Joy Harjo, US poet laureate, talks career and new poem collection
The entire notion of a volume of “collected poems” — a benchmark for any venerable and venerated poet — has been about volume. Typically, poetry anthologies are robust books, compared to the more slight collections that poets produce every few years.
Joy Harjo has always cut her own path. So the new “Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light” isn’t like other poetry retrospectives. At 127 pages — including a Sandra Cisneros foreword, notes on the poems and other pages without poems — the collection condenses a career, to date, with a curated conciseness.
The conceit for “Weaving Sundown” was that Harjo, the three-term U.S. poet laureate, would select 50 poems to represent 50 years of writing them. At 71, Harjo doesn’t view the anthology as a monolith or a tombstone, but rather as a different sort of benchmark.
She insists she has much more yet to say.
Nevertheless, “Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light” is a wonderful introduction to the Tulsa-based poet, a Mvskoke or Muscogee Nation member. Hers is a poetry untethered to Eurocentric notions of time and place. To read her work is to find a revelatory wonder in the Earth and to think about our space here differently. Inprint Houston brings Harjo to town Nov. 14. She discussed her career and her new collection.
Q: Even if this collection didn’t cover 50 years, each poem made me think about time in a different way.
A: I’m glad to hear that. There are may kinds of time. And I think about it a lot. There’s a poem called “For Calling the Spirit Back From the Wandering Earth in Its Human Feet.” Inside that poem there’s a discussion about time.
Q: One of your previous books mentioned the concept of “overculture,” a creation of overbearing commercialization. And this volume made me think of that as well as Karen Armstrong’s new book about a reverence for finding a spiritual sacredness in nature.
A: I think there’s a world in which the Earth is a dead thing. A place to dig still or monetize resources. But then there’s a world in which the planet is a living being and we’re part of that living being. Those ideas proceed differently with very different values and relationships, and they also differ with time.
Q: Sorry to get stuck on time, which really is an artificial construct but one we have made certain agreements regarding. Do you feel time differently now than you did when you first started writing poems? I think about songs I sing with my daughter in the car and have for more than a decade. Some stick around. Others change. Some we still love but differently than we used to.
A: Yeah, I know something has changed. I don’t feel I’m older, of course. I don’t feel elderly. But your relationship with time shifts, too, the older you are. Somebody could probably work that out as an equation. But I think it has to do with a depth of perception. You could argue children have a deeper depth of perception. They haven’t learned to cut it
off yet. Hence your daughter singing in the car. Whatever is going on in the world, she’s singing. That’s what matters. It’s absolutely everything when you consider that kind of time versus things related to money.
Q: I don’t want to get you in trouble with any sort of poetry clique because I know you’re not supposed to explain poems any more than you’re supposed to explain songs. But the notes at the end were revelatory, even just as context. Was there anxiety about offering too much information?
A: That started with my book “The woman who fell from the sky,” where I was trying to make a statement about morality. When I perform with a band or without, but when it’s any kind of music, I tell stories. These stories are not exactly about the poems.
It’s not my place to say what a poem means, what’s going on in it, what the contextual things are. So that’s where it started. My friend (author) Brenda Peterson helped arrange that book for me when I was having a hard time finding a shape for it. She suggested the notes. It’s important to experience the poem first. So it’s not seen as explaining. But I think it lets
people know, poetry doesn’t occur in a vacuum. Usually people are writing, speaking from a certain place.
Q: I was intrigued by the contrast between these poems, which feel fixed, and lyrics written by Bob Dylan, whose museum and archive in Tulsa enlisted you as its artist-in-residence. The documentation in his archive suggested never-ending lyrical revisions. But poems don’t enjoy the same luxury. When completed, poems feel permanent.
A: I don’t think about it too much. I never consider too much what people will think. I guess it does get to me sometimes. But I disregarded it through a lot of the years because my poetry for those years was disregarded. Which was frustrating. But I will say, I don’t always know what I’m up to, but I know I’m up to something. My poetry doesn’t really fit squarely in any of the poetry schools. But it’s also not like I have been deliberately trying to avoid those schools. I like to joke about allusions and references that they’re Creek not Greek. I noticed nearly every collection I’ve seen, there are heavy-duty classical references going on. I’ve felt more like, “Here I am, I know these stories, also. But I know other stories, too.”
Q: You have these other outlets, including music. Was there an aha moment or a trailhead for you and poetry?
A: You know, I didn’t know I’d end up working with poetry in school. I knew I was drawn to music. And in the junior high I went to, the teacher wouldn’t let girls play saxophone. My stepfather forbid me to sing. He didn’t want me singing in the house. It wasn’t that I was a bad singer. It was his way of exerting control over my joy, so to speak. So I walked away. Poetry helped me find a way back. I always heard poetry. I heard music, too, and wrote songs for a band. But those were different than when I was writing a poem. Sometimes poems would become songs. But not always.
Q: The most recent and closing poem, “Without,” felt resonant, given how shrill things are now in this country and internationally and how insignificant humankind is in a timeline that preceded us by millions of years. I keep going back to your line, “The world will keep trudging through time without us.”
A: “Without” was written during COVID times. And there was a political and racial reckoning, severe political manipulation of people’s fears. Anyway, that was one of my favorite poems I’ve written. It seemed like a good one to conclude the collection with because it’s a doorway toward where we’re going now.
Q: The poem and the book — they don’t feel like a farewell.
A: I keep working. I haven’t retired. I don’t think I ever will.