The Maynard
Spring 2016

These poems come from an ongoing project tentatively titled Timeless American Classic. [click to read more]

These poems come from an ongoing project tentatively titled Timeless American Classic. The pieces themselves are all derivations and creative distant readings of James Fenimore Cooper’s novel The Last of the Mohicans. This project was in part inspired by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s argument (in An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States) that Cooper’s novel plays a role in reinventing the colonial origins of the United States, and in creating a narrative that was “instrumental in nullifying guilt related to genocide.” Ultimately, this project seeks to disrupt the colonial logic in the novel by displacing (and reorienting) the text itself in order to expose the problematic representation of Indigenous peoples. The project is also deeply inspired by current digital humanities techniques of visualization, machine reading, and algorithmic allocation.