I'm going to accidentally quote the president.
Wow.
[LAUGHTER]
I'm Cynthia Hogue.
I'm the Marshall Chair in poetry for another month at ASU,
after which I will remain a poet, I trust.
Thanks to the amazing Natalie.
Thanks to Tyler realizing that she's a visionary.
Thanks to everyone who came here,
who gathered to celebrate three magnificent poets and friends.
Let me repeat, wow.
My heart is filled with joy looking out at you.
This is an awesome celebratory and magnificent moment
and a historic evening in Phoenix of all places.
Author of 15 collections of poetry and prose
and four award-winning music albums, Joy Harjo
is a member of the Muskogee Nation.
A writer, poet, musician, teacher, feminist,
and activist, though not necessarily in that order.
Recognized early on as a poet to watch,
she has now begun to be honored in ways
commensurate with her achievements,
her stellar career capped by receiving the Wallace Stevens
Award from the Academy of American Poets in 2015
and in 2017 by receiving the Ruth Lilly prize in poetry
from the Poetry Foundation, to name
but two of her many honors.
For me, there is a sense of sheer joy--
I'm sorry, Joy, the pun.
Can't resist.
I've taught Joy Harjo's poetry and also Rita's for 30 years.
And in reading Joy's work closely with students
of poetry, always powerful, even magical,
filled with unexpected insight and understanding.
I want to give you one brief example from the last class I
taught this fall.
In the middle of the Joy Harjo group oral report,
one student in the group, Raquel Denis,
suddenly lifted her head from the page and exclaimed
of Joy's most recent collection, Conflict Resolution with Holy
Beings, "this book is a book of wisdom
and Joy Harjo is a wise woman."
I was so touched because, coincidentally,
having lived with the book for the last six months off and on,
I had had the same exact realization
as I reread the counsel housed in the title poem
as I prepared for class.
Quote, "by listening, we will understand
who we are in this holy realm of words.
Do not parade pleased with yourself.
You must speak in the language of justice."
For Harjo, language is the key to social transformation,
but it's complicated.
As postcolonial scholar, Jonathan Monroe, has put it,
Harjo is a speaker of the truth of Indigenous peoples, a poet
and seer who urges us to live in relation to the web of life,
to the Earth, and to each other, preserving
what is a value at the shores of all knowledge.
As Harjo writes in The Woman Who Fell From the Sky,
we gather up these strands, broken from the web of life.
We call them the names of our relatives
and carry them to our home, made of the four directions
and we sing.
One speaker's spirit in conflict resolution inveighs, quote,
"you can change the story that the politically imposed trade
language, English, has told of the native peoples."
Joy Harjo's true-speaking poetry has
done just that, infused English with a changed story.
And we all are changed by her work.
Please join me in welcoming Joy Harjo.
[APPLAUSE]