[April is National Poetry Month, and
to celebrate I’ll highlight a handful of poets, past and present, we should all
be reading. Including some suggestions from fellow AmericanPoetryStudiers—add
yours for a celebratory, crowd-sourced weekend poetry post, please!]
On the
tremendous significance of a Native American Poet Laureate, and why Harjo goes
far beyond that.
In June
2019, the Muskogee Creek poet, author, and educator Joy Harjo was named the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United
States. Harjo is the first Native American Poet Laureate, and while as
usual in American history and culture such honors are greatly overdue (not just
for Harjo but for so many other Native American poets, past and present), it’s
also difficult for me to overstate the importance of a native author receiving
this title. Not simply for inclusion, although I wrote
a whole book about the value of that concept and believe it is a crucial
perspective and goal, for any community and for our
national one most of all. But Harjo’s selection also helps us challenge two
enduring and pernicious (and often intertwined) myths about the nation: that
Native Americans exist somehow outside of the United States (despite being the
longest-standing communities in this place, and ones that have been and remain part
of every state and region); and/or that they are part of our history but not
part of our present and future (the “Vanishing
American” narrative). Frustrating as it is for me to think that there are
Americans in 2020 who believe either or both of those things to be true of American
history and society, I know that there are—and having a Native American Poet
Laureate is a clear statement that those narratives couldn’t be further from
the truth.
But Harjo, who
has published eight poetry collections
among her many books and publications, is far more than simply our current Poet
Laureate, and two particularly amazing poems from across those decades of works
illustrate a bit of her stylistic and thematic depth. In this
long-ago National Poetry Month post I highlighted “A
Map to the Next World” (2000), which among its many stunning qualities
reflects Harjo’s ability (a vital one for the Poet Laureate, of course) to
bring together specific images and threads from her Creek heritage and culture
(and from Native American history and spirituality more broadly) with the kinds
of universal human questions and needs that transcend any cultural community
and link us all. All of which builds to two of the most pitch-perfect final
lines I know: “Crucial to finding the way is this: there is no beginning or
end./You must make your own map.” Or, to quote Harjo’s contemporary, the Native
American novelist and storyteller Leslie
Marmon Silko: “The only thing is: it has never been easy.”
Even more
difficult, in the most important ways, is “How
to Write a Poem in a Time of War,” from Harjo’s most recent collection, An
American Sunrise (2019). I honestly don’t feel that I can do justice to
that poem in my own exegesis, and would implore you to read it for yourself. But
one thing I find particularly striking and effective in “How” is the back and
forth between the poem’s main voice and the responses in italics, which
directly explore the very goal set out in the poem’s title. “If we begin here,”
that voice notes at one point, “none of us will make it to the end/Of the poem,”
and the pause after “end” makes clear that it is not simply the poem which we
are hoping against hope to make it through. But make it through we must, and
while the italicized voice’s first lines in the poem include, “This is memory
shredded because it is impossible to hold with words,/even poetry,” its (and
the poem’s) final line is “Yes, begin here.” If we are to finally begin
reckoning with all that a poem like this asks of us, there are few better
guides I can imagine than Poet Laureate Joy Harjo.
Next poet
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other poets you’d highlight?
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