Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds (Cheyenne and Arapaho) is one of America’s most beguiling visual artists. Whether its drawings, prints, paintings, or installations, Heap of Birds is always interested in using text and textuality to ask larger questions about how language is deployed and a means of power, control, and exclusion. For years, I have been taken with a piece by him from 1990 called Boost West, which is a painting? – drawing? – poem? – installation? of fifteen pastel markings on linen paper. Each panel contains three words that have been scrawled in Heap of Birds’ neo- adolescent hand in (almost) all caps. The piece can be viewed/read/decoded in a number of ways, but I was interested in it as a kind of poetry prompt. So, I wrote three different poems in response to the Boost West, using only the words Heap of Birds uses—no more no less.

My essay is an exploration of the semiotics and politics of the piece and a craft essay on my own failed composition.

Dean Rader has authored or co-authored thirteen books, including Works & Days, winner of the 2010 T. S. Eliot Prize; Landscape Portrait Figure Form, a Barnes & Noble Review Best Book; and Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry. Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly, was published in April of 2023 and was named by Book Riot as one of ten “mesmerizing” books of modern poetry. He is also the author of the award-winning scholarly book Engaged Resistance: American Indian Art Literature and Film from Alcatraz to the NMAI. His work has been supported by fellowships from Princeton University, Harvard University, Headlands Center for the Arts, Art Omi, VCCA, and the MacDowell Foundation. Rader is a professor at the University of San Francisco and a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry.