The Santa Fe International Literary Festival begins this Friday and among the authors on the schedule is Navajo Nation Poet Laureate Jake Skeets. KUNM spoke with Jake Skeets, who just released his sophomore collection of poems titled “Horses.” It explores the meaning of the end of the world through a Navajo lens, and Skeets said he started writing it during the pandemic while teaching at Dine College in Arizona.
JAKE SKEETS: I was living in Tsaile and Diné College sort of forced us to shift to online teaching quite quickly. I feel like that sort of pivot to everything digital really sort of began shaping my thinking around horses in this particular book about what is this new time that we're going to be entering. And is there “an ending” of some kind? And so I set out to write about the end of the world, kind of like as a broad topic, and then came across this event with these horses. Back in 2018, when nearly 200 horses were found dead in a dried up stock pond in Northern Arizona. So that sort of being a kind of event. This sort of like tragedy to sort of really springboard myself into this longer investigation of climate change and this ending of sorts, specifically on the Navajo Nation.
So my first book, “Eyes Bottled Dark,” focused on just Gallup, New Mexico as a border town. So one of my hometowns, really just exploring that history and my complicated relationship with that place. “Horses” then is sort of like a larger investigation into the Navajo Nation as a whole of really looking at what does it mean to be in a place like that, to be existing in a place like Diné Bikéyah when we're so fascinated, at the time, at least we were very obsessed with this idea of apocalypse, right? Like, what does it mean to go through an end of the world? And so I feel like that really sparked the book for me.
KUNM: You will be a part of the Santa Fe International Literary Festival, can you tell me a little more about that?
SKEETS: Yeah. I was really excited to hear the invite. I know that the Santa Fe Lit Fest has quite a following. There's actually really tremendous writers who attend every year. And so to be invited was actually quite a surprise. But I'm honored and I'm so excited to be in conversation with Ada Limón again. She invited me to do an event at the Library of Congress when she was the U.S. Poet Laureate. So I'm just excited to just be in her presence again and have a chat with her in Santa Fe this time.
KUNM: So tell me, what is this conversation? What is it going to revolve around?
SKEETS: The great thing about it is it's being moderated by Tommy Archuleta. I’ve been hearing his name pretty much since I've been writing, really. Because I went to undergrad at UNM. So I have such a fond memory of New Mexico writers. So I'm sure he has a really good topic range for us to have a conversation around.
KUNM: What aspect of poetry appealed to you when you first started writing?
SKEETS: I think it was rather just a culmination of a lot of different things. I had just always been drawn to writing in some way. It was always my best subject in school. So reading and writing. I went to elementary school at a school called David Skeet Elementary in Vanderwagen New Mexico, where I grew up. Already then the public school system was facing overcrowding. Because there was no extra classrooms and we had an abundance of students. So we were sort of the class that got the library. So we have recess, right? So instead of going outside, I stayed in the library And so we had these bean bags. And so you would just get a beanbag and a book, and I would just spend my recess in the library. And I just began reading, picking up anything I could to read. Fast forward to my junior year in high school, I actually was attending Window Rock high school for a year. My teacher, her name is Mrs. Chee and she gave us this packet of Native American poets and that's when I first read Lucy Tapahonso, Laura Tohe, Joy Harjo, and really began to sort of see that this is a career, that it could make a life out of writing.
KUNM: So legitimately, a year ago this month, you were appointed the Navajo Nation Poet Laureate. Thinking about this past year, what has been your goal for this specific role?
SKEETS: Honestly, I feel like I'm still exploring sort of what are the possibilities of this position. And it's too bad it's only two years, because now I'm only I'm already coming up on the final year, but I feel like one of the things I perhaps began thinking about is ways in which I can champion poetry in the civic sense. When we think about Poets Laureate, there's always this sort of like idea of civic engagement. But that makes more sense for a state Poet Laureate or a city Poet Laureate and, of course, United States Poet Laureate. But for a tribal government to have a Poet Laureate, on its own, made me really begin to question “What does civic engagement look like?” “What does public life look like within a tribal context? As a sovereign entity?” “As a sovereign people, how do we engage with this idea of civics?” And so for me, it's really sort of a learning opportunity, and really trying to understand what that could mean. There isn't a lot of other Native Poets Laureate that we can fall upon, right? So, at least within a tribal context. So, yeah, it's kind of like up in the air. And so this past year, I did a few events down in San Carlos Apache, talked with some students there. Then, of course, this year, I launched the Saad prize as a way to honor poets and writers from the Navajo Nation. And yeah, so I'm really excited for next year.
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