LIVING VERSE
Finding poetry in the world, and bringing poetry to the world, with Joy Harjo
Poet, musician, former U.S. poet laureate and activist Joy Harjo remembers how there were no opportunities to pursue a career in the arts for children, especially girls, growing up on the Muscogee (Creek) Nation Reservation in Tulsa, Okla.
“That wasn’t really an option or an outcome that was possible or deemed possible for anyone. It was not in our reality,” she says by phone during a tour stop in Boise, Idaho. “The poems that we read were mostly poets from New England or England, and most of them were male, and they certainly weren’t Native.”
She credits important relationships at the Institute of American Indian Arts and the University of New Mexico, where she met Laguna Pueblo novelist and poet Leslie Marmon Silko, with setting her firmly on the path of poetry.
Today, the internationally acclaimed, award-winning artist celebrates 50 years of publishing with the release of “Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light: Fifty Poems for Fifty Years,” as well as the accompanying book tour which stops here tomorrow evening as part of the Pittsburgh Arts and Lectures series, with support from Carnegie Mellon University.
Among her most recent accolades, Joy Harjo received Yale’s 2023 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry; the Harper Lee Award; the Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle; a National Arts Lifetime Achievement Award given by Americans for the Arts; and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation. She is the first Artist-in-Residence for Tulsa’s Bob Dylan Center, and from 2019-2022 she served three terms as the 23rd U.S. Poet Laureate.
She notes how her laureateship “came at a really intense crossroads in this country and world.” Within six months of the announcement, the world was under lockdown with COVID.
“What was most striking was how important it became for the Native community and opening the door of awareness for the community at large,” she says. “For Native people, it was a different kind of visibility.”
As the first Native Nations poet laureate, she wanted to create a signature project that focused on indigenous poets residing in the United States, so she developed Living Nations, Living Words, an online map and Library of Congress archive that features 47 poets and their work. Ms. Harjo then edited the companion anthology “Living Nations, Living Words: An Anthology of First Peoples Poetry.”
In the introduction, she wrote: “…indigenous peoples of our country are often invisible or are not seen as human. … You will rarely find us in the cultural storytelling of America, and we are nearly nonexistentin the American book of poetry.”
She emphasizes that “we’re often in lockdown with stereotypes” and “there’s a large percentage of the American population that are under the illusion that we’re all dead.”
However, her laureateship marked a watershed moment for Indigenous artists and leaders rising into visibility — from Sterling Harjo (no relation) and his outstanding series “Reservation Dogs” and the appointment of Deborah Haaland as U.S. Secretary of the Interior, to the 2021 Pulitzer Prize winners Louise Erdrich and Natalie Diaz.
Upon further reflection of the pandemic, she shares, “People were going to poetry in record numbers. We realized how much we need poetry when we come to places of transformation — like death and birth, coming of age. You see poetry in those rituals of our lives. It has an important purpose.”
In addition to Ms. Harjo’s collection of ten books of poetry, several plays and two memoirs, she is also the author of several children’s books. This month her poem “Remember,” illustrated by Caldecott medalist Michaela Goade, will be released by Random House:
Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their
tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them, listen to them. They are alive poems. Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the origin of this universe. Remember you are all people and all people are you.
Remember you are this universe and this universe is you.
As she tours the country, what brings Ms. Harjo a bit of respite and refuels her energy? “Being around young people,” she says. “Just feeling their energy and knowing that somehow we’re all going to survive.”