4 minute read
Professor Pomm’s Poetry
Law students at USD get passionate about creative verse
Story by John Andrews
I’M GOING TO read a poem to begin today’s class.” English students might expect their instructor to say that, but future attorneys studying tribal law?
Poetry has long been a component of tribal law classes at the University of South Dakota’s Knudson School of Law, thanks to Frank Pommersheim. “I wanted to try some things that were beyond the dry discussion of cases day in and day out that I think generally fatigue students,” he says. “I was interested in trying to read some poems — mostly that I wrote — that were short and demonstrated the power of language and metaphor and provided another angle of vision for students.”
Pommersheim joined the law faculty in 1984 after 10 years of working on the Rosebud Indian Reservation. He began experimenting with poetry after becoming a father. His poetry has evolved from family reflections to his assumption of a Buddha persona and the publication of small booklets illustrated by his daughter, Kate. “You have these experiences as a father with your children and they are amazingly intense, and I was struck by that,” he says. “I wanted to have a way to help me explore and remember that. Along the way I started to read a lot of Chinese and Japanese poetry, particularly haikus, and I was taken with that vehicle — brief, intense expressions of things.”
Students came to expect that each class would include a Buddha poem, sometimes inspired by a case they were studying and sometimes simply to break the monotony of reading case files, statutes and briefs. It’s starkly different from Pommersheim’s time in law school. “Looking back, that’s one of the things that made my law school experience quite negative, because it had nothing to balance the rather dry study of law. Based on my own experiences, I thought there had to be a better way to do this.”
Pommersheim’s teaching philosophy is built around three tenets: master the subject matter, demonstrate a passion for it and find a way to engage students. Poetry became his key to student engagement.
“When they’re engaged with the materials they participate, they’re energized, they think it’s a worthwhile notion, and you develop a little community, which is very important,” he says.
Pommersheim retired in 2019, but his successor, Ann Tweedy, is also a poet, and has carried on the tradition of poetry in her federal Indian law classes. “I started to think about how a lot of Indian law is from a non-Native perspective,” Tweedy says. “I decided to incorporate some Native poetry and some short stories by Zitkala Sa. The students really enjoy that. It’s a way to incorporate Native voices into federal Indian law, which is rare to hear.”
Tweedy has published three chapbooks and her first full-length book, The Body’s Alphabet, earned a Bisexual Book Award and was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. She has also written poems about subjects that come up during class. One, regarding the property case Pierson v. Post, has been published, and other law professors around the country have begun assigning it to their classes.
Student evaluations have consistently reinforced Pommersheim’s notion that poetry enhanced their learning experience. “I was struck by how struck students were, and how poetry stuck to them,” he says. “They could pay more attention to language, see things they might not ordinarily see, and if it provided any pour over effect to how they thought about law or studied law, all the better.”
Buddha Visits the Rosebud Sioux Reservation Tunkasila
The people suffer but reach out to you
Distant stars the red road
Buddha Sends a Hunter/ Gatherer Poem to Professor Pomm’s Indian Law Class
Cut complicity
gather reason seek balance
show respect find spirit
pour it all out
