It's my pleasure to welcome Pam Uschuk, who
will introduce Joy Harjo.
Pam's a poet, an editor, a professor,
and one of our great friends here at the Poetry Center.
Please help me welcome Pam Uschuk.
Thank you.
I bet Joy didn't think she was going to come to the Arctic.
Carrying a saxophone on her back,
a beautiful wind blew in from the east yesterday.
The saguaros raised their thorny paws,
palms slapped fronds, languorous in welcome songs.
Finches stitched air between palo verdes and chollas
as I drove Joy Harjo to the University of Arizona,
where she once taught poetry.
I am happy she has returned to read at the Poetry Center
because, in many ways, she is the Poetry
Center for many of us.
I met Joy when she held the Richard Hugo Visiting Poet
Chair at the University of Montana, in 1986.
I was a graduate student and had met her poems
on the recommendation of our friend, the Blackfeet writer
Jim Welch.
You should check her out, Jim said, in his understated,
soft-spoken way.
She's really something.
Of course, Jim was right.
I was lucky to study with Joy.
Upon meeting her, I realized I'd known her for centuries.
We became friends, and that friendship
has lasted for over 30 years.
Her graduate poetry class was seminal for me, teaching me
that poetry needs to speak urgently through the heart
as well as through the mind, that we must turn slaughter
into food.
She taught us metaphors, limitless shapeshifting,
the mountain lion roar and leafy shush of its powerful tides,
and how our ancestors inform us.
To introduce Joy in a short time is really difficult.
Her vitae stretches centuries and light years
with accolades such as the prestigious Wallace Stevens
Prize from the Poetry Society of America, the PEN Creative
Nonfiction Award, an American Book Award, a Lifetime
Achievement Award from Native Writers'
Circle of the Americas.
Thousands of people have heard her read her poems
and been transformed.
Thousands more have heard her play
her music that mended their hearts
and wiped away their tears with its sweet hands.
Tonight we're lucky.
We'll hear both, if the cold allows the horn to play.
Joy Harjo is the author of the memoir, Crazy Brave,
a children's book, The Good Luck Cat, and a young adult book,
To a Girl Becoming.
Seven books of poetry, including She Had Some Horses,
The Woman Who Fell from the Sky, In Mad Love and War,
How We Became Human, and her most recent,
Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings.
She wrote the one-woman play, Wings of Night Sky,
Wings of Morning Light.
She also edited with Gloria Bird the anthology
of Indigenous women's poetry, Reinventing
the Enemy's Language.
She is an enrolled member of the Muskogee Creek Nation
and holds the Chair of Excellence
at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville,
where she teaches poetry.
As far as I know, there is no one in America
who writes like Joy.
Magician of metaphor who often explodes
the heart of a poem into the universe and back,
she understands poetry speaks from the earth,
from the clouds, from crows laughing and eating
roadkill from the pavement's edge,
from a young Indigenous woman running
from an abusive relationship, terrified and making her way
across murderous traffic.
In her poems, we listen to the wisdom of ylang ylang flowers
in a Hawaiian backyard, to the ghosts
of animals nearly eradicated from the Earth,
to rivers flowing above, through, and under the ground.
We sit at the kitchen table and feast.
Hers is the terrible knowledge of centuries of wars,
of ancestors who walked the Trail of Tears
to Oklahoma after their homelands were
stolen by whites.
In her poems, she confronts fear,
releases it for all of us, as she conjures grace, honor,
and courage.
She takes it on for all of us as she
writes, "For any spark to make a song,
it must be transformed by pressure.
There must be unspeakable need, muscle of belief,
and wild, unknowable elements.
I am singing a song that can only be
born after losing a country."
In these times, when we enter this century's dark winter,
Joy's poems are utterly necessary.
Please welcome Joy Harjo.