Books
The Memory of Souls - available HERE on Amazon
“This is a book about the little people; but it is also a book about elders, the old culture, the Sundance, dreams, the Ponca Tribe of Nebraska, healing, joy, and being Indian. It is the story of Cliff Taylor stumbling into his people's ways and then finding community and home, of him shedding the bindings of trauma and getting his soul back; it is the story of a young Ponca walking with the little people on a journey of cultural recovery/regeneration and remembrance. Part Letter To A Young Native, part Sundancer's memoir, The Memory of Souls is both a back pocket talisman and an old prayer song sung into the night for the future generations.”
66 Things I’ve Experienced As An Indian (available free online)
This is a book-length poem composed of exactly what its title describes, a mosaic of 66 experiences from all dimensions of my life as a true-blue, hot-darn Indian. It also weaves in and out of my bittersweet departure from Nebraska and my Midnight Cowboy-style arrival in Seattle. Written during my first November away from home, it was my Native American Heritage Month deep-plunge into all of my memories, taking me back, giving honor to, and chiseling out the world I’d left behind, that spit me up onto the shores of what has been the grand next chapter of my life. I especially love this book and dream excitedly of when it will someday find a home in physical book form. For now, it’s online in its entirety for folks to find and read. Click the links below to begin!
66 Things I’ve Experienced As an Indian
(published in parts)
Ponca Lunch Hour Poems
(currently available as a zine you can order from this site)
I’ve been writing poems since I was 25, when I began my ten year stint as an overnight gas station attendant in downtown Lincoln, Nebraska and needed something to do with the creative inspiration that would visit me late at night besides just letting it pass through me. My vision is to create an ark of the thousands of poems I’ve written that contains as much as possible of what I’ve heard, seen, dreamed, experienced, learned, witnessed, remembered, and chanced into as a modern Ponca endeavoring to practice and live my people’s culture, to make something for all those who’re doing their own version of the same. This is book culled from all those poems written over the years, featuring everything from my pops and grandpa, my great-great-great grandpa Chief Standing Bear and imaginings of alternative Native realities, funny moments from the Sundance, work stories from New Orleans, to snapshots of Tokyo and recountings of dreams. In 2015 I won South Dakota State University’s Great Plains Emerging Tribal Writer Award for some of these poems. I love being a poet and I love these poems.
To order your copy of the zine, please email me at cliffponca@gmail.com
and send a payment of $15 to cliffponca@gmail.com on Paypal.