To call Joy Harjo a multihyphenate is both an understatement and the only possible descriptor that even comes close to characterizing this remarkably talented woman. While the current Poet Laureate of the United States is now best known for her poetry, Harjo is also a vocalist, a saxophonist, a flutist, an activist, a mother, a feminist, an environmentalist, and an active member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. In addition to poetry, she has written plays, children’s books, and two memoirs: Crazy Brave and Poet Warrior: A Call for Love and Justice. Harjo has also produced six award-winning albums, including her latest, I Pray for My Enemies (Sunyata Records/Sony Orchard), which dropped in early March.
While none of this success or these accolades came easily, art was always, in some ways, meant to be a part of her journey. To hear Harjo tell it, music and musicality were baked into her DNA from day one. Her mother, Wynema Baker Foster, loved singing, and even recorded some of her own original songs; Harjo recently told Vanity Fair that she believes her sister has these albums in her possession now. “I liked that you could hold music in your hands,” Harjo wrote in Crazy Brave. “It was like holding a spinning world.” Harjo described her mother’s songs as “heartbreak ballads” that likely drew from her mother’s rocky relationships — first, with Harjo’s father, Allen W. Foster, and later, her stepfather.
Harjo would similarly turn to art and music as a way to cope with the tumult of life. In school, she tried her hand at a number of different art forms before gravitating toward writing. At 16, the Tulsa, Oklahoma, native enrolled at the Institute of American Indian Arts, which was at the time a boarding school in Santa Fe, New Mexico. There, she explored her love for painting (members of her extended family were also painters) and other visual arts. For college, she attended the University of New Mexico and initially enrolled as a pre-med student; by the end of her first year, however, she had switched her major to art. (The ever-curious creative even took a few filmmaking classes at the Anthropology Film Center in Santa Fe.) Then, in her final year, Harjo switched her focus one more time, to creative writing.
Poetry is a voice, when you’ve been shut in or been quarantined or when you go out in the street and you know you’re facing death. It’s an old voice that says we’ve been here before and we don’t know the answers. I don’t know that poetry can answer things. But here is a place of words: a certain architecture of aesthetics that can shift your awareness or take you into a place of awe for the smallest and the largest things that we deal with, from the mundane to the miraculous. You can find both those things — you can find all of the above — in one poem.
It was during her time at the University of New Mexico that Harjo published her first chapbook, a nine-poem volume titled The Last Song, in 1975. Around this time, Harjo was also navigating the new role of being a young mother, and living somewhat as a nomad. Her love for writing drove her to apply for a spot at the revered Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She was accepted, and graduated with an MFA in 1978. She would go on to teach at the Institute of American Indian Arts and at four universities, establishing herself as a dynamic instructor and a lover of stories and histories.
Her work is heralded for its layered depths: She draws upon First Nation storytelling traditions and myths, framing all of her work through a social justice and feminist lens. Many of her poems use landscape imagery that pays homage to her beloved American Southwest, though there are also at times scenes drawing from the Southeast, Alaska, and Hawaii. Much of her work is autobiographical, and as an activist, she often delves into the political, too, highlighting the need for a preservation of the Native heritage amid an ever-changing modern landscape, a pushback against colonialism.
I feel strongly that I have a responsibility to all the sources that I am: to all past and future ancestors, to my home country, to all places that I touch down on and that are myself, to all voices, all women, all of my tribe, all people, all earth, and beyond that to all beginnings and endings. In a strange kind of sense [writing] frees me to believe in myself, to be able to speak, to have voice, because I have to; it is my survival.
Some of Harjo’s best-known poems include “She Had Horses” (“She had some horses she loved. / She had some horses she hated. / These were the same horses.”); “An American Sunrise” (“We were running out of breath, as we ran out to meet ourselves. We / were surfacing the edge of our ancestors’ fights, and ready to strike.”); and “Running” (“I was anything but history / I was the wind”). The poet has given much of her work a second life in more recent years, too. For instance, “Running,” which she published in the New Yorker in 2018, has since been turned into a song on her most recent album, I Pray for My Enemies.
This may be because Harjo has always viewed music and poetry as kindred spirit art forms, two different angles into the same core of creativity. She rekindled her love for music two decades into her literary career at the age of 40, forming the band Poetic Justice, for which she sings and plays the flute and saxophone. The sound is an amalgamation of her various identities and interests, blending Indigenous music with funk and jazz (John Coltrane is one of her favorite musicians). She later toured with a different band, Arrow Dynamics, and between the two, released the aforementioned six albums.
Music is like everywhere I want to go in poetry, which is ultimately a place of wordlessness. We go to poetry for grief, for joy, for falling in love, for putting yourself back together after falling apart and falling in love — all of those transformative moments in life. When we go to music we’re often looking for something we can’t even name, but maybe music, or a song, will show us: That’s what I was looking for, that’s what I was searching for.
Harjo has long understood the importance of a name. Born as Joy Foster in 1951, she claimed her new name, “Harjo,” when she officially became a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. In an interview with book critic Jane Ciabattari several years ago, Harjo explained that the name, which honors her grandmother, means “so brave you’re crazy,” and it is a constant reminder to her to keep doing the work to undo the historic trauma that haunts her family and her people.
Who are we before and after the encounter [of colonialization]? And how do we imagine ourselves with an integrity and freshness outside the sludge and despair of destruction? … Our tribe was removed unlawfully from our homelands. Seven generations can live under one roof. That sense of time brings history close, within breathing distance. I call it ancestor time. Everything is a living being, even time, even words.
Presently, Harjo is serving the second of her three terms as the United States Poet Laureate (her third term is set to begin in September 2021), making her the second Poet Laureate to serve three terms, and the first Native American Poet Laureate. Her signature project, “Living Nations, Living Words,” launched last November, and features an interactive ArcGIS Story Map that maps 47 contemporary Native American poets from across the country, including Natalie Diaz, Ray Young Bear, Layli Long Soldier, and Louise Erdrich. It’s just one of the many ways that Harjo continues to honor and build upon a legacy of art as activism, the collective as resistance.
Photo credit: Paul Abdoo/ Stringer/ Getty Images