Muscogee (Creek) writer and humorist Alexander Posey (1873–1908) lived most of his short but productive life in the Muscogee Nation, in what is now Oklahoma. He was an influential political spokesperson, an advocate for improving conditions in Indian Territory, and one of the most prominent American Indian literary figures of his era. One of Posey’s dearest subjects was the Oktahutche River, which he so loved that he gave it voice in his poem, “Song of the Oktahutche.” His poetry, drawing from Romantic European and Euro-American influences such as Robert Burns and John Greenleaf Whittier, became a sort of Indian Territory pastoral in which the Greek nymph Echo shares a river with Stechupco, the Tall Man spirit of the Muscogees. Song of the Oktahutche collects for the first time all of Posey’s poetry, which has until now been scattered in various rare volumes, either unpublished or replete with textual errors. His highly regarded poems constitute the largest body of Native poetry from the turn of the twentieth century. Matthew Wynn Sivils draws on extensive archival research to produce a complete, accurate, and meticulously annotated edition of Posey’s poetry that will further enrich and personalize the legacy of this remarkable Native author.

Muscogee (Creek) writer and humorist Alexander Posey (1873 1908) lived most of his short but productive life in the Muscogee Nation, in what is now Oklahoma. He was an influential political spokesperson, an advocate for improving conditions in Indian Territory, and one of the most prominent American Indian literary figures of his era. One of Posey s dearest subjects was the Oktahutche River, which he so loved that he gave it voice in his poem, Song of the Oktahutche. His poetry, drawing from Romantic European and Euro-American influences such as Robert Burns and John Greenleaf Whittier, became a sort of Indian Territory pastoral in which the Greek nymph Echo shares a river with Stechupco, the Tall Man spirit of the Muscogees. Song of the Oktahutche collects for the first time all of Posey s poetry, which has until now been scattered in various rare volumes, either unpublished or replete with textual errors. His highly regarded poems constitute the largest body of Native poetry from the turn of the twentieth century. Matthew Wynn Sivils draws on extensive archival research to produce a complete, accurate, and meticulously annotated edition of Posey s poetry that will further enrich and personalize the legacy of this remarkable Native author.

Muscogee (Creek) writer Alexander Posey (1873-1908), a trailblazing journalist, humorist, and poet, wrote one of the largest bodies of American Indian poetry of his time and also produced some of the most intriguing journals to arise from the late Indian Territory period. As the first complete, accurate, and accessible collection of Posey's verse and non-fiction works, this edition recovers, as much as possible, his original creative intentions, making his writing available to a wider audience of both scholarly and non-academic readers. Whenever possible, the texts housed in this collection are based on Posey's original manuscripts, or---in the case of several poems---the last versions published during his lifetime.

The American nineteenth century witnessed a media explosion unprecedented in human history. New communications technologies seemed to be everywhere, offering opportunities and threats that seem powerfully familiar to us as we experience today’s digital revolution. Walt Whitman’s poetry reveled in the potentials of his time: “See, the many-cylinder’d steam printing-press,” he wrote, “See, the electric telegraph, stretching across the Continent, from the Western Sea to Manhattan.” Still, as the budding poet learned, books neither sell themselves nor move themselves: without an efficient set of connections to get books to readers, the democratic media-saturated future Whitman imagined would have remained warehoused. Whitman’s works sometimes ran through the “many-cylinder’d steam printing press” and were carried in bulk on “the strong and quick locomotive.” Yet during his career, his publications did not follow a progressive path toward mass production and distribution. Even at the end of his life, in the 1890s as his fame was growing, the poet was selling copies of his latest works by hand to visitors at his small house in Camden, New Jersey. Mass media and centralization were only one part of the rich media world that Whitman embraced. Whitman’s Drift asks how the many options for distributing books and newspapers shaped the way writers wrote and readers read. Writers like Whitman spoke to the imagination inspired by media transformations by calling attention to connectedness, to how literature not only moves us emotionally, but moves around in the world among people and places. Studying that literature and how it circulated can help us understand not just how to read Whitman’s works and times, but how to understand what is happening to our imaginations now, in the midst of the twenty-first century media explosion.

Until now, the study of American Indian literature has tended to concentrate on contemporary writing. Although the field has grown rapidly, early works—especially poetry—remain mostly unknown and inaccessible. Changing Is Not Vanishing simultaneously reinvents the early history of American Indian literature and the history of American poetry by presenting a vast but forgotten archive of American Indian poems. Through extensive archival research in small-circulation newspapers and magazines, manuscripts, pamphlets, rare books, and scrapbooks, Robert Dale Parker has uncovered the work of more than 140 early Indian poets who wrote before 1930. Changing Is Not Vanishing includes poems by 82 writers and provides a full bibliography of all the poets Parker has identified—most of them unknown even to specialists in Indian literature. In a wide range of approaches and styles, the poems in this collection address such topics as colonialism and the federal government, land, politics, nature, love, war, Christianity, and racism. With a richly informative introduction and extensive annotation, Changing Is Not Vanishing opens the door to a trove of fascinating, powerful poems that will be required reading for all scholars and readers of American poetry and American Indian literature.

Most of Alexander Posey's short and remarkable life was devoted to literary pursuits. Through a widely circulated satirical column published under the pseudonym Fus Fixico, he did much to document and draw attention to conditions in Indian Territory. He rose to prominence among the Creeks and played a leading role as spokesman on a number of serious political issues. Daniel F. Littlefield Jr. has written the first full biography of Alexander Posey, a pioneer of American Indian literature and a shaper of public opinion. Daniel F. Littlefield Jr. is a professor of English at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and director of the American Native Press Archives. He is the editor, with Carol A. Petty Hunter, of Alexander Posey's Fus Fixico Letters (Nebraska 1993).