Finally, poet, writer and musician Joy Harjo — a member of the Muscogee Creek Nation in Oklahoma (she's also the first Oklahoman to become a national poet laureate)— is getting the recognition she deserves. She often draws on Native American stories, languages and myths and talks about her poetry as a kind of music — like making a fire by slamming two rocks together. "You hit words together with rhythm and sound quality and fierce playfulness," she says.
Which explains why she has five albums of original music and won a Native American Music Award in 2009. Oh, yeah, she also had a "transcendental moment" when she was a kid and heard a Miles Davis album on the radio in the family car. But she waited until she was about 40 to pick up her first saxophone to learn how to play it. Scroll down to hear her backing herself up with the sax on her poem "She Had Some Horses."
Which explains why she has five albums of original music and won a Native American Music Award in 2009. Oh, yeah, she also had a "transcendental moment" when she was a kid and heard a Miles Davis album on the radio in the family car. But she waited until she was about 40 to pick up her first saxophone to learn how to play it. Scroll down to hear her backing herself up with the sax on her poem "She Had Some Horses."
"This would be no place to be without blues, jazz—Thank you/mvto to the Africans, the Europeans sitting in, especially Adolphe Sax with his saxophones... Don't forget that at the center is the Mvskoke ceremonial circles. We know how to swing. We keep the heartbeat of the earth in our stomp dance feet...
I could hear the light beings as they entered every cell. Every cell is a house of the god of light, they said. I could hear the spirits who love us stomp dancing. They were dancing as if they were here, and then another level of here, and then another, until the whole earth and sky was dancing.
We are here dancing, they said. There was no there.
There was no "I" or "you."
There was us; there was "we."
There we were as if we were the music.
You cannot legislate music to lockstep nor can you legislate the spirit of the music to stop at political boundaries--
—Or poetry, or art, or anything that is of value or matters in this world, and the next worlds.
This is about getting to know each other.
We will wind up back at the blues standing on the edge of the flatted fifth about to jump into a fierce understanding together."
--from "Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings"
I could hear the light beings as they entered every cell. Every cell is a house of the god of light, they said. I could hear the spirits who love us stomp dancing. They were dancing as if they were here, and then another level of here, and then another, until the whole earth and sky was dancing.
We are here dancing, they said. There was no there.
There was no "I" or "you."
There was us; there was "we."
There we were as if we were the music.
You cannot legislate music to lockstep nor can you legislate the spirit of the music to stop at political boundaries--
—Or poetry, or art, or anything that is of value or matters in this world, and the next worlds.
This is about getting to know each other.
We will wind up back at the blues standing on the edge of the flatted fifth about to jump into a fierce understanding together."
--from "Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings"
Here she is accompanying her spoken word poetry on the sax. Pretty cool.
Harjo is the author of eight books of poetry, including the American Book Award-winning In Mad Love and War (1990).
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