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Poet Laureate Joy Harjo with maybe the most famous tattoo in American literature since Ishmael.
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Joy Harjo has
championed the art of poetry – ‘soul talk’ as she calls it – for over four
decades,” Hayden said. “To her, poems are ‘carriers of dreams, knowledge and
wisdom,’ and through them she tells an American story of tradition and loss,
reckoning and myth-making. Her work powerfully connects us to the earth and the
spiritual world with direct, inventive lyricism that helps us reimagine who we
are.
Multi-talented
Harjo has also studied art; mastered the saxophone at age 40 becoming a recording
artist; penned juvenile fiction,
memoirs, and plays; and has had a distinguished academic career. But her path
to our nation’s greatest achievement
for a poet has been anything but smooth
and straight.
Harjo
was born on May 9, 1951 as Joy Foster.
Her father Allen W. Foster was Muscogee—Creek—and
her mother Wynema Baker Foster, had mixed ancestry—Cherokee, French, and Irish.
She was the oldest of four children.
Her parents divorced due to her
father’s drinking and emotional and physical abusive behavior when drunk. Her mother’s second marriage was to a man who
disliked Indians was equally abusive.
The trauma rendered her
nearly mute and she struggled in school.
In
her teen years she found solace and expression in art but
her stepfather kicked her out of the
family home when she was only 16. Drifting
in an out of the marginal lifestyle
of an impoverished Native woman Joy
found her way to Santa Fe, New Mexico, and enrolled in the Institute of American Indian Arts.
At
age 19 she officially enrolled as a member of the Muscogee Nation and took her paternal grandmother’s last name Harjo, a common name among Muscogee and
related peoples.
In
Santa Fe Harjo met and married a
fellow IAIA student, Phil Wilmon. They had a son, Phil Dayn, before
the youthful marriage ended in divorce.
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Harjo in 1975.
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Harjo
moved on to the University of New Mexico,
enrolling as a pre-med student but
changing her major to art and then creative writing, as she was inspired
by Native American writers. There she
met Simon Ortiz of the Acoma Pueblo at poetry readings. The
established poet became her mentor
and eventually her lover and
together they had a daughter, Rainy Dawn.
She
graduated in 1976 already noted as a
promising and then earned her Master of
Fine Arts in creative writing from the prestigious University of Iowa.
Harjo
returned to the IAIA to teach in
1978 and ‘79 and again in ‘83 and ‘84. She has also taught at Arizona State University, the University of Colorado from 1985 to
1988, the University of Arizona from
1988 to 1990, the University of New Mexico from 1991 to 1995, American Indian Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
in 2013, and was appointed to the Chair
of Excellence in the Department of
English at the University of
Tennessee, Knoxville in 2016.
During
her final years of study and through her academic career, Harjo published poetry and stories to growing acclaim beginning with The Last Song in 1975 and including She
Had Some Horses in 1983, Secrets from the Center of the World
in 1989, The Woman Who Fell From the Sky in 1994, A Map to the Next World
in 2000, How We Became Human New and Selected Poems: 1975–2001 in 2004, Conflict
Resolution for Holy Beings: Poems in 2015, and An
American Sunrise: Poems this year.
Along
the way Harjo reaped a slew of awards,
recognition, and fellowships including a listing in the Outstanding Young Women in America and
a National Endowment for the Arts
Creative Writing Fellowship in 1978; the Arizona Commission on the Arts Poetry Fellowship in 1989; the American Indian Distinguished Achievement
in the Arts Award in 1990; the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America and the American Book Award from the Before
Columbus Foundation for In Mad Love
and War in 1991; the Woodrow Wilson
Fellowship at Green Mountain College
in Poultney, Vermont in 1993; the Lifetime
Achievement Award from the Native
Writers Circle of The Americas in 1995; the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts in 1997; the
Oklahoma Book Award for Poetry for How We Became Human in 2003; the Eagle Spirit Achievement Award in 2009;
the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial
Foundation Fellowship in 2014; the Wallace
Stevens Award in Poetry by the Academy
of American Poets Board of Chancellors in 2015; and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation in 2017. This list is neither complete nor exhaustive.
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Harjo's 2012 memoirs.
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If
all of this seems like a smooth, steady climb to success and
recognition, it was not. Harjo’s personal
life was often chaotic. She was wracked with self-doubt and restless
both creatively and spiritually. In
addition to her poetry she continued to draw
and create works of visual art
that she often incorporated in readings and performances.
At
the age of 40 after hearing recordings
of John Coltrane Harjo picked up the
saxophone. She brought that free form jazz spirit to music based on Native American traditions,
lore, and rhythms. She also sang.
Her five albums each received
honors and in 2009 she won the Native
American Music Award for best female
artist. She frequently tours with
her music group, the Arrow
Dynamics and incorporates music into her readings in which she speaks
with a musical tone, creating a song in every poem.
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Harjo and her saxophone. Music infuses her work across art forms and genres.
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Harjo
has also used her poetry and creative spirit in social justice activism not only around Native American issues but women’s rights and equal justice in today’s hostile
environment. Her web site includes insightful commentary on the issues in her blog. Her activism for
Native American rights and feminism stems from her belief in unity and the lack of separation among humans,
animals, plants, sky, and earth. Harjo believes that we become
most human when we understand the connection
among all living things—what Unitarian Universalists like to call
the interdependent web of all existence.
She believes that colonialism led to
Native American women being oppressed
within their own communities, and she works to encourage more political equality between the sexes.
These
beliefs spring especially from an ever deepening understanding of her
Muscogee/Creek tradition but are not limited to it. Due to her long time residency in the
Southwest, many of her stories and poems are set there and reflect to stories
of the Hopi and other tribes/nations
of that region as well as the broader condition of native peoples throughout
the Western Hemisphere.
Now
to some samples of that work.
An America Sunrise is the title
poem of her new from her collection from her long-time publisher W.W. Norton. Then we sample poems from her long, creative
career.
An American Sunrise
We were running
out of breath, as we ran out to meet ourselves. We
were surfacing
the edge of our ancestors’ fights, and ready to strike.
It was difficult
to lose days in the Indian bar if you were straight.
Easy if you
played pool and drank to remember to forget. We
made plans to be
professional — and did. And some of us could sing
so we drummed a
fire-lit pathway up to those starry stars. Sin
was invented by
the Christians, as was the Devil, we sang. We
were the
heathens, but needed to be saved from them — thin
chance. We knew
we were all related in this story, a little gin
will clarify the
dark and make us all feel like dancing. We
had something to
do with the origins of blues and jazz
I argued with a
Pueblo as I filled the jukebox with dimes in June,
forty years
later and we still want justice. We are still America. We
know the rumors
of our demise. We spit them out. They die
soon.
—Joy Harjo
This Morning I
Pray for My Enemies
And whom do I
call my enemy?
An enemy must be
worthy of engagement.
I turn in the
direction of the sun and keep walking.
It’s the heart
that asks the question, not my furious mind.
The heart is the
smaller cousin of the sun.
It sees and
knows everything.
It hears the
gnashing even as it hears the blessing.
The door to the
mind should only open from the heart.
An enemy who
gets in, risks the danger of becoming a friend.
—Joy Harjo
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Harjo's art and poetry are interwoven--Perhaps the World Ends Here.
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Perhaps the
World Ends Here
The world begins
at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.
The gifts of
earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since
creation, and it will go on.
We chase
chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their
knees under it.
It is here that
children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at
it, we make women.
At this table we
gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.
Our dreams drink
coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us
at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once
again at the table.
This table has
been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.
Wars have begun
and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place
to celebrate the terrible victory.
We have given
birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here.
At this table we
sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.
Perhaps the
world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating
of the last sweet bite.
—Joy Harjo
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Harjo speaking.
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Once the World
Was Perfect
Once the world
was perfect, and we were happy in that world.
Then we took it
for granted.
Discontent began
a small rumble in the earthly mind.
Then Doubt
pushed through with its spiked head.
And once Doubt
ruptured the web,
All manner of
demon thoughts Jumped through—
We destroyed the
world we had been given
For inspiration,
for life—
Each stone of
jealousy, each stone
Of fear, greed,
envy, and hatred, put out the light.
No one was
without a stone in his or her hand.
There we were,
Right back where
we had started.
We were bumping
into each other
In the dark.
And now we had
no place to live, since we didn’t know
How to live with
each other.
Then one of the
stumbling ones took pity on another
And shared a
blanket.
A spark of
kindness made a light.
The light made
an opening in the darkness.
Everyone worked
together to make a ladder.
A Wind Clan
person climbed out first into the next world,
And then the
other clans, the children of those clans, their children,
And their
children, all the way through time—
To now, into
this morning light to you.
—Joy Harjo
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