“They call me call me Two Shoes. I am of two worlds,” poet Louis V. Clark III writes in his book How to Be an Indian in the 21st Century. “My dad was 100% Polish and my mom was 100% Indian,” Clark says. However, “My dad was more into being an Indian and my mom wanted to be white because that’s where the success seemed to be in life.”
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The poems of Clark, who grew up on the Oneida reservation west of Green Bay, often rhyme and feel song-like. Some contain wry humor. His “Who Ordered Pizza” imagines indigenous people mistaking the fleet of Christopher Columbus for a pizza delivery. In “Normal Kid,” Clark talks about his struggle to figure out his identity. Asking a teacher for help, “He said I might be Oneida, or Menominee or Crow/But I said that all the white boys call me ‘stupid’/Dontcha know.”
As an adult in a night school writing class, Clark says “a teacher told me that those types of writings are not poetry, so I pretty much kept my writing to myself. I never tried to get published or anything.” The working-class poet, who led a road maintenance ditch digging crew, would read his poems to entertain co-workers and family instead.
In 2010, Clark responded to an ad calling for submissions from the University of Arkansas. That led to the university publishing his first poem compilation, Two Shoes.
Now retired, Clark is working on several book ideas.
Louis V. Clark III has upcoming author appearances at 1 p.m. on Nov. 3 at the Aram Public Library in Delavan, and 6 p.m. on Nov. 7 at Hartland Public Library.
