing down of self. The self rose again, despite or in spite, but the society didn't change, and one would continue to reckon with it, by reconciling with one's histories, memories, and dreams.

While they are a bit of a thought experiment turned personal revolution, the LETTERS also represent moments of confession, where the speaker "gave as good as [she] got, sometimes." But the line you mention is also the moment in which she allows herself to fully inherit the implications of the violence that was projected onto her, and in which she is finally willing to stand for herself. You'd be a fool to mess with a woman with a good knife. That's not what finally does the trick, though. It's the matriarchy that immortalizes her, as she becomes her own constellation. And what are stars but the product of powerful forces?