Joy Harjo

Joy Harjo’s latest volume of poetry, How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems: 1975-2001 (2002), described by Adrienne Rich as “precise, unsentimental, [and] miraculous” (Book cover), covers the entirety of human existence from beginning to end in as little as twenty-six years, or in as little as 265 pages when including the introduction and endnotes which are fundamentally part of the text.  Well, that’s not entirely true, since the poet was born in 1951, so it was written in half a century.  Well, that’s not exactly right, either, because Harjo draws much of her inspiration from her ancestors and from “the volcanic…labor contraction[s]” (Harjo 210, LeSueur) of the earth.  Instead, in her words, she is but a contributor to “the oldest story in the world” (Don’t Bother the Earth Spirit, 2) birthed from “The Woman Who Fell from the Sky” when she planted the “roots…she…carried from the Sky World” (223), and demonstrating through her poems that the story is “delicate [and] changing” (Don’t Bother…2).

 

Influenced by Muscogee Creek philosophy, her concept of time is “simultaneous[,] layered…in the shape of a coiled snake or in waves like the ocean.  The inside is the outside” (224).  Coincidentally, Harjo sees poetry in the same way, “start[ing] from the inside out, then turn[ing] back into a complete movement” (xix), which provokes an interesting question: Just how do you construct an anthology that follows modern chronological order when the concept itself is disputed within your own philosophy?  Sure, you could provide many surface-level explanations: for example, perhaps the poet wanted to work in the western European/white American model of time to appease by far her largest audience, or, even worse, maybe she really doesn’t believe her people’s understanding of time—maybe it’s an act, or at the very least, an interrogation of what the concept of ‘time’ really means.  But I think a more subtle distinction harkens back to earlier words by the famous novelist and poet Meridel LeSueur when speaking to Harjo about the eruption at Mount Saint Helens, how it gave “birth to another world” (210).  This is how the text should be viewed: each collection is representative of different Joy Harjos at different times in her life, her mini-epochs.  With that in mind, then, the point of the anthology is not to offer necessarily the “best” poems from each collection and compile them into one volume, nor is it to create an anthology that fulfills the thematic obligations of the title, that is, to fully articulate “how we became human,” but rather, by using each book title as the chapter titles; the purpose is to capture the “essence” of Harjo’s developing spirit.  While the Muscogee Creeks typically perceive time as a spiral, perhaps a human life is too short to fully realize its bend.  Although, if the cycles are measured in waves of human rights violations on indigenous populations, then the poet has experienced more than her fair share.

Before delving briefly into the peculiarities of these spiritual transitions, it must be mentioned there are also similar, overarching characteristics between them.  Namely, the decision to compose without using traditionally European forms of rhyme, meter, and alliteration.  Not to say that she doesn’t incorporate these devices, but they are used almost unperceivably.  For instance, here is a short poem from Secrets from the Center of the World entitled, “Invisible Fish,” which actually happens to be one more heavily reliant upon European devices:

 

Invisible Fish
 

Invisible fish swim this ghost ocean now described by waves of sand, by water-worn rock.  Soon the fish will learn to walk.  Then humans will come ashore and paint dreams on the drying stone.  Then later, much later, the ocean floor will be punctuated by pickup trucks, carrying the dreamers’ descendents, who are going to the store (my emphasis).

Notice that I did not draw attention to the anaphoric examples, because Harjo uses these repeatedly in her work as they conform to the Muscogee notion of time.  As for the cases of rhyme, alliteration, and assonance, most of these can only be detected by ears fine-tuned to cadence, or by reading the poem several times.  Even harder to catch is the malapropism “descendents” instead of “descendants,” alluding to the fall of proceeding generations.  I will discuss Secrets from the Center of the World in greater detail below.

By naming her first chapbook The Last Song, it is cause to wonder whether Harjo saw for herself a lifetime of publishing.  Perhaps still grieving over the loss of friend “Larry Casuse to the racist guns of the Gallup police” (xvii), she could only work in the ellipsis of uncertainty?  Whatever the reason may be, this is Harjo stripped to the bone—naked by her lack of punctuation.  Also, the lack of capitalization except for proper nouns suggests that every word is equally important, that is, unimportant compared to the places and people being referenced.  Here is the raw urgency to tell a people’s dying song before it is lost.  A song that is “an ancient chant / that my mother knew / came out of a history / woven from wet tall grass / in her womb” (The Last Song 11-15).

In What Moon Drove Me to This?, published in 1979, we see a Harjo torn between a new story-weaving style and the former scarcity. The poems “Someone Talking” and “Fire” are the first instances we see poetry that is not left-justified.  Here the poet is working her hardest to find her voice.  In “Crossing the Border,” we see the moment of conception regarding her future works “that could not have been written without the mentoring of Simon Ortiz” (xx).

Shortly after What Moon Drove Me to This?, the most dramatic transformation came to fruition after learning from Richard Hugo “that becoming human was the most honorable task of poetry” (xx, my emphasis).  His works and teachings were instrumental in creating Harjo’s most iconic book and poem by the same title, She Had Some Horses.  Here is realized the full power of the anaphora, embodied in this small snippet of text:

She had some horses.

She had horses who were bodies of sand.
She had horses who were maps drawn of blood.
She had horses who were skins of ocean water.
She had horses who were fur and teeth.
She had horses who were clay and would break.
She had horses who were splintered red cliff.

She had some horses. (1-9).

In Secrets from the Center of the World, Harjo takes off in a new and exciting direction.  Constructed as a “collaboration with the astronomer and photographer Stephen Strom,” the poet for the first time works in the ekphrastic material—a term I’ve invented to describe the distinction between lyricizing living art and living-captured art, the former having always been her muse—and through this new medium, the work becomes “a depth measured by light-years rather than miles” (xxiii).  The poems, written in intricate prose with the titles sharing the first words to each poem, contest her earlier notions of proper nouns as portrayed in The Last Song.  Finally at last, Harjo is able to articulate the secret she knew all along: “This land is a poem…I could never write, unless paper were the sacrament of sky” (This Land is a Poem 1-2).

In Mad Love and War is definitely her most political collection.  Written as recently as 1990, Harjo saved writing about the assassination of Anna Mae Pictou Aquash in 1975 until having enough distance to write about it with the sensitivity and gravity the subject deserves.  For those familiar with the controversial case, the name ‘Leonard Peltier,’ or anything about the hit coming from inside the AIM (American Indian Movement) is not mentioned.  Instead of dwelling impotently on the painful past, the conclusion of the poem is presented as a way to deal with political struggle, “to perceive the amazed world the ghost dancers / entered / crazily, beautifully” (For Anna Mae…, 39-41).  What Harjo seems to say here is that the way for indigenous people to combat postcolonial America is to turn back to the culture, to turn back to their art, and to let the machine be its own undoing.  By choosing not to acknowledge Peltier’s militaristic campaign against the State, she diffuses its impact.  In Mad Love and War is a manifesto for Native Americans that overtly states “The Real Revolution is Love.

It is fair to talk about the next two sections together because they share a common thread.  The Woman Who Fell from the Sky and A Map to the Next World: Poems and Tales are mainly concerned with the spiritual/religious culture of indigenous peoples, and the collections work as two sides of the same planet, the earth and sky.  It is no mistake that Harjo ends the former with the poem “Perhaps the World Ends Here,” allowing the white space between the sections to symbolize the void of uncertainty.  Whereas The Woman Who Fell from the Sky focuses on expressing the universality of myths, especially concerning the Flood and Creation stories in an effort not only to subvert the overbearing presence of Christian ideology but to draw inherent connections between cultures, A Map to the Next World is not just a reflection on the possibility of an afterlife, but also questions its existence.  Then, by alluding to the atrocities inflicted by the Pol Pot regime, and how “Never is the most powerful word in the English language” (The Power of Never 1), Harjo even goes as far as blaming superstitious or divine forces for the suffering of humankind.  The ambiguity between the two collections is homage to the most basic aspect of the human spirit—its uncertainty—and is solely independent from race or background.

New Poems: (1999-2001), is the final installment to the collection.  This section represents the Joy Harjo of today, the easygoing artist with the special ability to turn the foreign into the familiar.  That being the case, it's certainly the most reflective of the sections.  Here, physical boundaries are grander than we’ve seen from her except for in Secrets of the Center of the World.  But unlike Secrets, which operates on a level of abstraction, New Poems largely pertains to the concrete world, moving from Krakow, to Oklahoma, to Los Angeles, all the way out to the poet’s new home in Honolulu, Hawai’i.  Crow makes its usual appearance (the bird in animal lore viewed as being very human-like), but this time, the symbolic significance is now fully envisioned for the outsider to appreciate:


Crows mark the boarder
Between despair
And joy
They are
Poets of noise—
Needed, because the question
Is too large to fit
One city, one church,
Or one country (Faith 12-20).


In summation, New Poems are the latest songs in further developing the interconnectivity between place, gender, and ethnicity.  Joy Harjo is necessary to read when studying 21^st century women poets because where so many other poets thrive off pointing out the differences between people, and the isolation that comes with it; she does the opposite by showing us that when it rains, “The wetness saturates everything, including the perpetrators of the second overthrow / [and] We will plant songs where there are curses” (It’s Raining in Honolulu 9-10).

 

 

Links

The Woman Who Fell from the Sky creation myth: http://www.mythencyclopedia.com/Wa-Z/Woman-Who-Fell-From-the-Sky.html
 
Native American mythos regarding earlier eruptions at Mount Saint Helens: http://volcano.oregonstate.edu/education/livingwmsh/hr/hrho/nam.html

About Larry Casuse: http://www.religion-online.org/showchapter.asp?title=3042&C=2616

Simon J. Ortiz: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/simon-j-ortiz

The Richard Hugo House: http://hugohouse.org/

Joy Harjo explaining the meaning of “She Had Some Horses” and what her tattoo means, the two questions she is asked most frequently: http://www.joyharjo.com/AskJoy.html

Wiki pages to Anna Mae Aquash and Leonard Peltier, because it is difficult to find non-bias sources. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Mae_Aquash http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Peltier

American Independent Movement webpage: http://aimovement.org/

“A Litany for Survival” by Adrienne Rich.  Harjo claims it is one of the most influential poems for her own writing: http://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/457374-the-black-unicorn-poems