Ekphrasis, enjambment, anaphora and apostrophe are all words that have swirled around my mind over the past nine weeks of the semester, a mental alphabet soup of all things poetry. 

This fall, I decided to test my creative writing and analytical reading skills — and knock out another general education requirement — by taking “Introduction to the Genre of Poetry.” Poetry, as I’ve come to learn, lets writers present stories in their most uninhibited forms; though there may be rhyme, there’s often no standard reason, giving writers structural liberty with how they format the vehicle for their tales.

On Oct. 19, my discussion section read Erin Marie Lynch’s concrete poem “Removal Act.” In the piece, she shapes the text around space restricted by a large rectangle in the middle of the page, where it says “Sorry, this image is not available for download,” a message from the British Museum’s website. 

Where the blank space lies is where a picture of her ancestor, Mato Sabi Ceya, would go if it weren’t for the museum withholding her family archives. Thus, Lynch’s poem serves as both an act of preservation and an act of resistance against the erasure of the Dakota people. 

As I sat staring at the blank rectangle, the omission of a story, I was transported back to my time in my high school’s research program, where I spent three years investigating different methods of language preservation and revitalization around the world. 

One conclusion that interested me most was that, regardless of where languages were based, for linguists, anthropologists and dying language speakers, shared stories and folklore were methods of language preservation. I still remember being struck by the words that to preserve a language, you must first tell the story and preserve the people.

With memories of my research findings and that one poem from discussion class stuck in my mind, I devoured Layli Long Soldier’s new book, “We,” published Oct. 6, during a six-hour plane ride back to Los Angeles this weekend. The book explores Long Soldier’s connection to her family, ancestors, history and Oglala Lakota background through poems, essays and photography.

As the book’s opening remarks note, “We” draws from the English language to build a sense of collaborative effort and togetherness throughout the book and begs the reader to consider the Lakota word “wé,” meaning blood. From the book’s very beginning, Long Soldier uses language and double meanings to remind readers that other languages exist in this country, and that there’s been blood here long before colonizers.

As I read “We,” what struck me most was that it wasn’t always the direct words that Long Soldier used, but rather the way she stylized her writing that often told parts of the story.

In one of the book’s chapters, “184 X’s,” Long Soldier lists out sentences starting with “X marks,” in reference to the 184 Native American leaders who were coerced into signing the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie with the letter “X” instead of their names — even though they could not read the document.

“X marks a line I once wrote: / Everything is in the language / we use,” Long Soldier wrote. “And X marks my humble correction: / At critical moments, everything is in the language / we do not understand.”

Though she is directly speaking to the critical moment in which those 184 leaders were forced to sign a treaty in a language they did not understand, Long Soldier is also pointing to how we should be reading this poem — reading into the meanings that are not directly spelled out for us in the text, such as the phrase “X marks” itself.

At the end of the 19-page poem, Long Soldier reveals something to her readers: “In most Lakota orthographies, it’s important to know / there is no X.”

With that line alone, Long Soldier resolved all the confusion I encountered trying to figure out how X could mark so many things — she wants us to understand that there is no understanding this poem without reading it under a Lakota lens. If X does not even exist in the Lakota orthography, then making those 184 leaders sign their names “X” is an act of direct erasure.  

Although “We” is not fully written in Lakota, the book still excels as an act of language preservation because Long Soldier proves that there is no understanding of the story unless we as readers accept the existence of the language, and therefore of her people. 

In both Lynch and Long Soldier’s poetry, they take moments when their language or culture was taken from their ancestors and use poetry to reframe and reclaim those moments. 

Their poetry proves that we can’t just look for meaning in written language, but we must also search for meaning where there is an absence of it. 

Marina Yazbek is a sophomore writing about language and its role in popular culture and entertainment in her column, “Word on the Street,” which runs every other Tuesday. She is also an Arts & Entertainment Editor at the Daily Trojan.