Interview with Joy Harjo
Featured Writer: Joy Harjo
Interviewed by Leigh Hopkins
Joy Harjo, Catching the Light (Why I Write): A Lyrical Meditation on Writing Poetry (Yale University Press).
INTERVIEW WITH JOY HARJO
Leigh Hopkins | OCT 2022 | Issue 19
When beloved and internationally renowned poet Joy Harjo was appointed as the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States in 2019, she became the first Native American to hold the position. The announcement came at a time when our political despair was at its peak, and the collective response was exuberant. Finally, in that bleak year, Washington had gotten something right. Harjo went on to be only the second person to serve three consecutive terms in the role of U.S. Poet Laureate.
It has been fifty years since Joy Harjo accepted poetry as her true calling. After attending a Native arts boarding school in Santa Fe in her teens, Harjo began to understand the power of the arts to influence the way history is told. Three days after our conversation, Harjo was awarded the lifetime achievement award at the Americans for the Arts National Arts Awards. She is a performer and writer of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and the author of nine books of poetry, including American Sunrise (2019), which won a 2020 Oklahoma Book Award, and Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings (2015), which was shortlisted for the Griffin Prize and named a Notable Book of the Year by the American Library Association. In addition to poetry, Harjo has published two award-winning children’s books, three plays, and two memoirs; Crazy Brave, awarded the PEN USA Literary Award and the American Book Award, and the highly acclaimed Poet Warrior.
Harjo’s most recent book, Catching the Light (Why I Write): A Lyrical Meditation on Writing Poetry (Yale University Press) is a meditation on answering poetry’s call. The book is structured in fifty vignettes for fifty years of poetry. Throughout, Harjo refers to words as ladders to light and to “poetry as a tool for finding the way into or through the dark.” I read Catching the Light in one day, totally immersed in language and story. When I reached the last page, I felt full of possibility — not only for myself as a writer, but for the future of art and activism, for the power of words to withstand erasure and forge a path for the future. I’ve had the delight of knowing Joy for over a decade, so it was a treat to spend an hour with her the week after the book’s release. Joy Zoomed from Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she is artist-in-residence at the Bob Dylan Center. We talked about Cloud Language, bending time, and the infectious, “infecting” nature of Tik Tok.
LEIGH HOPKINS: The last time we were together was two months after the announcement of your appointment as the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States. A few months later, the pandemic shut everything down. How did that shift things for you?
JOY HARJO: It shifted everything. Most of my term was spent inside with a lot of video and a lot of Zoom, but I also wrote Poet Warrior during the pandemic. This life is what I've been doing for years, it's just that much of the time it went unnoticed. I've always had an audience for my poetry, the Poet Laureateship just gave it a lot more intensity and attention. I know a lot of creatives got blocked during the pandemic, but I had downtime and I got a lot done. I remember the first time going out after I'd been in, I thought, how in the world did you travel like this? I've been trying to go back inside a little more, but it seems like since the Poet Laureateship ended, there's even more demand.
HOPKINS: How have you responded to the increased demand for your time and attention?
HARJO: It’s important. We're all here to serve. I've been around teachers, usually healers, who believe that if somebody asks you for something, you're supposed to help them. I'm also a human being. I'm in my seventh decade. I'm the matriarch of our family. Now I'm the artist-in-residence at the Bob Dylan Center. I love playing, so I've been doing more of that, and I will write a third memoir that is tentatively titled Cloud Runner.
HOPKINS: I remember talking to you about this when you were in Philadelphia. You were staying on the 50th floor of an amazing hotel and you invited me to come up to watch the sunset. You shared then that you had been doing a lot of reflecting on clouds and light because you were spending so much time up in the air as you traveled from place to place. It feels like the subject of your next book has been in your field for a long time.
HARJO: As a child, I always looked at storms. This is Oklahoma, so there are always a lot of lightning storms and thunder. I remember people having to keep me inside because I liked to be out watching. It would excite me. In my studies of Native literature and being around the Pueblos, people who live in the desert, they learn Cloud Language. They call the words or syllables “vocables.” It's like Cloud Language interpreted into the human voice.
HOPKINS: Cloud Language interpreted into the human voice. I love that.
HARJO: Yes, I do too. A lot of the vocables have roots to them, and there are other languages where elementals or animals find their way. Whenever I’m flying, I’m very aware of clouds. Being in the air so much, you learn to acknowledge them and get a sense of them, and they're different in different parts of the world. I lived in Honolulu for 11 years, and — I guess I can say this — it was the first time a rainbow talked to me. I was sitting in my office in Lava Heights, minding my own business when I heard a rainbow say: “Come look out and see me.” In moments like this, I always ask myself, how do you know? Was it in your imagination? Well, everything is imagination, but I just knew there was a voice inside me that said, “Come and see me.” So I went into the other room and there was a rainbow outside the window.
Another time I was in a van in New Mexico with Larry Mitchell and his then-wife, Karen Kuehn, an incredible photographer who was going to do some publicity shots for us. I was sitting in the backseat and leaning against the window, which was toward the Sandia Mountains, and I saw a rainbow. The rainbow said to me — again, how did I know it said it to me? It just did. It's not shocking or alarming, but you pay attention. It said, “I will see you later and I will bring someone with me.” So we were down at Karen's place in The Bosque, and she said, “Let's go out. The light's good.” So we went outside and I looked up and there was a double rainbow.
Photo by Karen Kuehn.
HOPKINS: “I'll bring someone with me.”
HARJO: What that tells me is that there's consciousness to everything. If you look at Muskogee philosophy, we're in a living universe.
HOPKINS: In Catching the Light, you wrote about the interference of technology and how much is lost in the way we use language today.
HARJO: Well, those words come through to remind me, too, because I'm like everyone else. I get caught up in it. About a month ago, I signed on to Tik Tok. I knew there was an indigenous Tik Tok and I wanted to see what's going on. You know, it's part of communication in this world that I'm in. Soon I was going on Tik Tok ten minutes a day, sometimes twenty. Recently I woke up in the night and I couldn't sleep because I realized that my dreams were being infected.
HOPKINS: Infected by Tik Tok.
HARJO: That's the word: infected by Tik Tok. It was cutting my dreams into slivers. It was slivering my dreams. So I signed off and deleted Tik Tok, but it is so compelling.
HOPKINS: Especially for people who love music like we do, Tok Tok is both infectious and infecting.
HARJO: Yes, it is! I mean, there's some brilliance on there, but the images run so fast and there's so much. I like having quiet, that's always been important. Even as a child, I made my quiet in that small house in the closet, and I could have the quiet and the dark. Or I'd be outside. Even with raising little children, I still had more of what I call "inside time.”
HOPKINS: You mentioned "inside time" earlier. You’re not talking about being physically inside — it’s about contemplation.
HARJO: Soul time.
“LET GO OF THAT WHICH BURDENS YOU…LET GO OF ANY ACTS OF UNKINDNESS OR BRUTALITY. THE MOST POWERFUL MOMENT IS JUST STARTING. START ANYWHERE TO CATCH THE LIGHT.” — Catching the Light, JOY HARJO
HOPKINS: One of the qualities that I've always loved about your writing is the way you move between dream state and waking visions, between natural elements and energy fields. There's a vignette in Catching the Light that really stayed with me about the time when you were driving on the highway in Tennessee and you noticed that you had a visitor riding alongside you: your sixth great-grandfather.
HARJO: This happened when I was a visiting writer for a week at Agnes Scott College. We visited the grounds of the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, which is a National Historic Site where my grandfather Monahwee — I'm the sixth generation from him — and the warriors fought Andrew Jackson. [The Red Stick War] was the largest uprising in North America, but a lot of people don't know about it. We were standing up against the illegal move of our people to Indian territory. When I was there, they were having a celebration and our tribal nation sent a bus full of people. We were having demonstrations, people set up booths and did stomp dances, but what was the most bizarre is that the reenactors were there shooting off cannons (laughing).
HOPKINS: What?! I mean, reenactors are bizarre, but this —
Joy Harjo-Sapulpa and Leigh Hopkins
HARJO: — yeah, it's weird. You know, they had the natives on one side or the reenactors on other, all dressed up in their military uniforms, shooting cannons, and they were going to reenact that “battle.” It was bizarre. So to get to the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, there's a windy kind of road down to the interstate that gets you to Atlanta. I had just pulled on the interstate when I felt my great-grandfather next to me. He was known for his horsemanship, and I could hear the horse galloping and I could smell his sweat, the horse sweat mixed with the human sweat. Monahwee was known to be able to bend time to get places faster than is possible. There are ways to bend time. I remember looking at the mileage sign and it said something like 90 miles to Atlanta, and after Monahwee went by — which took in my perception of time, not even a whole minute — suddenly, the sign said 60 miles to Atlanta. In one minute, I'd gone 30 miles.
HOPKINS: You bent time together!
HARJO: I don't know exactly how he did it, but it backed up what my elder always told me about him.
HOPKINS: You’ve written that you think of English as a trade language. How do you reconcile that the language that was forced on your ancestors is the same language you use to communicate about things like hope and beauty and the importance of the legacy of the past?
HARJO: I'm trying to learn my own language. I’m kind of spotty at it, but when I learn how things are put together, how sense is made, and what matters in a culture and the landscape and history and all of that is embedded in it, I realize how so many of us use language that we were colonized by. We were colonized by language, too. Language is built with all sorts of expectations and shapes, so in a way, it reshapes your mind. For me, poetry goes back to that liminal space.
“WE WERE COLONIZED BY LANGUAGE, TOO. LANGUAGE IS BUILT WITH ALL SORTS OF EXPECTATIONS AND SHAPES, SO IN A WAY, IT RESHAPES YOUR MIND. FOR ME, POETRY GOES BACK TO THAT LIMINAL SPACE.”
HOPKINS: In Catching the Light, you wrote that structurally, you think of a poem as a house. The houses of the colonizers were these very square, sharp, pointy-cornered houses, but Native houses more closely follow natural elements.
HARJO: I was just thinking about that. Ali Cobby Eckermann, who is an Australian Aboriginal poet, has a poem about that.
HOPKINS: Can you say more about this in connection to your time at the Iowa Writers Workshop?
HARJO: I've tried to figure this out, because I don't have bad feelings about Iowa, I have friends there, but it was a challenging place. When I arrived in Iowa, poetry belonged to me and I felt that I had a place with poetry. Then when I was in that atmosphere, a lot of the students had PhDs in literature and they had been literary poetry bound for their whole lives. I felt unmoored — as if poetry lived somewhere in a rarefied place that I could never get to. It lived in a different kind of house, and that house was far away from where I lived. That's what I had trouble with, until finally, about after the second year of the two-year program, I finally decided that I just had to be who I was, even if it didn't fit.
HOPKINS: It seems like this has been a theme for you at many points in your life.
HARJO: I go through that a lot. Actually, one of my themes is feeling like I should just get over it. My gosh, I'm 71, I should just get over it! I was disregarded a lot when I was younger for a number of reasons, but at some point, a wise teacher told me: be yourself. At first, I thought it was too simple, but it's one of the most challenging things to do.
“I was disregarded a lot when I was younger for a number of reasons, but at some point, a wise teacher told me: be yourself. At first, I thought it was too simple, but it's one of the most challenging things to do.”
HOPKINS: I keep a quote on my desk from you from American Sunrise that says, "Be who you are, even if it kills you. / It will over and over again." I turned 54 last week and I'm eternally surprised by how much effort it takes some days to claim space for my own voice, for my own thoughts. Knowing this is something that you’re still thinking about is comforting. It helps me to be kinder to myself.
HARJO: It's an awareness of selfhood. Selfhood, of course, leads you to everyone-hood. I've always felt that the best poems are larger than me. I have a children's book coming out with [Caldecott Medalist] Michaela Goade, who is illustrating the poem, “Remember.” When I wrote "Remember," I came to understand that the poems were speaking to me. I came to realize that poem has been with me almost my whole career. I don't like to say career because it doesn't feel quite right, although I guess it is the English language (laughing).
HOPKINS: You’ve made a life through poetry for fifty years. Did you have to give yourself permission to do this?
HARJO: I've come to understand that poetry really is a calling and I don't even know that I chose it. It’s interesting, because it was so compelling and it made no sense. At the point when I published my first poem, I had two small children and I was studying at the University of New Mexico. I had all my Art History hours, but I started out Pre-Med with a minor in dance.
HOPKINS: You often talk about music and poetry as though they’re almost interchangeable, that they serve as doorways for each other.
HARJO: I’ve always loved drawing and painting. My grandmother and aunt were painters. It was a kind of language that allowed me to be in my “inside space,” which is huge. Dreams and new ideas and teachers and other kinds of universes live there. Painting gave me a skill to move more succinctly. I started out painting and I figure I’ll go out painting. I loved poetry, but I was not a speaker. I would not stand up when I needed to speak, and that haunted me. Then I started going to readings and I met Simon Ortiz and Leslie [Marmon] Silko, and I understood that you could get into the same space as you do with art. I saw myself as a kind of witness to what I was seeing going on — a very female witness. People were concerned. How was I going to make a living? Most Native students, a lot of us are first generation. I was a first generation on my father’s side, the sharecropper’s side, the tribal leader’s side. On my mother’s side, my grandmother and aunt had gotten BFAs in art in what was basically Indian territory.
HOPKINS: You’ve said there was a precedent for that. You knew a lot of successful Native artists, so focusing on art seemed like a good way through.
HARJO: Yes, it was recognized that you could make a living as an artist, but there is no place in the community for poets. How does a poet make a living, you know? (laughing) Native people were going to school to learn knowledge that we could take back in health care and education and law and vocations that really mattered to the growth, development, and well-being of the community, and what use is poetry? But there was something there within me, something that didn’t even make sense to me, but I knew I had to go there.
HOPKINS: I’ll never forget watching your inaugural reading as Poet Laureate at the Library of Congress. When you stood on that stage and picked up your saxophone, it was one of the most moving things I’ve ever witnessed. It was as if the whole room was breathing with you.
HARJO: That was an amazing moment. You know, sometimes you move along with your life and don’t have time to reflect. Most of my life is ‘inside,’ but being named US Poet Laureate was a big shift. “Most of my life is ‘inside,’ but being named US Poet Laureate was a big shift. In that moment of being an artist, I realized how much the falsely constructed images of Native peoples have damaged a possible relationship with the American Story. Standing on that stage, I thought, if my work does nothing else, I want us to be seen as human beings.”
“Most of my life is ‘inside,’ but being named US Poet Laureate was a big shift. In that moment of being an artist, I realized how much the falsely constructed images of Native peoples have damaged a possible relationship with the American Story. Standing on that stage, I thought, if my work does nothing else, I want us to be seen as human beings.”
HOPKINS: I did a deep dive into the website of your signature project for the Library of Congress (“Living Nations, Living Words,” an interactive map that highlights the works of 47 Native Nations poets), and it’s incredible. What it was like to gather this information?
HARJO: I’ve always loved maps, and I wanted to create a digital map that would show that there are many Native poets, to show that we are everywhere. Sometimes where they live is not where their people are, so I picked a map that had no political borders between the US and Canada and Mexico — it was just earth and water — and that was the map I chose. The poets all talked about place, and I said to them, “You pick the poem and the place where you want to be placed on the map.” I would love to see every Native poet on that map.
HOPKINS: Joy, thank you. It’s been so wonderful to spend this time with you today.
HARJO: I know, me too. We don’t get to do this very much. This has been great.
Leigh Hopkins is the Editor and Curator of Khôra, a dynamic online arts space conceived and produced in collaboration with author Lidia Yuknavitch and Corporeal Writing. Leigh is a columnist at The Rumpus, and her work has appeared in BOMB Magazine, Longreads, McSweeney’s, Entropy, and The Philadelphia Inquirer, among other publications. She is a writing workshop leader at Corporeal Writing and the Director of Viva Institute. After the publication of Leigh’s essay The Brazilian Healer and the Patron Saint of Impossible Causes (Longreads), she was featured in a Brazilian documentary by the film crew who first exposed the crimes of John of God, the world’s most famous “spiritual surgeon.”
In 2010, Leigh left a career in social policy to move to Brazil, where she founded an online institute by rigging a satellite dish to a boulder in a banana field. Before moving to Brazil, Leigh was a leader in the design, development and implementation of the after school literacy program model Youth Education for Tomorrow (YET), which was referenced by President Obama in the New York Times as an example of what’s possible in community-based institutions. As the Vice President for Education of a leading social policy think tank, Leigh provided support to 500 literacy programs in historically underserved communities throughout the United States.