We sing our song which we’ve been promised has no beginning or Up in this land of nightmares which is also the land of miracles. Naked but for the stories we have of each other. Of god’s house walk with us as we climb into the next century Oh, sun, moon, stars, our other relatives peering at us from the inside This god who grew to love us became our lover, sharing tables of Or built a fire, as our brother to keep us warm. This god laughed and cried with us as a sister at the sweet tragedy of This god became the father who wished for others to walk beside Terrifyingly beautiful cosmos of her womb. With children to suckle, to sing with-to continue the web of the This god was lonely for touch, and imagined herself a woman, We gather at the shore of all knowledge as peoples who were put There are as many ways to poetry as there are to God.”įrom “Reconciliation, A Prayer,” in the 2002 collection How We Became Human: “I consider poetry soul talk, song language,” she said in a 2009 interview. If a single theme marks Harjo’s output, it is a spiritual quest, seeking the soul. The scenic lilts of self-discovery in her early work never took Harjo far from a steely focus on the dynamics of identity, enduring and transcending government injustices heaped on Indians, a legacy she came, over time, to see as precursor to the greater earth plundered by pollution, heaving from convulsions of the climate. Harjo built on discoveries of the familiar-a world of Muscogee Creek ancestral memory, shared by elders in Oklahoma-leading to her early influential encounters in New Mexico with poets, jazz musicians, writers, and painters. Harjo’s story is an American epic, a triumph of the spirit, reshaping history’s lens on the West, rewriting a national myth of endless space. Awards, prizes, and honors include the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lily Prize for Lifetime Achievement, the Academy of American Poets Wallace Stevens Award, the William Carlos Williams Award, a Guggenheim, and two NEH fellowships as she begins her fourth year as Poet Laureate. That bridge runs through Harjo’s impressive trek of 22 books of poetry, six albums as a jazz saxophonist and husky spoken-word poet, two children’s books, two plays, last year’s memoir sequel Poet Warrior, screenplays, and editor of major anthologies. The music was a starting bridge between familiar and strange lands.” “My rite of passage into the world of humanity occurred then, through jazz. I didn’t know the words jazz or trumpet." I became acutely aware of the line the jazz trumpeter was playing (a sound I later associated with Miles Davis). I don’t know where we were going or where we had been… I wonder what signaled this moment, a loop of time that on first glance could be any place in time. “We were driving somewhere in Tulsa, the northern border of the Creek Nation. “Once I was so small I could barely see over the top of the back seat of the black Cadillac my father bought with his Indian oil money. Her memoir’s opening scene hooked me right away: Poet Laureate, the first Native American so exalted, but I had never read her work. cit., a magical store in whose forest of books, new and older, I picked up her 2012 memoir, Crazy Brave. I started a Joy Harjo reading jag the summer before last in Santa Fe, New Mexico, at op.