Story Folded Up Like a Fist

IN THE MESKWAKI LANGUAGE, There is no word for poem. So poet and novelist Ray Young Bear ’73 made up his own: pekwimoni, a word that translates roughly as “story folded up like a fist.”

It’s a word that seems perfectly suited to the interwoven cultural imagery that fills his work. “My poems are therefore origami,” he explains, “large stories that have been compressed with multiple layers of images and messages. They can be complicated or simple, but they’re replete, once the key is turned, with Algonquian-based history.”

http://magazine.pomona.edu/2017/summer/story-folded-up-like-a-fist/#.WV-PA1170n0.gmail