At one time, poets were considered the “unacknowledged legislators of the world,” or so Shelley said. Today, it’s hard to imagine a world where people turned to poetry rather than CNN for the important news of the day.
Still, one can learn a lot about what it means to exist in this world by turning to poetry, especially the work of someone like Joy Harjo, a contemporary writer and musician with a wide variety of poems, plays, and CDs as part of her repertoire.
Harjo is a native Oklahoman, a member of the Muscogee Nation, and her many books of poetry include a diverse variety of forms and themes. Harjo is at that stage of her career where her poetry has been collected, most recently in How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems 1975-2001.
The Early Poems
The poems from She Had Some Horses , her first book of poetry excerpted in this collection are primarily about women claiming their right to live and breathe and survive in a world often indifferent to all three struggles. “Remember” tells the reader:
Remember you are this universe and this
universe is you.
Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you.
Remember language came from this.
Remember the dance language is, that life is.
Remember.
The title poem also uses repetition, this time of the phrase “She had some horses” throughout the poem to describe the magical and dual nature of a woman’s life. The poem ends:
She had some horses she loved.
She had some horses she hated.
These were the same horses.
Mixed with the eloquent mysterious imagery and phrasing in so many of her poems, Harjo brings in and makes simple details of everyday life eloquent, such as in “Naming”:
I call my sisters to dress for the stomp dance
As all the little creatures hum and sing
in the thick grass around the grounds.
Lightning bugs are tiny stars
dancing in the river of dusk.
Our stomachs are full of meat and fry bread
and the talk of aunts and uncles.
Themes of Revolution and Identity
Many of the poems in this collection are about war and revolutions—the effects and the need to remain “human” in the face of the inhumanity that both inevitably carry with them. Many poems are about injustice. If you are familiar with Buffy Saint Marie’s song, “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” the references to a woman who supposedly “died of exposure” might link to Harjo’s poem “For Anna Mae Pictou Aquash, Whose Spirit is Present Here and in the Dappled Stars (For We Remember the Story and Must Tell it Again So We May All Live).”
This poem is written for Aquash, a member of the American Indian Movement, whose murder has never been solved. When her body was found, the FBI had her hands cut off and sent to Washington for fingerprint analysis. The mutilation was impossible to understand, and the cover-up of her murder was atrocious. Harjo writes:
. . . we understood
wordlessly
the ripe meaning of your murder.
As I understand ten years later after the slow changing
of the seasons
that we have just begun to touch
the dazzling whirlwind of our anger,
we have just begun to perceive the amazed world the ghost dancers
entered
crazily, beautifully.
Harjo’s Notes and Comments
A big plus with this book is the section of Notes at the end, where Harjo explains some of the references in the poems or the background behind them. This information is not necessary in appreciating the poems; however, the explanations in the Notes are almost as poetic as some of the poems.
Perhaps her fellow Okies will best understand and admire Harjo’s “The Last Song”:
how can you stand it
he said
the hot Oklahoma summers
where you were born
this humid thick air
is choking me
and i want to go back to new mexico
it is the only way
i know how to breathe
an ancient chant
that my mother knew
came out of a history
woven from wet tall grass
in her womb
and i know no other way
than to surround my voice
with the summer song of crickets
in this moist south night air
oklahoma will be the last song
i’ll ever sing
Today it is unlikely that people consider that “literature is the news that stay news,” as Ezra Pound famously said. Pound’s line is often misquoted with “poetry” replacing literature.” Perhaps, after all, there is some sense that poetry does have something to say about the human experience. Joy Harjo’s poems speak eloquently of what being human is all about.
References
Harjo, Joy. How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems 1975-2001. New York: Norton, 2002.
Pound, Ezra. ABC of Reading. New York: New Directions, 1960.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “A Defence of Poetry.”Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments, 1840.
Shaun Perkins - Shaun Perkins, teacher, poet, storyteller, porch-sitter, beekeeper, gardener, writer, has been a high school and university teacher for ...
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