Meet Poet Laureate Joy Harjo

 

 Poet Laureate Joy Harjo

An American Sunrise

BY JOY HARJO

 

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.

* * * * * * * * * *

Poet Laureate Joy Harjo

Verse Like Water presents

U.S. Poet Laureate

Joy Harjo in virtual event

article link here

Family foundation donates more than a thousand copies of Joy Harjo's book “An American Sunrise” to indigenous students across Minnesota. CLC instructor distributes some of those copies to students here in the lakes area.

Written By: Jennifer Kraus

November 7, 2020

She was named the United States Poet Laureate in June 2019 and is the first Native American Poet Laureate in the history of the position — she is Poet Joy Harjo.

Harjo will be the featured speaker in Central Lakes College’s ninth year of its visiting poet program Verse Like Water. Typically poets travel to the Brainerd campus for the program, but because of the COVID-19 pandemic the program will be streamed live at noon Thursday, Nov. 12. Harjo will do the program from the comforts of her home in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Anyone can tune in and listen to the free program via YouTube by visiting https://bit.ly/3eBgKcE.

The program is a collaboration between CLC, Riverland Community College in Austin and the Olseth Family Foundation.

Jeff Johnson, CLC instructor and director of Verse Like Water who has loved poetry reading since he was a boy, said he is excited to have Harjo, a major voice in American literature who also is an activist, musician, and writer of memoirs and essays, as Verse Like Water’s next poet. What is even more exciting to Johnson is this poetry program will reach high school students across the state, as the Olseth Family Foundation is sending out 1,250 copies of Harjo’s latest book, “An American Sunrise” to indigenous students throughout Minnesota.

“I'll be sitting on the hood of my GMC truck peddling poetry in a pandemic," Johnson said prior to distributing Harjo’s hardcover poetry books at noon Friday, Nov. 6, in the east CLC parking lot. His truck was filled with about 450 poetry books and he had three signs about social distancing and two others about poetry.

When Johnson began teaching at CLC 11 years ago, he wanted to start up a poetry series similar to one he had when he previously taught at Saint John’s Preparatory School and Saint John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota. Johnson, who has been in teaching for 34 years, talked with his dean at CLC about starting a poetry series.

“I asked him if I would step on any toes if I started a poetry series,” Johnson said of his conversation with the dean. “And he said, ‘Absolutely not, knock yourself out.’ He said we've never been able to get more than 30 people here at any literary reading. He told me that they had had Will Weaver come and only 30 people came.”

Johnson came to the Brainerd campus with the experience of booking poets and getting people to come, and he wanted to promote literacy and poetry in the lakes area. And Johnson didn’t bring just any poets to the series — he brought top tier poets who have won Pulitzer Prizes, National Book Awards and are MacArthur Genius Fellows. In the past nine years, Johnson has brought more than 20 poets to the Verse Like Water program including Li-Young Lee, Naomi Shihab Nye, Richard Blanco, Marie Howe, Terrance Hayes, Mark Conway, Matt Rasmussen, Tracy. K. Smith, Robert Hass, Charles Simic, Billy Collins, Mary Szybist, Major Jackson, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Osama Olamar, Kaveh Akbar, Peter Balakian, Vijay Seshadri, Luis J. Rodriguez, Juan Felipe Herrera and Nick Flynn.

Johnson said the poetry series benefited the entire community and also has reached many high school students through the years. Schools bus students to the poetry events and CLC provides them with food.

“We wanted to make them feel special,” Johnson said.

The poetry series has been made possible through regional grants, with a bulk from the Five Wings Arts Council. Johnson thought he was going to lose grant money this year because of the pandemic, but learned he was going to be able to keep it so began planning the virtual event with Harjo.

The difference with this coming event with Harjo compared to the previous poetry events is Johnson has help.

“I’m usually a one-man show,” Johnson said. “Like I do everything. I write the grants. I pick up the poets at the airport. I put them in the guest house here in Stearns County where I live and I make them a big feast. But this time around, I'm collaborating with two other entities ... Riverland Community College in Austin and the Olseth Family Foundation.”

Johnson said one thing he wants people to know about the upcoming poetry event is that Harjo is not only a poet.

“There's music in every poem. There are musical notes in the human hearts and imaginations of every single poet, but I see more music in Joy Harjo than I do in any average poet,” Johnson said. “And this is partly because she is a musician. She picked up a saxophone at the age of 45 because her grandma played a saxophone. There's a poem about it in that book ... so you're going to hear her sing. She won't just read poetry and perform the poetry; you’re going to hear her sing the poetry.”

More about Joy Harjo

Joy Harjo was appointed the new United States Poet Laureate in June 2019, and is the first Native American Poet Laureate in the history of the position. Born May 9, 1951, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Harjo is a member of the Mvskoke/Creek Nation and belongs to Oce Vpofv, according to poets.org/poet/joy-harjo. She received her Bachelor of Arts from the University of New Mexico before earning a master's degree from the Iowa Writers Workshop in 1978.

Harjo is a poet, musician and playwright. She is the author of several books of poetry, including “An American Sunrise” in 2019; “The Woman Who Fell From the Sky” in 1994, which received the Oklahoma Book Arts Award; and “In Mad Love and War” in 1990, which received an American Book Award and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award. Her memoir “Crazy Brave” in 2012 won the 2013 PEN Center USA literary award for creative nonfiction. Harjo also published collections of interviews and conversations, children's books and collaborative art texts.

In 2015, she received the Wallace Stevens Award for proven mastery in the art of poetry from the Academy of American Poets, the website stated. She also is a performer, playing the saxophone and flute solo and with the Arrow Dynamics Band, and previously with the band Poetic Justice. She has appeared on HBO's “Def Poetry Jam” in venues across the U.S. and internationally and released four award-winning albums. In 2009, she won a Native American Music Award for Best Female Artist of the Year.

In 2015, Harjo gave The Blaney Lecture on contemporary poetry and poetics, which is offered annually in New York City by a prominent poet, called “Ancestors: A Mapping of Indigenous Poetry and Poets.” Her other honors include the 2019 Jackson Poetry Prize, the PEN Open Book Award, the American Indian Distinguished Achievement in the Arts Award and The Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize among many others.

In 2019, Harjo was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In addition to serving as U.S. Poet Laureate, Harjo directs For Girls Becoming, an arts mentorship program for young Mvskoke women, and is a founding board member of the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation.

(Source: poets.org)

Harjo’s 2018 poem:

“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.”

---

JENNIFER KRAUS may be reached at jennifer.kraus@brainerddispatch.com or 218-855-5851. Follow me at www.twitter.com/jennewsgirl on Twitter.

* * * * * * * * * *

Becoming Seventy

BY JOY HARJO

Knoxville, December 27, 2016, for Marilyn Kallet’s 70th birthday.

This poem was constructed to carry any memory you want to hold close.

We

arrived

when the days 

grew legs of night.

Chocolates were offered. 

We ate latkes for hours 

to celebrate light and friends. 

We will keep going despite dark 

or a madman in a white house dream. 

Let’s talk about something else said the dog

who begs faithfully at the door of goodwill:

a biscuit will do, a voice of reason, meat sticks — 

I dreamed all of this I told her, you, me, and Paris — 

it was impossible to make it through the tragedy

without poetry. What are we without winds becoming words?

Becoming old children born to children born to sing us into 

love. Another level of love, beyond the neighbor’s holiday light 

display proclaiming goodwill to all men who have lost their way in the dark 

as they tried to find the car door, the bottle hidden behind the seat, reason 

to keep on going past all the times they failed at sharing love, love. It’s weak they think — 

or some romantic bullshit, a movie set propped up behind on slats, said the wizard 

of junk understanding who pretends to be the wise all-knowing dog behind a cheap fan. 

It’s in the plan for the new world straining to break through the floor of this one, said the Angel of 

All-That-You-Know-and-Forgot-and-Will-Find, as she flutters the edge of your mind when you try to 

sing the blues to the future of everything that might happen and will. All the losses come tumbling 

down, down, down at three in the morning as do all the shouldn’t-haves or should-haves. It doesn’t matter, girl — 

I’ll be here to pick you up, said Memory, in her red shoes, and the dress that showed off brown legs. When you met 

him at the age you have always loved, hair perfect with a little wave, and that shine in your skin from believing what was 

impossible was possible, you were not afraid. You stood up in love in a French story and there fell ever 

a light rain as you crossed the Seine to meet him for café in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. You wrote a poem beneath the tender 

skin from your ribs to your hip bone, in the slender then, and you are still writing that song to convince the sweetness of every 

bit of straggling moonlight, star and sunlight to become words in your mouth, in your kiss — that kiss that will never die, you will all 

ways fall in love. It doesn’t matter how old, how many days, hours, or memories, we can fall in love over and over 

again. The Seine or Tennessee or any river with a soul knows the depths descending when it comes to seeing the sun or moon stare 

back, without shame, remorse, or guilt. This is what I remember she told her husband when they bedded down that night in the house that would begin 

marriage. That house was built of twenty-four doves, rugs from India, cooking recipes from seven generations of mothers and their sisters, 

and wave upon wave of tears, and the concrete of resolution for the steps that continue all the way to the heavens, past guardian dogs, dog 

after dog to protect. They are humble earth angels, and the rowdiest, even nasty. You try and lick yourself like that, imagine. And the Old 

Woman laughed as she slipped off her cheap shoes and parked them under the bed that lies at the center of the garden of good and evil. She’d seen it all. Done it 

more than once. Tonight, she just wanted a good sleep, and picked up the book of poetry by her bed, which was over a journal she kept when her mother was dying. 

These words from May Sarton she kept in the fourth room of her heart, “Love, come upon him warily and deep / For if he startle first it were as well / to bind a fox’s 

throat with a gold bell /As hold him when it is his will to leap.” And she considered that every line of a poem was a lead line into the spirit world to capture a 

bit of memory, pieces of gold confetti, a kind of celebration. We all want to be remembered, even memory, even the way the light came in the kitchen 

window, when her mother turned up the dial on that cool mist color 
of a radio, when memory crossed the path of longing and took 
mother’s arm and she put down her apron 

said, “I don’t mind if I do,” and they danced, you watching, as you began your own cache of remembering. Already you had stored the taste of mother as milk, father as a labor 

of sweat and love, and night as a lonely boat of stars that took you into who you were before you slid through the hips of the story. There are no words when you cross the 

gate of forbidden waters, or is it a sheer scarf of the finest silk, or is it something else that causes you to forget. Nothing is ever forgotten says the god of remembering 

who protects the heartbeat of every little cell of knowing from the Antarctic to the soft spot at the top of this planetary baby. Oh baby, come here, let me tell you the story 

of the party you will never forget, no matter where you go, where you are, or where you will be when you cross the line and say, no more. No more greedy kings, no more disappointments, no more orphans, 

or thefts of souls or lands, no more killing for the sport of killing. No more, no more, except more of the story so I will understand exactly what I am doing here, and why, she said to the fox 

guardian who took her arm to help her cross the road that was given to the care of Natives who made sure the earth spirits were fed with songs, and the other things they loved to eat. They like sweets, cookies, and flowers. 

It was getting late and the fox guardian picked up her books as she hurried through the streets of strife. But it wasn’t getting late. There was no late, only a plate of tamales on the counter waiting to be 

or not to be. At this age, said the fox, we are closer to the not to be, which is the to be in the fields of sweet grasses. Wherever you are, enjoy the evening, how the sun walks the horizon before cross 

sing over to be, and we then exist under the realm of the moon. There’s where fears slay us, in the dark of the howling mind. We all battle. Befriend them, the moon said as a crab skittered under her skirt, her daughter in 

the high chair, waiting for cereal and toast. What a girl she turned out to be, a willow tree, a blessing to the winds, to her family. There she is married, and we start the story all over again, said her father 

in a toast to the happiness of who we are and who we are becoming as Change in a new model sedan whips it down the freeway toward the generations that follow, one after another in the original 

lands of the Mvskoke who are still here. Nobody goes anywhere though we are always leaving and returning. It’s a ceremony. Sunrise occurs everywhere, in lizard time, human time, or a fern uncurling time. We 

instinctually reach for light food, we digest it, make love, art or 
trouble of it. The sun crowns us at noon. The whole earth is a queen. Then there are always goodbyes. At sunset say goodbye to hurt, to suffering, to the pain you caused others, 

or yourself. Goodbye, goodbye, to Carrie Fisher, the Star Wars phenomenon, and George Michael, the singer. They were planets in our emotional universe. Some of my memories are opened by the image of love on screen in an 

imagined future, or broken open when the sax solo of “Careless Whisper” blows through the communal heart. Yes, there’s a cosmic consciousness. Jung named it but it was there long before named by Vedic and Mvskoke scientists. And, there is 

a cosmic hearteousness — for the heart is the higher mind and nothing can be forgotten there, no ever or ever. How do I sing this so 
I don’t forget? Ask the poets. Each word is a box that can be opened or closed. Then a train of words, phrases 

garnered by music and the need for rhythm to organize chaos. Like right here, now, in this poem is the transition phase. I remembered it while giving birth, summer sun bearing down on the city melting asphalt but there we were, my daughter 

and I, at the door between worlds. I was happier than ever before to welcome her, happiness was the path she chose to enter, and 
I couldn’t push yet, not yet, and then there appeared a pool of the 
bluest water. We waited there for a breath 

to catch up, and then it did, and she took it that girl who was beautiful beyond dolphin dreaming, and we made it, we did, to the other side of suffering. This is the story our mothers tell but we couldn’t hear it in our ears stuffed with Barbie advertising, 

with our mothers’ own loathing set in place by patriarchal scripture, the smothering rules to stop insurrection by domesticated slaves, or wives. It hurt everybody. The fathers cannot know what they are feeling in such a spiritual backwash. Worship 

boxes set into place by the need for money and power will not beget freedom. Only warships. For freedom, freedom, oh freedom sang the slaves, the oar rhythm of the blues lifting up the spirits of peoples whose bodies were worn out, or destroyed by a man’s slash, 

hit of greed. This is our memory too, said America. Heredity is a field of blood, celebration, and forgetfulness. Don’t take on more than you can carry, said the eagle to his twin sons, fighting each other in the sky over a fox, dangling between 

them. It’s that time of the year, when we eat tamales and latkes. We light candles, fires to make the way for a newborn child, for fresh 
understanding. Demons will try to make houses out of jealousy, anger, 
pride, greed, or more destructive material. They place them in a 

part of the body that will hold them: liver, heart, knee, or brain. So, my friend, let’s let that go, for joy, for chocolates made of ashes, mangos, grapefruit, or chili from Oaxaca, for sparkling wine from Spain, for these children who show up in our dreams and want to live at any cost because 

we are here to feed them joy. Your soul is so finely woven the silkworms went on strike, said the mulberry tree. We all have mulberry trees in the memory yard. They hold the place for skinned knees earned by small braveries, cousins you love who are gone, a father cutting a
watermelon in the summer on the porch, and a mother so in love that her heart breaks — it will never be the same, yet all memory bends to fit. The heart has uncountable rooms. We turn to leave here, and so will the hedgehog who makes a home next to that porch. We become birds, poems.