Joy Harjo: An Introduction

by Sharon Harrow and Linda Stewart

My house is the red earth; it could be the center of the world. I've heard New York, Paris, or Tokyo called the center of the world, but I say it is magnificently humble. You could drive by and miss it. Radio waves can obscure it.

Words cannot construct it, for there are some sounds left to sacred wordless form. For instance, that fool crow, picking through trash near the corral, understands the

center of the world as greasy scraps of fat. Just ask him. He doesn't have to say that the earth has turned scarlet through fierce belief, after centuries of heartbreak and laughter -- he perches on the blue bowl of the sky, and laughs.

--Joy Harjo, from Secrets From The Center of the World
(and the poem Harjo closed with at her reading)

Joy Harjo, a member of the Muscogee Creek tribe, was born in Oklahoma and claims both Oklahoma and New Mexico as her homes. A multi-talented poet and jazz musician, she came to Tucson as the 13th and final visiting writer in our Poetics and Politics series.

Harjo's visit was fitting as the last in the series in that she re-created an atmosphere that had been effected by some of the other visiting writers. There was something solemn about her character and she left our morning class with a sense of incompleteness; a feeling similar to that which one feels when reading a novel that does not have a comfortable and pat ending. We are left feeling somewhat frustrated, and as if there is still work to be done.

Harjo began the Monday morning class, a class that included many of her former students, by relating her experience at a recent conference where academics sometimes asked questions to which they already knew the answers. In response to Harjo's opening to our class, students asked questions relating to their personal response to Harjo's work rather than to a traditional academic critical approach. One sensed that "prepared" questions had been abandoned. It seemed she was looking for questions that would enliven her poems. She wanted to see interactions with the writing and was interested in examining the connections between poetry, both what a poem says specifically as well as poetry as an art form, and our own lives and communities. Even though Harjo prefaced the class period by saying that she felt she had been talking too much about her writing, her answers to student questions were generous and open and sprinkled with personal anecdotes and humor; her laughter on the tape can't be transcribed, but it is frequent. At the American Indian Graduate Center brown bag lunch, Harjo expressed her pleasure at being invited to conclude the Poetics and Politics series, saying that the series itself is a way of building alliances; she said that she wants to be careful not to waste energy by fighting injustices, but wants instead to build networks, build communities. Clearly an "insider" at the University of Arizona, Harjo praised Larry Evens and Ofelia Zepeda for their work in putting the series together, urging the graduate students to honor Larry and Ofelia by presenting the gifts the class had purchased for them publicly at the reading. Harjo also caught up with her former students.

"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" -- from "Eagle Poem"

Joy Harjo began the Monday night reading with "Eagle Poem," a poem of hope, which people who had heard her read before said she usually uses to close her reading. The choice of this poem to open was just one signification of the mood of Harjo's visit, which was upbeat even though she had braved an early morning flight to Tucson, was in the middle of packing for a move to a new house in two days, and had taken time from the end of a busy semester at the University of New Mexico to be with our class.

"I am amazed as I watch the violet/ heads of crocuses erupt from the stiff earth/ after dying for a season,/ as I have watched my own dark head/ appear each morning after entering the next world/ to come back to this one,/ amazed" -- from "For Anna Mae Pictou Aquash"

Harjo opened the reading by saying that the best thing she had done that day was hold a four-and-a-half-pound baby in her arms. During the afternoon she had gone to visit a friend who had given birth the night before. Harjo then read poems, mainly from In Mad Love and War, about regeneration and rebirth. She explained that the poem, "Rainy Dawn," about the birth of her own daughter, was written for Rainy's encouragement when she was a teenager. "People think that I named her Rainy Dawn because she was born on a rainy morning, but the truth is she was born on a hot July day. I named her after the rain, which is such a blessing in the desert." Each poem spoke of such blessings, of a point of beauty born of pain and of hope. Her reading was a positive one. She included "Transformations" in the ten poems she chose to read, a piece that dealt in part with the conversion of hatred into love, the transformation of oppression into a positive force. Though she may have claimed to be tired and tired of talking, she read with the intensity, excitement, and tenderness appropriate to the last Monday evening in a very special series.