From the Desire Field

“From the Desire Field” is a poem by Mojave poet, linguist, activist, and creative writing professor Natalie Diaz, who is an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. This community is an Indian reservation in the US state of Arizona, adjacent to the south side of Phoenix. The poem was published in Poem-a-Day on June 5, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets. It was reprinted in Diaz’s second poetry collection, Postcolonial Love Poem (2020), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2021. The poem explores ideas about insomnia, anxiety, desire, sexual love, peace of mind, and quietness. Written in Diaz’s characteristic rich, densely packed, and innovative language and unusual form, the poem affirms queer identity, Diaz’s Hispanic (Mexican) heritage, and Native American ceremonial practices. These themes and their various ramifications lie at the heart of much of Diaz’s poetry.

Poet Biography

Natalie Diaz was born on September 4, 1978, in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California. In a podcast interview with David Naimon, Diaz described herself as Indigenous and Latina or Mexican, as her father was Mexican and her mother Indigenous. She is a member of the Gila River Indian Tribe, and she also identifies as a queer woman. She received a Bachelor of Arts in English from Old Dominion University in 2000. During her college years she played basketball for the Lady Monarchs and later played professionally in Europe and Asia. Returning to the United States, she earned a Master of Fine Arts degree (MFA) in Poetry and Fiction from Old Dominion in 2006. She soon began to make her mark as a poet. In 2007, Diaz won the Pablo Neruda Prize in Poetry awarded by Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry for a set of three poems including “No More Cake Here.” Her first collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec (2013), won an American Book Award.

Also a linguist, Diaz began as coordinator of the Fort Mojave Language Recovery Program in 2009, where she worked with some of the few remaining speakers of the Mojave language to ensure its preservation. The program was under the auspices of the Arizona State University Center for Indian Education, and Diaz spent many hours recording and transcribing the Mojave language.

Diaz’s second poetry collection, Postcolonial Love Poem (2020), which included “From the Desire Field,” was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2021. It was described on the Pulitzer Prize website as “[a] collection of tender, heart-wrenching and defiant poems that explore what it means to love and be loved in an America beset by conflict” (“Postcolonial Love Poem, by Natalie Diaz,” The Pulitzer Prizes). The collection was also a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award.

Since 2018, Diaz has held the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University (ASU). She teaches in the Creative Writing MFA program. In 2021, she was elected to the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets. She is also director of the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands at ASU, which on its website describes its work as follows: “Our initiatives, collaborations, guests, and community engagements acknowledge and dismantle the British and European lenses which have excluded so many of our Indigenous and diasporic experiences of language and story.”

Diaz has received fellowships from the Lannan Foundation (2012), the MacArthur Foundation (2018), and the Native Arts Council Foundation. She won the Arts and Letters Award in Literature and the Princeton Holmes National Poetry Prize, both in 2023.

Poem Text

Diaz, Natalie. “From the Desire Field.” 2017. American Academy of Poets.

Summary

Through its first-person speaker, the poem explores a variety of feelings and emotions centered around insomnia, anxiety, and desire. The speaker considers her insomnia, and how her mind becomes entangled in thoughts and memories. Unable to sleep, the speaker adopts a new way of coping with anxiety by using different words to describe it: first desire and then a garden. She remembers a line from Federico García Lorca’s “Romance sonámbulo” (1955), which uses green to evoke desire. She is a garden when night comes, she says, because she is a field in which worry flowers inside her. During the night, if she is not exhausted from love making, her mind traverses the range of her desires in an unfocused kind of way.

Reframing her experience through language enables the speaker to see insomnia in a different light. According to this understanding, throughout the night, insomnia resembles the season of spring, producing many different and surprising flowers. In this nighttime green world, the speaker experiences desire for her lover, who like green wildlife invades her body. She then directly addresses a friend. She asks if it is acceptable to say that she does not feel good and to ask that person to tell her a story about how she planted sweet grass, and to keep telling the story until the speaker feels calmed by the smell of burning sweet grass and can move on, refined by the smoke.