The Last Wolf

“The Last Wolf” is a free verse poem that does not subscribe to a consistent meter. The lines and stanzas all vary in length. This is fairly characteristic for much of TallMountain’s personal poetry canon.

TallMountain’s description of the poem coming from “some spirit person” in her interview with Bruchac loosely places it in the category of “automatic writing.” Automatic writing is when the poet allows themself to be a conduit for a spirit, often closing their eyes or writing in the dark without planning. In the traditional western canon, W. B. Yeats’s wife Georgie famously practiced automatic writing.

Further, “The Last Wolf” can be considered part of the Native American Renaissance, a controversial term applied to indigenous authors who gained mainstream popularity after the 1960s.

TallMountain utilizes repetition to emphasize the theme of indigenous languages being erased. The language of the wolf represents these endangered languages; TallMountain repeats the very specific term “baying” in Lines 3 and 11, both of which are the third lines of their respective stanzas. This repetition of both individual words and their placement within a stanza offers two levels of emphasis.