Native American Joy Harjo

Joy Harjo has worked as a painter, a dancer, a musician, a screenwriter, and a teacher, but it is as a poet that
she has reached her widest audience and has made the deepest impression beyond her immediate Native
American culture. Of the many Native American poets who have come to prominence in the past two
decades, few have produced such imaginative and provocative work as Harjo.
More than one critic has commented on Harjo's deep feeling for the myths and world view of her people, a
feeling she has translated into works that have found an increasingly appreciative audience. As Dan Bellm
has noted in the Village Voice Literary Supplement, Harjo is "now writing a visionary poetry that is among
the very best we have." It is this strong sense of ancient Native American values coupled with untraditional
visions of our larger society that enables Harjo's poetry to transcend a particular culture or a single period
of time.
Harjo uses poetry to travel to internal landscapes and to return to the visible world. The poet not only
employs visual images to report on these journeys, she also uses the connected sounds she has heard in her
mind since childhood. "Often when I write poems," she told the Tucson Weekly in 1989, "I start not even
with an image but a sound." This use of sound as a starting point for her poetry is an important part of her
artistic thinking, as important to her as her early experience with painting.
In an interview in Pasatiempo in 1989, Harjo is quoted as saying that her approach to writing is similar to a
painter's technique, as "images overlap until they become one piece." Other influences on Harjo's work are
even more specific. For example, there was her experience at Indian boarding school in 1967, when a
creative Native American atmosphere immediately stimulated her artistic ambitions.
In addition, one of the first poetry readings she attended was given by Galway Kinnell, an event that
helped turn her mind in the direction of literature. In a 1993 Poets & Writers interview, Harjo indicated
some of the other poets she admires, among them Pablo Neruda, Okot p'Bitek (a writer from Uganda),
Audre Lorde and Gwendolyn Brooks. Among prose writers she admires, Harjo cites Leslie Marmon Silko
and N. Scott Momaday; it is noteworthy that Harjo has often paid tribute to Silko as the writer to whom
she is most deeply indebted. Underscoring her ability to draw upon prose writers for poetic inspiration,
Harjo, in the Poets & Writers interview, characterized another important work, Momaday's House Made
of Dawn, as "a novel that was pretty much a poem."
Last Song
Many of the poems in Harjo's first collection, a 1975 chapbook entitled The Last Song, are directly rooted
in the writer's own Southwest: such titles as "for a hopi silversmith" and "Watching Crows, Looking South
Towards the Manzano Mountains" give a local flavor to much of this earliest work. Her second collection
appeared five years later as What Moon Drove Me to This? and contains all of the material published in
The Last Song, in addition to forty-eight new poems.
This second book gives a clear indication of the writer's desire to encompass wider themes and to work in
the atmosphere of the larger society: the book contains such new poems as "Chicago and Albuquerque,"
"Crossing the Border into Canada," and, in "Blackbirds," a consideration of the destruction that can take
place when the military comes in contact with creatures from the wild. Despite the promise contained in
this second volume, Harjo does not have positive feelings about the book. "It should stay out of print," she
told Poets & Writers magazine in 1993, "It was a very young book.... You could see the beginnings of
something, but it wasn't quite cooked."
What Moon Drove Me To This
One section of What Moon Drove Me to This? contains "Four Horse Songs" and represents an early use of
that animal as a symbol in her work. The motif of the horse finds its fullest expression in her 1983 volume
She Had Some Horses. Harjo has pointed out more than once that this is the one poem she is most often
asked about and the one she least wants to discuss.
Certainly the horse is one of the most recognizable Native American images, but in Harjo's poetry the
animal achieves what has been called "psychic dualism," a view of our human nature that allows us to see
ourselves as a part of, and at the same time apart from, the rest of nature. In the view of Dan Bellm, "The
title poem is a long litany of the `horses' inside a woman who is trying to become whole." The book
contains several other poems in which the horse is used, in varying degrees, as a symbol for the poet's
meanings; these poems include "Call It Fear," "Night Out," "The Black Room," and "Kansas City," among
others.

At least one other poem in this volume looks forward to a later autobiographical essay: "For Alva Benson,
And For Those Who Have Learned To Speak" directly prefigures the prose piece "Three Generations of
Native American Women's Birth Experience" that Harjo published in the July-August 1991 issue of Ms.
magazine.
Other poems in She Had Some Horses take us to earlier and later expressions of ideas that are strongly
connected to each other. For example, "Nandia" and "Anchorage" are reminiscent of what we find in many
parts of Secrets from the Center of the World, while "Rain" is a seminal expression of at least two poems in
In Mad Love and War, "A Hard Rain" and "The Real Revolution is Love." It is also instructive to read
"Your Phone Call at 8 AM" in connection with "Are You Still There," a poem that appeared in her first
collection, The Last Song.
Secrets from the Center of the World
Harjo used her first collaboration on a book-length effort to expand on several of her major ideas and
concerns. The 1989 Secrets from the Center of the World combines poetic texts by Harjo with photographs
by Stephen Strom; the images are designed to expand the meanings of the printed words. The book not
only provides an unusual view of the American landscape, it also illustrates many of Harjo's Native
American mythic beliefs and poetic visions. In her preface to the book, the poet observes that Strom's
photographs show that the world "is not static but inside a field that vibrates.
The whole earth vibrates." This echoes one of Harjo's long-held beliefs, that "in the real world all is in
motion, in a state of change." In this book, as in so much of her work, the poet uses language to represent
what she sees as a constant flow of landscape, history, and myth.
In Mad Love and War
Harjo's 1990 book of poetry, In Mad Love and War, marks a very different direction for the writer.
Although the setting and symbols of the book's opening poem, "Deer Dancer," are clearly drawn from
Native American mythology, much of the book shows a wide variety of other concerns, ranging from the
strictly autobiographical ("Rainy Dawn" is about her daughter), to American music ("Bird" and "We
Encounter Nat King Cole as We Invent the Future"), to an intense concern with the power of love, often
seen in a social and political context ("City of Fire" and "The Real Revolution is Love").
The quality of Joy Harjo's poetry has placed her in the first rank of Native American writers. Her work
conveys her very personal vision of reality, with images from her own culture illuminating the wider
American landscape. In 1992 Harjo told interviewers from Tamaqua magazine that her writing technique
"is a fusion, much the way jazz is a fusion."
Harjo is a mystical poet who works from dreams, but many of her poems are firmly rooted in the
landscapes of politics and social justice and her work freely indulges in sensual images as an integral part
of her meaning. Her further ability to deal fluidly with the themes of past and presentin historic and even
prehistoric termsgives increased depth to her work.
Dan Bellm has given this succinct appreciation of the writer's output: "Harjo's work draws from the river
of Native tradition, but it also swims freely in the currents of Anglo-American versefeminist poetry of
personal/political resistance, deep-image poetry of the unconscious,`new-narrative' explorations of story
and rhythm in prose-poem form." Harjo also invites comparison with poets of a wider tradition.
Brian Swann, in his introduction to Harper's Anthology of 20th Century Native American Poetry, quotes
Richard Hugo's 1975 comment to the effect that Native American poets are similar to such writers as T.S.
Eliot and William Butler Yeats.
As in the case of the Anglo-Irish Yeats, Harjo is able to thrive in the larger culture while still breathing
deeply of her own native air. Her poetry is permeated with the spirit and symbols of the Native American
experience, but it also reverberates with every dimension of the human experience.
At midcareer Joy Harjo continues to develop as a writer, having moved from the competent, though
occasionally predictable, language of the early poems ("I give you, my beautiful and terrible/fear") to work
that resembles some of the best poetry in American English since Whitman.
Eagle Poem

"Eagle Poem," a later work, for example, speaks of similarities between prayer and life in this way:
We are truly blessed because we
Were born, and die soon within a
True circle of motion,
Like eagle rounding out the morning
Inside us.
In interviews Harjo has identified herself with currents in modern American writing, particularly with the
regional depth of Meridel LeSueur and Flannery O'Connor and the strong voices of Audre Lorde and Alice
Walker. As with LeSueur and O'Connor, Harjo exploits the genius of landscapes (the wide open spaces of
her native Oklahoma and the deserts and mountains of the West) and cityscapes (Albuquerque, Cheyenne,
Okemah, Gallup, Okmulgee) that are relatively unfamiliar to the national literature. She also makes
valuable use of and builds upon oral traditions that allow room for suppressed memories, silences, dreams.
A Creek in background, Harjo often wonders aloud about her own survival and how it was accomplished,
when most of her people have disappeared and continue to disappear. In "Night Out" she talks about
people who, like herself, "fought to get out, fought to get in," fearful, even after paying "the cover charge
thousands of times over with your lives" that they "can never get out." In such poems Harjo speaks of
herself and the Native Americans who people her poemsNavajo, Shawnee, Cherokee, Kiowaas
survivors.
"Anchorage," from the same period, speaks about "the fantastic and terrible" stories of persistence among
people whom many regard as "those who were never meant/to survive." There, as in "For Alva Benson,
And For Those Who Have Learned To Speak," Harjo identifies herself with those who
go on, keep giving birth and watch
ourselves die, over and over.
And the ground spinning beneath us
goes on talking.
Although forces have chipped away at her world, as "white soldiers" chipped away at Native American
culture from the beginning, Harjo remains determined "to turn the earth/around" in a cooperative effort to
save memories, histories, dreams.
As her body of work unfolds, Harjo speaks with increasing confidence, more certain of the value of her
own voice and the authority of the voices she makes room for in her poems. That voice has become, in
fact,
memory alive
not just a name
but an intricate part
of this web of motion,
meaning: earth, sky
stars circling

my heart
centrifugal.

From the beginning Harjo not only has celebrated what was destroyed or lost but also has worked to
reclaim it through prayer ("One Cedar Tree"), active resistance ("The Black Room"), and imagination
("Vision"). Beginning with In Mad Love and War, her work has suggested new strength, insight, and
direction.
Although it continues to reflect anger, regret, and anguish over what she and the people she identifies with
have endured, it also carries a powerful sensein "Transformations," for example"that hatred can be
turned into something else, if you have the right words, the right meanings, buried in the tender place in
your heart where the most precious animals live."
References
Writings by Joy Harjo
The Last Song (Las Cruces, N.Mex.: Puerto del Sol, 1975).
What Moon Drove Me to This? (New York: Reed Books, 1979).
She Had Some Horses, edited by Brenda Peterson (New York: Thunder's Mouth, 1983).
Secrets from the Center of the World, by Harjo and Stephen Strom (Tucson: Sun Tracks/University of
Arizona Press, 1989).
In Mad Love and War (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1990).
Fishing (Browerville, Minn.: Ox Head, 1992).
The Woman Who Fell from the Sky (New York: Norton, 1994).
Reinventing the Enemy's Language: Contemporary Native Women's Writing of North America (New York:
Norton, 1997).