We all know what historical fiction is. It’s fiction taking place in a period in the past like Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall or Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring. But what do you call poems that cover historical events? Historical poetry? That feels like the best way to describe poet Elise Paschen’s newest poetry book Blood Wolf Moon that was published earlier this year. It’s a series of poems, divided into five sections, that explores Osage history and Paschen’s own Osage family background and history.
Part of the book focuses on the Reign of Terror— a period of terrible violence against the Osage people on their land in Fairfax, Oklahoma from 1920-1926, which was the subject of David Grann’s book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. Grann’s book title was inspired by a line from Paschen’s poem “Wi’-gi-e” published in Bestiary in 2009.
The collection of poems also explores her own relationship with her mother, Maria Tallchief, who is best known as the United States’ first prima ballerina, and her own larger family history. The collection is an engaging and haunting work of art.
We had a chance to talk with Elise Paschen about Blood Wolf Moon.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Elisa Shoenberger
Why is this poetry collection Blood Wolf Moon so important?
Elise Paschen
This is my sixth poetry collection. I’ve been on a book tour with it since last April when it was published. I have just such joy with this book and bringing it to cities across America. It’s my heart project; it’s my passion project. I’ve thought seriously about my Osage history since I was in high school, and I’ve written about it in all of my books. But this book really takes a deep dive into my own personal Osage history and background, as well as our generational sense of the trauma from the Reign of Terror from the 1920s period of history, which has just haunted me.
It was a very important book to write for me. Getting it out into the world is very important, because I want to share the history of the Osage. As you know, I’ve experimented with the Osage language because I want it to be known by as many people as possible. It’s something that has been in my bones and my blood for decades. So I’m so happy to have been able to get it all down on the page.
Elisa Shoenberger
The theme of wolves comes up throughout the collection including the title. Could you talk about that recurring image?
Elise Paschen
When I started writing the long poem, “Heritage,” I had been diving into the poems of a dear friend of mine who’s no longer with us, Lucie Brock-Broido. She wrote a poem about wolves called “Dire Wolf.” I was thinking about wolves, and I didn’t know I was going to be writing this long poem, but I just started drafting this poem, kind of as an homage to my friend Lucie. A first draft of the poem was titled “Wolf” and my epigraph read: “Sorrows, like a gathering of dire wolves, come in packs. . . .” -Lucie Brock Broido
After I wrote those initial drafts of the poem, I realized it would be the first section of the long poem, “Heritage.” I think that’s how the wolf image first appeared. It wasn’t anything deliberate. It was something that just organically occurred with my own fascination with the wolf.
As for the title, I was researching the moon during the month of my own birth, which was January, and I stumbled upon the term the Blood Wolf Moon. It is both a Super moon that occurs in January and a lunar eclipse. These various threads started weaving themselves into the fabric of the book.
Originally, the book was going to be called Heritage. Then I thought to name it Heritage of the Blood Wolf Moon, which was kind of long. Then I ended up deciding, “Okay, just the long poem will be called ‘Heritage,’ and then the book will be called Blood Wolf Moon.”
When we were looking for covers for the book, we were taking the name literally with images of the moon with the wolf. But then we discovered the artwork of Addie Roanhorse, who’s an Osage artist. Her work ended up on the cover where she uses a ledger map and buffalo. I love the fact that it’s a buffalo and not a wolf. As you may recall from the poems, my family is part of the Buffalo Clan. The buffalo is a very sacred animal for our family, the Tallchief family.
There are Easter eggs on the cover. It’s a ledger map of the town of Gray Horse, which is the district where my family is from. And if you were to expand the map and look further west, you would see the Tallchief names where our land is. And if you’ve seen the movie or read the book, Killers of the Flower Moon, Lizzie Q is the mother. So Lizzie Q is right there in the middle of the cover of my book. So it’s an homage to her and her family as well.
Elisa Shoenberger
I noticed that many poems have a variety of different shapes and spacing. Could you talk about the choices?
Elise Paschen
At the beginning of my education as a poet, I was taught very traditional poetry forms. In college, I studied with Robert Fitzgerald, who translated The Iliad and The Odyssey, and he taught a class on the history of prosody or versification, beginning with Ancient Greek poetry forms and ending up with contemporary free verse.
My first books of poetry had some kind of metrical system. There’s some kind of a rhythm. It could be iambic diameters or trimeters, but there’s some mathematical configuration happening almost subliminally.
This new book is a departure for me, because when I started writing “Heritage,” I organically created this stanza, which works in intervals of five. I see them as hanging indent stanzas and allowing more air, space, separation, and breath. I see them almost like clouds on a page, but it’s always in these intervals of five.
I work with my computer like a typewriter. So I write in the middle, and then all the way to the left, then all the way to the right, and then going down little steps in the middle, left, right, and then two steps going to the left. And then we go back to that same kind of pattern. And so that pattern just presented itself to me with this long poem, along with the idea of creating a crown of poems—this bracelet of poems where the last line of the poem becomes the first line of the next section.
I was being interviewed by somebody on the radio station, and they said, “Well, I think you’ve created a new form. Maybe it’s called Sky writing.” But then I think I said, maybe it’s an Osage crown. I love that idea of maybe creating some kind of form that is also a testament to my Osage ancestry, so that’s how I settled on calling this format “The Osage Crown.”
Originally “Heritage” was about twenty-four poems, and then I decided to stop at fourteen, because I realized it was a perfect circle that I could create with this idea of naming so that I end with my Osage name so I could create this circular structure in the poem.
There’s this idea of five in the intervals of the lines. There are also five different chapters in the book. I want people to be reading it from beginning to end, almost like the five acts of a play.
Several of these poems were originally parts of a prose book that I wanted to write. Section three focuses on the Reign of Terror. The first poem in section three originally came from an essay I wrote back in 2001 when I had a fellowship with the Newberry Library, and I was writing about generational trauma. The poem “The Terrors” was originally a personal essay that I then converted into a prose poem. I’ve always been interested and intrigued and playing with forms. I think this book might have more prose poems than my other books.
Elisa Shoenberger
Could you talk more about section three?
Elise Paschen
I started my research on the Reign of Terror when I was in high school, and I had an independent study at the Newberry Library. When growing up, before David Grann wrote his book, before the movie, people didn’t really talk about the Reign of Terror, which is what I mentioned in the poem “The Terrors.” So it wasn’t something I was really raised with, except that my mother told me, as I say in the second to last stanza, her cousin Pearl Bigheart’s father was murdered during the Reign of Terror. People still are afraid to talk about it. So I was aware of that story. I wanted to write this prose book, but whenever I want to write a prose book, it always turns into poetry.
I really immersed myself in this history and read the FBI files of the trials that were going on. It was very one sided; the FBI had this very white male point of view, and I wanted to get into the minds of the Osage people who were there. That’s why I wanted to create these interior monologues. Instead of writing the prose book, I wrote the poem “Wi’-gi-e.” In it, the narrator is Mollie Burkhart whose family was murdered during the Reign of Terror. In that poem is the line: “During Xtha-cka Zhi-ga Tze-the, the Killer of the Flowers Moon.” Anna Brown, Mollie’s sister, was killed during the month of May.
On my desk is an Osage Moon chart. Anna Brown was killed in May during Xtha-cka Zhi-ga Tze-the, The Killer of the Flowers Moon. When David Grann was writing his book on the Reign of Terror, I sent him my poem, “Wi’-gi-e.” He told me, “I’ve printed out your poem. It’s sitting on my desk, and it’s helping me write my book.” That’s where his title comes from.
This history has haunted me for a very long time. So in section three of this book, I ended up writing the third poem “After Killers of the Flower Moon,” after seeing the premiere of the movie in Oklahoma. It’s an ekphrastic, a poem about another work of art. Having learned from Lily Gladstone that she wore my great grandmother’s blankets in the film helped to inspire the writing of this poem.
When I was finishing this book, I was interested in learning about the relationship between Pearl Bigheart, my mom’s cousin, and the Reign of Terror. I learned that my great grandmother’s brother was George Bigheart, who was murdered during the Reign of Terror. I found this newspaper article, which became the poem, “In Memoriam.” It’s a found poem. I discovered the obituary right before I was handing in the book for publication.
Elisa Shoenberger
Wow. That’s incredible. What else do you want us to know?
Elise Paschen
I have another passion project, and that’s serving on the board of Indigenous Nations Poets. I’d love readers to check out our website. We’ve been in existence for five years. It’s a very new nonprofit, and each year we have a mentoring retreat where we support the work of young Native poets. It’s just such an honor to know them and to see all the directions they’re taking.
Thank you, Elise Paschen, so much for talking with us!
For more information about Elise Paschen, check out her website: https://elisepaschen.com/
POETRY
Blood Wolf Moon
By Elise Paschen
Red Hen Press
Published April 8, 2025
