SOURCE: Lincoln, Kenneth. “Modern Shamans: Seer, Shaman, Clown.” In Sing with the Heart of a Bear: Fusions of Native and American Poetry 1890-1999, pp. 267-74. Berkeley and Los Angeles, Calif.: University of California Press, 2000.

In the following essay, Lincoln examines Alexie's place among Native American writers of his generation.

Alexie is not writing the intellectualized masturbation that passes for so much of today's poetry. He is a singer, a shaman, a healer, a virtual Freddy Fender saying, “Hey baby, que paso? I thought I was your only vato.”

Adrian C. Louis, Foreword to Old Shirts & New Skins

But I haven't met an Indian writer out there who isn't arrogant—or a writer in general who isn't arrogant. … I don't pretend I'm not.

Sherman Alexie, Indian Artist, Spring 1998

With Sherman Alexie, readers can throw formal questions out the smokehole (as in resistance to other modern verse innovators, Whitman, Williams...