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Authors
Joy Harjo (b. 1951)
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Harjo’s collections of poetry include two chapbooks, The Last Song (1975) and What Moon Drove Me to This (1979), and the volumes She Had Some Horses (1983), In Mad Love and War (1990), The Woman Who Fell from the Sky (1996), A Map to the Next World (2000), and How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems 1975–2001 (2002). In Secrets from the Center of the World (1989) she wrote the text to accompany Steven Strom’s photographs of the particulars of the southwestern landscape. She has also edited an anthology of Native American women’s writing, Reinventing the Enemy’s Language: Contemporary Native Women’s Writing of North America (1997). Laura Coltelli has edited a valuable collection of interviews with Harjo, The Spiral of Memory (1990). Commentary on the contexts of Harjo’s work appears in Paula Gunn Allen’s The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (1986) and Norma Wilson’s The Nature of Native American Poetry (2001).
Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Joy Harjo studied at the University of New Mexico and received an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. Her rich multicultural lineage -- Harjo's mother was part Cherokee, French, and Irish; her father was Creek -- figures in her poetry as she reflects upon the relationship between past and present, humans in their communities, and various aspects of the self. Harjo is an accomplished musician -- she plays the tenor saxophone -- and music from jazz to Creek songs influences the sound of her poems. Her books of poetry include She Had Some Horses (1983), In Mad Love and War (1990), and The Woman Who Fell from the Sky (1996).
Questions for Discussion and Writing
Harjo and Simon J. Ortiz come from very different cultures within the broad community of Native American poets. Harjo's roots are in Oklahoma; Ortiz associates himself with the Pueblo peoples of New Mexico and Arizona. However, both work in a European language and a European literary form -- poems arranged on the printed page. They do so in order to keep traditional voices and songs alive by reconciling them with the world which now surrounds, and threatens to overwhelm, the oldest cultures in the United States.
1. Ortiz's Vision Shadows (1977) and Harjo's Eagle Poem (1990) both use the eagle's symbolic values. Describe the way in which the eagle is invoked or contemplated in each of these poems, and describe the differences between the two poets' uses of the bird.
2. Ortiz's Passing Through Little Rock (1976) and Earth and Rain, the Plants & Sun (1977) and Harjo's White Bear (1983) and Summer Night (1990) all speak of returning to origins, to some condition clearer or closer to the truth. Are these mystical insights? Daydreams? Describe the tonal and thematic distinctions among these poems, and locate the points at which those distinctions make themselves apparent.
3. In terms of form, Harjo's The Flood (1994) is the most conspicuous departure from the prosody favored by both of these poets. Why is The Flood crafted so differently? In general, the poems by Harjo show more formal and linguistic variety than those of Ortiz. How might we account for this difference?
