Joy Harjo knows noise.
Explore her writing and you’ll soon find it rich in the auditory imagery of dogs barking, the ground speaking, and the moon playing the horn. And yet, sounds do much more than play to the senses in Harjo’s poetry.
I was first introduced to Harjo’s voice through her poem, “She Had Some Horses,” in Lucille Clifton’s poetry class. By a careful reading of the poem, Clifton managed to guide her undergraduates through the repetition of the poem, the horse-running composition found in the rhythms of the words, and the end line which reverberated within us.
“There is music here,” Clifton suggested, and indeed there was.
Joy Harjo knows noise.
Harjo has won many accolades and awards for her writing, including the William Carlos Williams Award, the American Indian Distinguished Achievement in the Arts Award, the Josephine Miles Poetry Award, the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award. She has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Arizona Commission on the Arts, and the Witter Bynner Foundation. She holds a B.A. from the University of New Mexico, an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa, and an honorary doctorate from Benedictine College. In 2003–2004, she won dual awards, Writer of the Year and Storyteller of the Year from Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers for her book, How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems 1975–2001, and her CD, Native Joy for Real. Most recently, Wordcraft Circle awarded her the title of 2005 Writer of the Year—Film Script, for A Thousand Roads, which she wrote for the National Museum of the Native American.
She is an artist in more ways than one, as she is poet, songwriter, screenwriter, children’s writer, musician, and storyteller. And yet for all of her degrees, awards and accolades, she still runs across those who do not feel her writing is considered poetry.
Joy Harjo knows noise.
We recently had the privilege of catching up with Joy when we discussed the fusion of oral and written poetry, the responsibility of the poet, and the way music penetrates us all ....
You started out painting, yes?
Yes, I started out painting when I was young and often think about returning to it. I never quite developed it. I eventually leaped over to poetry.
And now you’ve been working with music for quite some time, as well as screenplays.
Music was probably my first love, but I didn’t start working on it until the last fifteen years or so. I’ve written prose, and in fact, have a book way overdue at Norton. The contract is for a memoir, but memoir sounds so pretentious to me. It’s actually a book of stories, some of it as memoir. At the moment I’m working on a show, something that will combine all of the above. And yes, screenplays, too. A screenplay I cowrote for the National Museum of the American Indian, A Thousand Roads, just premiered at Sundance.
There’s a 1993 interview with Marilyn Kallet, in which Kallet asks if you regretted the decision to give up painting, and asked what poetry could do that painting couldn’t, and you answered that it allows you to “Speak directly in a language that was meant to destroy us.” Do you find yourself attracted to that particular challenge?
As an artist, I don’t really think about all that—being interviewed also engages the creative. You know, you have to come up with answers for interviewers. [laugh] But yeah, you do it because it absolutely moves you. What attracted me to poetry was language, was basically sound. Poetry is a sound art. Oral poetry is experienced directly as sound art. Poetry in books is sound art but for the most part has lost the original link to performance. Now performance poetry has become a pejorative term. Poetry was here long before Mr. Gutenberg, scrolls, or any other book-like means of transporting the word. What enticed me about poetry was being able to hold in my hands and in my heart these small pieces of meticulous and beautiful meaning. It was like reclaiming the soul, or giving the soul a voice.
When you talk about your first encounter with music, you describe it as being drawn into the music on an almost physical level. There are a lot of other instances in which memory seems to be accompanied by the same mixing of senses. Is this part of the process for you?
I guess so. I don’t like to think about it too much. You know? [laugh] Because when I start thinking too much, it gets in the way and sometimes even just writing what I have to do is like going through a ritual to get rid of all the literal and linear and hierarchical stuff of the Western world, and I have to just let that go. My first experience of music in this world was through my mother’s singing voice. I have a very, very faint memory of that experience while in the womb, and then it became the center of my world, especially in the formative years, when my mother was writing songs and singing for country swing bands, jukeboxes in truck stops where she worked, the radio, guitar players at the house. Music was and is my body. I don’t think I ever felt a separation between music and my body. Words make bridges but music penetrates.
In reading your poetry, I find myself immediately thinking in terms of dynamicism.
Yes, that appears to be the consensus. I’ve collaborated with an astronomer, Stephen Strom: his photographs, my poetic prose pieces. His astronomical study is on the birth of stars. Poetry also concerns rigorous studies, of the human soul, which is directly connected to Strom’s studies. We all appear to struggle in this universe. Poetry is basically another discipline and provides a structure for understanding the world. Science is a religion. Its world is mechanistic. Some philosophical strands of American and European poetry are similar, based on a mechanistic world, and more theoretical. To dip down into the soul is to get dirty. The more theoretical, the more removed it can become, and then you lose a relationship between the soul and the world. You talk at it rather than move with it. I’ll never forget my first day of teaching at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Reg Saner was a professor there. He introduced himself and came into my office. Said that he believed there were two kinds of poets; he called them Jacob and Esau poets, Jacob implying the refined and Esau the hairy wild man. He considered me of the second sort, primitive. Seems to me this becomes a pejorative kind of naming though he may not have meant it directly that way. The way I took it at that time was as a question: what is such a primitive poet doing in such a refined place?
And that connection between the soul and the world is important to you in your poetry?
To me, that’s what poetry is. The communication with the soul is important to me, and maybe this, too, is considered primitive!
There’s communication going on here.
Right.
In a couple of previous interviews, you’ve mentioned the idea of the fusion of oral and written as a new literature. How do you see this manifesting itself in your work?
Well, I think it is on Native Joy for Real. I consider singing, the saxophone, and poetry the blending of the oral and written. My early poems were short, lyrical statements usually fastened around one image. Then, they grew as my concept of poetry and vision grew. Being a mother of young children influenced the form. Then as the children grew, so did spaces of time in which to write. The lines grew longer, the vision deeper. The first experimentation I did with the interweaving of the oral with written was in The Woman Who Fell From the Sky. By the time I got those poems, I was trying to figure out how to make a book reflect an oral experience of poetry, in written form. Hence, the prose pieces in between the poems. They were another kind of experience that replicated, I felt, the experience of the performance of the poems. It’s not the first time it was done. Evers’ and Molina’s Yaqui Deer Songs used this technique, and they referred to Leslie Silko’s Storyteller. I wanted the experience of the book to mimic my oral presentations, which often have commentary preceding the poems. A Map to the Next World expanded that concept. Maybe it doesn’t work. Adding a saxophone takes you so far outside the written pages of a book, it’s blasphemy!
How has a loss of credibility, for mixing genres, expressed itself, and how do you see such a reaction reflecting upon the world of poetry?
When you perform or sing or add a saxophone to your poetry, it’s taken from the realm of literary art to performance art, and performance art is a pejorative term. Recently I came upon a blog written by someone who had come to a performance in Ojai that included Galway Kinnell, Suzanne Lummis, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and me. She was a very good writer, kind of edgy, edgy academic. She trashed me and was very pleased with her erudite opinion. What I was doing wasn’t real poetry. What did singing and saxophone have to do with it? She and others like her feel that the music is getting in the way of poetry. And if you read poetry a particular way, then I suppose it is. It’s not supposed to be sung, and it’s not supposed to have other kinds of accompaniment, or you’re destroying the integrity of the written word. The words and text exist without you. That is one reality of poetry, a fixed, flat-planed reality.
In another interview, you mentioned that the division between music and poetry is not something that really has substance in some Native American traditions. In listening and reading your work, especially “Woman Hanging from the 13th Floor,” and comparing them and seeing the revisions that had been done from one to the other, what was your process?
When I turned the poem into a song I trimmed about half of the poem, then added a hook line, chorus, and other musical kinds of elements.
What sort of things do you find demanding this sort of revision?
There’s a difference between a spoken phrase and a sung phrase. And at the root is rhythm. It’s been a primary creative spark for me, even before the music was added, or dropped in where it was always meant to be. Repeating elements are pleasing to the ear, or can be. In “Woman Hanging from the 13th Floor,” “Set me free” in one verse is “Set us free,” in the next, and in another “Set them free.” It works, I think. I didn’t need these repeating elements in a poem, but the song needed them. The music fits right around other poems, as if I’d written them to include the music at some future point. This integration has been a long time coming. My first effort was Furious Light, a tape produced and distributed by a Washington, D.C., organization, Watershed Foundation. It’s no longer available. I don’t even have a copy anymore. Several prominent Denver jazz musicians performed on it, including Laura Newman and Eric Gunnison. The next was my formation of the band, Poetic Justice, which was first just Susan Williams and me, then her brother, John, then Will Johnson, and later Richard Carbajal. I spoke the poems on that project, which resulted in a CD of music, Letter from the End of the Twentieth Century. I learned to play saxophone on that album, played soprano and alto. My singing voice began to evolve and on the next project I learned to sing. The writing too has been affected. Three of the songs on Native Joy for Real are written as songs. The rest were poems first, and I suppose continue to be poems. It’s a process and continues to be a process.
One of your most recent books, A Map to the Next World, makes use of the same alternation between prose and poetry you mentioned in The Woman Who Fell From the Sky.
Right. The book consciously leaps between the two. One is to be reminiscent of an oral act, the other more written.
And often the two inform each other. Some of the connections are more explicit, and some are less, but in one poem, “Returning from the Enemy,” it seems to hit a real focus. The entire poem takes its form in exactly this way, and toward the end of the book, there’s a final poem, “In the Beautiful Perfume and Stink of the World,” in which you have two poems that are braided together.
That weaving informs the whole shape of the book and occurs at many levels, a kind of oral and written call-and-response, or the linear stacked next to the mythic. There’s the overall book, then “Returning from the Enemy” mimics this shape within a longer poem, and then the shape occurs within the final poem, “In the Beautiful Perfume and Stink of the World.” This was my original choice for the name of the book, by the way, but my editor vetoed it—didn’t like the word “stink” in the title. Found it repugnant. But to my thinking, it’s part of this world, and now seems to be very much a part of this world. Anyway, within that poem, there is that back and forth, so that form is at work on three levels.
“Returning from the Enemy.” That title is a reference to a Native American ceremony, is that correct?
Yes. A lot of native cultures have such ceremonies. The poem is intended to work as an actual ceremony for cleansing someone who has gone off to war—and certainly going out into the world can be going to war—and seen and participated in atrocities. Of course, seeing is a kind of participating. You are present at the moment. And what you’ve seen and taken in is dangerous—to the mind, body, soul, and spirit—and can infect everyone, not just in the present moment but through all time. Much of the monster we are witnessing now in America was given life with the first massacres. So basically the poem is a cleansing ceremony. And to be clean of something you have to go back to the root.
In this poem, this isn’t a literal war, it’s basically a war in terms of culture, correct?
Yes, it is a cultural war I’m addressing here. Violence informs all aspects of it. The source of much of this violence is a fundamentalist stance, a relentless stance in which one opinion or experience of religion, education, or culture is deemed the only one, and anything different is an enemy. Forcing language use is violent and disturbs the root of a people, both the afflicted and the perpetrator.
Your own poetry is often described as a ‘poetry of witness,’ thus suggesting that conceptions of history are quite central to your work. Do you see the primary aim of history, and by extension, a poetry of witness, to be similar to that of a cleansing ceremony?
I don’t know about making a direct analogy between a cleansing ceremony and poetry of witness. Certainly poetry of witness can act as an element in a cleansing ceremony, or a series of poems could be ceremonial in intent. I’m not sure what you’re asking. Cleansing can be one part of a larger process of acknowledgment, preparation, recounting, and so on.
Well, for example, one of the threads of thought, in “Returning from the Enemy,” is a comparison between the mythological and the everyday ways in which we see ourselves and others. For example, you write, “When my father remembered he was descended from leaders, he was ashamed he’d hit his wife, his baby. When I was the baby I did not know my father as a warrior, I knew him as an intimate in whose face I recognized myself.” This comparison between mythological figures and real life, how do you think that informs the process you’re describing in “Returning from the Enemy”?
I tenderly and reluctantly stepped into the place of that poem, didn’t want to, but while in New Smyrna Beach could not deny what I was seeing forming directly in front of me, in a place known by my people before we were moved further and further west into what is now called Oklahoma. History became present and known. The micro and macro views are mirrors and they were fiercely reflecting there. I mean, we go out into the world and we encounter, but the world is also inside us. And we’re inside the world, and within that configuration, all of this takes place in one space. There might be a distance, and there might be an intimate closeness, but it all takes place in the same space. Lately, I’ve been exploring how everything occurs within the same space at the same time, a thought akin to principles of quantum physics: each moment is layered and present. Being able to discern this is another matter. Poetry is a means.
You spoke, once, about your grandmother, I think it was, knowing the color of a general’s dog, and how this informs your own sense of what is historical.
Yes, the dog belonged to my great-great-etc-great grandfather, Monahwee, who was one of the major leaders of my tribe. He often turns up in the pages of history books, but these are the kind of details that are deleted—these heighten the meaning and lend context.
Memory, and the way it shapes our approach to history, is a very important concept for you, yes?
Right, because I think that memory is active. It’s an active thing and it kind of twists through present, past, and future. I thought I knew what memory was/is, but I’ve been wrestling with that concept. Maybe there’s human memory, which is flawed by emotional recall, point of view, etc, and then there’s the memory of stones, which is closer to eternal but still flawed by lack of ability to move freely, and then over-memory, the ocean of all memories. For me, memory isn’t situated in the past, but moves about freely. We can catch hold of it. And some of it is born within us, probably located somewhere in that DNA spiral. For instance, what if we take Monahwee and the example of the little black dog. We have the stories of him, or the memories of him, that are intimately connected because of family connections, and those family connections are kept solid because of the stories we continue to tell of him, and of that little black dog, and the stories of him basically able to bend time, when he traveled, and other stories. That’s how we know him, through those intimate particulars. This memory was carried from Monahwee to his son, then daughter, then daughter, then my great-aunt Lois Harjo, who told me, and I wonder how it’s changed through this chain of human rememberers. Most of us are pretty eccentric in our remembering. But, the image is there, nonetheless, and links to other stories about his ability to communicate with animals, including his horses. And because we speak them—and because there’s power in speaking, there’s power in thinking, and in dreaming and remembering, because it makes energy—it makes real energy. And every time you think, dream, speak, or write of someone or something, it gives power and makes connections. And even when you think about your enemies, same thing. This is about a process of linking. The connection is dynamic. Our family has the memory of Monahwee, as does the tribe. And then there’s the memory of Menawa (pronounced differently in Alabama) whose McKenney-Hall image is presented next to Andrew Jackson at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend Monument in Alabama. There, he’s an image of defeat, of takeover, and he represents the end of Native presence in the area. I’ll never forget performing at Auburn University. When I announced that I was the granddaughter of Monahwee, they gasped. It was an immense gasp. I was suddenly a ghost appearing in front of them. All these years my relatives and I had been presumed dead. So that Monahwee, or Menawa, as they called him there, was a flat figure in history. He was a part of a process of colonization. He wasn’t real. And that’s the difference, because where I come from, that particular spirit lives. Your spirit can travel back—or forwards, depending—and connect, because it’s there and part of you. I believe that history contracts and expands, depending. I can see Monahwee’s spirit evident in the children, grandchildren—it grows itself. Frightening to think about what is growing, what we are given birth to as our actions and thoughts leap from us. [laugh] You know? [laugh] We’re all grown from each other. We’re part of a process, of a root system. I think ideas are given form in that same manner. Even theories are a creative act.
You almost get the sense, in this conception of it, that memory is a sentient being, and that the division between past, present, and future is useful, in a practical sense, but not essentially real. You’ve mentioned, a number of times, that when we speak, when we dream and think, this has power, it puts energy out there and changes the world. This poem, “Returning from the Enemy,” ends with somebody who is being severely tortured, and who continues to sing throughout it. How does that fit in for you, do you think?
This image, this story was taken from a story that appeared in the New Yorker on a massacre in El Salvador. Men were taken out and shot and women and children herded into a church and burned. Other women and girls were hunted down in the fields, then raped and killed. The one survivor told the story of how she watched all of this, hidden in the field. The most beautiful girl of all of them was singled out for heavy and violent rape. In the middle of her degradation she sang. She went down singing. To take what was meant to destroy her and turn it into a song is one of the most powerful acts I have been witness to, and I was witness to it in a story that was printed in the New Yorker. Funny to think of the New Yorker magazine as being a carrier of memory. But it is. And it was, for me. And in the context of my poem/story sequence, which references a historical span of much degradation, killing, and theft, it made sense. It does make quite a leap, in the context, and that could, in the end, be an inherent weakness in the sequence. Maybe the singing will help shift the pattern, the reaction to the pattern, and maybe that’s behind my singing of the poems. The poem/story sequence is really about facing the ruins of colonization in my family, myself. The overriding voice is female, includes many different ages of female. Historically, there are no female voices, and especially no female Native voices. The only two who appear are Pocahontas, and she has no direct voice but remains as an image, as a colonized figure in her English clothes. And there’s Sacajawea, who has a voice because of her link to two white explorers, Lewis and Clark. We don’t hear her voice. Most Native stories weren’t and aren’t recorded on paper. There are many reasons for that, but overall there’s a basic mistrust of the written word, as our experience with it has been writing as a colonizing tool. And women weren’t respected by the colonizers. Males wrote and made history and still do. Stories, songs, and poems exist more so in the space of memory. And to know them you have to have an intimate relationship with the tribe and be literally part of the context of the tribe. The power of the written word is access, and a different kind of movement, which also promotes a different kind of remembering. So, in “Returning from the Enemy,” the speaker is female. She holds the father in that voice, carries memory.
To find memory, or desire, or some other emotional force, coming across in your poems as living creatures seems so important to what is being said. Do you think the process, in more mechanistic approaches, of trying to make things still, and believing that in doing that that you will gain more knowledge about it, is part of the problem?
Well, it’s always been strange to me that in order to understand something you dissect it and you take the pieces apart. And certainly that can be a useful process, I suppose, but then you study the pieces, but you don’t look at the force that’s animating the whole being, and you don’t see how the pieces are connected first, though the logic of how everything hangs together is telling of the immensity of the creative, dynamic source. Science to me is really about studying the pieces but disregarding the life force itself.
There’s a deep connection, in your poetry, between memory and responsibility. Could you tell me a little more about that?
The word “responsibility” in terms of poetry tends to freak out the American poet. The idea that we have a responsibility for what we say often feels like a steel jacket to the American Dream poet, where everything is available to you, and the land is yours for the taking. There’s still sort of that attitude, I think, with poetry, or even with anything Indian, where it’s there for the taking, and it just doesn’t really work that way. I keep remembering a quote from Luci Tapahonso, and she said it in Navajo, but I can’t remember the Navajo: “The sacred is on the tip of the tongue.” The Disney American mind believes it can get something for nothing, that riches and fame are the end goal and describe success. But things don’t come free. There’s a payment for everything that you do. If you write something, something has to be offered in return. And that’s part of the dynamic process. You can’t just take. But there’s a whole process to that, there’s also giving back, and I think that’s part of the responsibility, too. Ideas and images, in the way they come through, they’re given to you, you’re part of the process. Certainly writing is a way of giving it back. But there is a larger responsibility. Certainly I write because it delights me, and that’s at the root of any artist, that the form, and moving within that form, delights you. But I’m also aware that there are certain things I can’t write about, mostly ceremonial. But not to have permission to write about them doesn’t make me feel stymied or censored. It’s just that there are some things that are sacred, and beyond writing.
And that just don’t go into words.
And some places are sacred, not meant for non-ceremonial or non-tribal members. Many Americans just don’t accept this, though they certainly wouldn’t want us putting highways across their altars and pulpits. “I’m an American, I can do anything I want. I can write about anything I want. I can give myself an Indian name if I want.” And so on.
Acknowledging that there’s a responsibility to be silent, in some spaces, would you also say there is a time when a poet is charged with a responsibility to speak?
There’s that great poem from the bible in Ecclesiastes that encapsulates this: “A time to be born, a time to die, a time for everything under the seasons,” that the Byrds made into a song so long ago. For poetry, silence is a tool that is just as important as words. I believe the role of the poet is truthteller. And you follow the poem to the truth. You cannot commandeer the poem. It doesn’t work that way. Writing is about a tenth of what poetry is—maybe another part of this question is censorship, that is, most Americans believe that they should have access to anything in the world they want; it’s their birthright as Americans, and they are insulted when they are turned away from a ceremony, or told that certain texts or songs are dangerous and belong to certain families or people. They can write about anything they want and it has nothing to do with integrity. Sometimes integrity means being silent, about particular songs or texts because they are to be opened only in certain places or under certain conditions because otherwise they won’t have life, or might diminish or endanger life.
I’m interested in how dynamicism affects your approach to poetry, because there are people out there for whom dynamicism, in poetry, means never revising, and that’s clearly not the case with your work.
No, I think you have a responsibility to craft to the best of your ability. I think you have a responsibility to build something that’s well-crafted. Something that will stand the test of time or the test of weather, doubt [laugh]—all of that. Many of my younger students or less experienced students still have a resistance to craft. They hang on to the first draft as their only draft because they are still amazed that they gave birth to anything. And what they’ve given birth to isn’t always poetry. We all have a responsibility to craft. Allen Ginsberg had this famous quote, “First thought, best thought.” The first thought might carry the seed of the thing, but the first swipe of sandpaper doesn’t necessarily make the most elegant sculpture, and maybe I’m after a certain kind of elegance in the middle of the wreck. And then I complicate the wreck with a saxophone and singing. Maybe some people just have a different approach, and sometimes it works for them. I don’t go to contests or anything, though I have been invited to perform at some performance slam poetry events, and there I am at the HBO Def Poetry Jam, and it’s like I’ve stepped out of another time and place. When I’m in those spaces I know I’m not a performance poet. My stuff is resonating at another level. It’s not hard, fast, or punchy and showy. I’m not going a hundred and fifty miles into a wall of excitement. I’m not riding the ride for sheer entertainment.
So in terms of crafting, I’m wondering how this dynamicism informs the revision process.
I’m still not sure how to answer this. I can scramble around and pull up “Fear Song,” or “I Give You Back,” as it was first called—the poem was larger than me when I wrote it in my mid- to late twenties. The poem has its own life. Even though you’re bringing in the thinking part of the mind, to help craft, you still have the other part involved. It’s almost like the poem is there and you kind of scrape away the things that don’t work to unearth it.
Do you see the process of revision taking the poet further away from the truth, or bringing them closer?
I see revision as the road to the deepest heart of the poem. It’s what writing poetry is about. I chip away and don’t always know what I’m going to find. I’ve had some poems appear almost, but not quite, done, and others I wrangle with for years. But I’ve never had a poem just stand up in one draft and say “Here I am.”
Well, revision isn’t necessarily a written process, either.
No, it’s not always written, and sometimes the revision goes on before the pen hits the paper or we tap it out on the screen. Li Young Lee once said that he revises long before the pen hits the paper ... he works on it before it becomes physical.
I wanted to ask a couple of questions about “the crow and the snake.” I very much enjoyed this piece. I felt it, on one level, as a political allegory, but by using the snake in the way you do, are you playing with the Judeo-Christian creation myth?
I hadn’t really considered the Christian creation story analogy, but it works. There are levels to the piece, and then the impetus. I wanted to see what would happen to the overrun of birds who had designated the backyard as their gathering place. There were often literally hundreds who appeared there. So it started with a big old rubber snake. But of course, that’s the literal. Christianity, of the sort practiced in the United States, ascribes the fall of humans to a snake, and a woman! In a Mvskoke reading, a snake in a tree would immediately tell you something powerful and strange was afoot, so to speak, and you would get away. Eating of the tree of knowledge could give you power but it would require tests and fasting. Adding an underworld animal to a middle world being, a tree complicates it. The myth doesn’t embrace, however. It excludes the power of the snake, the power of women, and the power of the earth mother. And it’s a crow who comes back and puzzles over the story and finds a different conclusion. And notice I link “who” with crow, not “that” or “it.” A relationship is made here, not the one of Adam dominating the world and having the power to dominate. That crow had such depth—could have been a poet crow!
That question of domination, as opposed to engagement, is something that shows up in a lot of your work, and it seems to be at the root of poetry, for you. What practical steps do you take to engage the world? Or are those steps practical?
I think that a lot of it is very, very basic. I suppose it’s—if you were to have a Mvskoke Creek University, you know, that’s 101. I noticed a shift in my practice of being a human when I was seven years old and went to public school. Actually, this is when I started going to church, too, lured by cookies and Kool-Aid. There was no place for who I had been, or who I was, except the artist or the singer in art or music classes. I went from a world of music, a world in which I could see things, in which I could see the movements of energy between people and plants, or animals. A very engaged and alive relationship with this world we’re in. In school the world I was taught was relatively flat, but brilliant in conception and variety. And in that world there were no females, there were no Indians, and even though half the class was Indian we read that there were no more Indians. In this world only the mental and rote learning had a place. Except in art and music classes, which I loved.
In the first poem of A Map to the Next World, “Songline of Dawn,” you seem to be exploring a particular take on our relationship with the gods. There was one line that struck me in particular, “Protect them, oh gods of the scarlet light / who love us fiercely despite our acts of stupidity / our utter failings.” My first reaction to this line was to ask myself how the Judeo-Christian tradition might shift if one were to reconceive of its god as being fallible. In the spiritual world you’re describing in your work, how do you think the gods might be seen regarding their own fallibility? Are they less than perfect?
I think so. In the poem “A Map to the Next World,” a star was once a human, or had a very human experience, and possibly failed. If the Sun was perfect it wouldn’t be here either. [laugh] I’ve been called a Buddha-ist, but it’s very Mvskoke, or Creek. And then I have my own track—we all do in our approach. Traditional people in my tribe have always allowed for that—it defines us as humans. I guess I do have a little bit of a problem with organized religions, generally, but everything has its place. It’s not just the commercial aspects, but the forced-enrollment-or-you-go-to-hell aspects. Doesn’t make common sense, or even uncommon beautiful sense.
How do you understand the relationship to god changing, if that god is conceived of as being fallible?
I think we can only experience god, for the most part, by the size of our minds or by the size of our hearts. Every once in a while there can be a point or moment of grace. Like an incredible poem you read or hear [laugh], you know? That suddenly opens everything up. Or a piece of art, or a small but incredible act of kindness in somebody that opens everything up. Or experiencing someone’s death with them, or experiencing somebody’s birth with them. We are then opened to our utter humanness, which paradoxically links us to our experience of god. But then god is certainly that, is through everything, I mean, it’s the life force. It’s that life force that animates absolutely everything.
What creation myth did you grow up with, as a member of the Mvskoke tribe?
The most predominant creation story is Christian. Probably more than half the tribe is Christian, so the major story involves Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden. We have more than one version of a Mvskoke creation story because the tribe is made up of several smaller groups. I’ve heard several versions, from several different entities within the tribe. I’ve been pulling everything together, trying to make sense of it all, and in my family it appears that our tribal creation story might have us coming thousands of years ago from Polynesia, up from South America into Mexico, and then over. I believe current anthropology might even back this up. Volcanoes figure into the story, as does the Pacific Ocean.
In the Mvskoke tradition, Rabbit is the trickster, is that right?
Yes, and Rabbit, the trickster, was there at the beginning of creation. And Rabbit is neither male nor female. Neither is the overall deity or overseer of all creation. Christianity invests heavily in making all the rulers male. One of the first things the churches did was to change or destroy our narratives. Female deities were turned into male, if they survived the destruction. A trinity of a father, son, and holy ghost leaves out any female presence or power at the beginning of creation. Strange. In this world there can be no creative power without the female force. Mary was always there as an afterthought, and was only there as a virgin, not as a fully grown woman [laugh], so to speak, and not as a female deity or power. So that premise, for me, is quite faulty. And it doesn’t work for me that, again, a male was given dominion over the land. Everything comes down to common sense. It doesn’t make sense. Earth is larger than humans in size and consciousness. We’re guests on this earth. Humans are just part of a larger creation. If it so happens we were given dominion, or males were—and I don’t believe this at all and it’s one reason I walked away from the church at thirteen—then we certainly won’t have it next time around. We’ve done nothing but rape the earth of its resources and don’t even turn around. We forget to say thank you.
On that same line, to go back to the poetry here, the process of creation suggests for some, a creator/creation relationship similar to that relationship conceived of between god and universe. Do you see these two relationships as being similar?
Yes, I do. I believe that we are creators in every moment, with every thought, word and deed. I don’t imagine myself as god creating a universe. [laugh] I guess I should say that. I don’t think of that literally. There’s a certain immensity, or eternalness about god and creation, and then here’s the little human poet creating the human poem. So there’s another step, or a few steps, left out. But the impulse is very similar.
In light of the similarities between these relationships, what are your views regarding the possibility of perfection within the discipline of poetry?
Well, I don’t know that perfection follows humans around. This isn’t the perfect world, though some moments are near perfect, and I’ve read some near-perfect poems. They haven’t been mine. There are moments, but I don’t know that humans are capable of perfection.
In previous interviews, you’ve made note of what appears to be a key difference between classical European conceptions of art and Native American conceptions of same, characterizing it as follows: “In a Native context art was not just something beautiful to put up on the wall and look at; it was created in the context of its usefulness for people.” How do you see poetry being useful in the context of present day America?
Poetry doesn’t appear to be useful or in use to mainstream America. It is the least-read genre, along with plays. And fewer and fewer people are buying books or going to the library. Yet, some people do read, continue to read, to take time to delve into questions of the soul, and how those questions are constructed. Poetry is very alive in oral venues: slam poetry, ceremonial poetry, song poetry. Performance poetry is usually wrapped around narrative, word play with a big hit of sensationalistic techniques. Some of it can be quite stunning and amazing. Patricia Smith is someone who straddles written and oral. Often it’s poetry as testimony of the soul of these times. Much of it isn’t pretty or rarified, but most life here isn’t—I guess what I’m trying to say is that much of it appears to be urban, though the slam movement has made its way to the reservations, to Hopiland and Navajoland. Especially rap. As far as usefulness literally, I’ve written poems whose purpose is to move into the world and effect change. I’ve written a poem to get rid of fear. Another, “Rainy Dawn,” becomes a poem to usher girlhood to womanhood transformation and to bring rain. I have a difficult time assembling some larger statement on the state of American poetry. It’s alive. We’re alive and we’re singing. The standards appear to be slipping, however—but, overall, written or oral, poetry describes the shape and size of the soul in America in these times.
On the question of written and oral forms of poetry, you’ve said, in the past, “I believe that written language was, in many ways, a devolution of the communication process. You lose human contact. With written communication, you gain the ability to lie more easily.” Do you see the written word as a method of controlling others?
I think words, yes, have the ability to control. It depends on who’s speaking them, it depends on the intent. I think of pure communication as communication beyond words. When there is nothing between speaker and audience, no misunderstandings, no lies, no hidden agendas—there’s no need for translation. When we speak and are in the presence of each other, that is, poet and audience, for instance, there’s also communication that happens beyond words—the speaker and audience both are part of the poem, energetically, literally. Books are wonderful inventions, as is the ability to translate poems to the page, and read them later ... as if they were freeze-dried. I love being able to carry books around and have them available for reading whenever I want—but something is lost here, the context, the voice, the performance. We get farther and farther away from each other with each step of so-called progress, yet, paradoxically we are brought together from far distances. But of course, the intent can get lost in context. Words are an expression of spirit—and poetry is written/spoken expression at its most distilled. Maybe in this country for most people the link has been broken between poetry and an individual’s intimate experience of poetry. And in my tribe and with many indigenous people, words on paper are suspect because they’ve been used to sign away land and take away children. They’re still being used in courts of law to steal. And people who write are usually seen as making money off their writing or off the tribe by their writing, so they’re suspect, their motives are suspect.
There’s an early Noni Daylight poem, “Someone Talking,” in which Noni is describing a feeling and she can’t think of the word, and then she thinks of the word and it’s “Milky Way.” And that’s the word for what she’s feeling. This particular theme comes through a number of times, where you seem to be comparing experience with words. It seems that you’re saying that your idea of poetry is much broader than what many people would allow it to be.
Oh, I think so. I’m grappling to express what might be a different experience of poetry, or maybe it’s the same, but different words, a slightly different context.
To the point that it seems like the stars themselves could be described as a poem.
Yes, at some point, and maybe the ultimate purpose of the poem, is to become the thing itself, rather than naming it.
Do you think they’re a better poem?
Sometimes, yes. [laugh]
There’s one image—the Sandia Mountains, as seen from the Albuquerque airport—that shows up in your poetry over and over again.
The Sandia Mountains for years were my guardians. They were the magnetic center as I lived in New Mexico, mostly Albuquerque, for most of my life. I’m excited that I will return there this fall and every fall to teach a semester at the University of New Mexico.
These show up way back in What Moon Drove Me to This, in the poem “I am a Dangerous Woman,” which describes going into an airport security check.
And that was way back when those checkpoints were really benign. But I didn’t consider them benign then. They were obstructions to free movement, and again, it made no sense as 99.99 percent of us aren’t terrorists. If I had to write that poem now it would be twice as long and very angry.
In one of the prose pieces in A Map to the Next World, “sudden awareness,” the same place shows up. You’re talking about what might be going on in your mind while dying, and how some of the thoughts coming to you, stupid things like the Pepsodent jingle.
[laugh] I know all of those, that’s horrifying to me. You know how you can get stuck on a jingle, or some kind of meaningless repetition.
And it just carries you on out. [laugh] But in this piece, you have the place between the security checkpoint and the plane as the last image.
I’ve always had a problem with transition points, for example, before the checkpoint and after, borders of countries, the place between waking and sleeping, dreaming and waking, starting to write and writing, and so on. I have a relatively new poem, now a song, inspired by watching the sun rise in the Albuquerque airport. It’s a poem, “Morning Song,” on Native Joy for Real: “The red dawn is rearranging the earth, thought by thought, beauty by beauty.” It’s a song now.
Does that mention the Albuquerque airport?
No it doesn’t, though that’s where it started. This is an example of where the personal story doesn’t really matter: the poem, or song, is as it is at that moment, but it wouldn’t have happened without Albuquerque, the airport, the impending birth of a granddaughter, the impending death of a beloved Sioux man.
The things that have happened in America to change those security checks, how have they affected your writing?
Maybe what I’ve seen is what’s been underground, what’s been bubbling beneath the surface, or boiling beneath the surface of American consciousness all along, it’s just been opened. You think about what this society is coming to when the children kill each other. These killings are a terrible poem, a comment on the state of the American soul. This is capped off by the very raw and recent Red Lake killings by a child. What have we come to when children are killing each other? The killings are a cry of desperation on behalf of the family, the nation, the child. They are cries of defeat. This is connected to the ability to understand and create metaphor really being lost. Most language use is for buying or selling, or for commenting on manufactured stories, stories that don’t make connections between the children and their families, their families and communities, between smaller and larger communities of all life forms.
Do you see these “cries of defeat” as being individual, or do you think it’s wider than that?
The individual is linked to family, is linked to clan (which in my tribe makes certain relationships with plants, animals, people), and is linked to larger groups like town, city, state, country, then earth, then planetary system. All are occurring at the same time and are part of the intimate structure of a human being. Last night I was speaking with a Pueblo healer friend of mine about the earth medicines. The trees want to share as do the plants. And when we share with anyone, whether they are plant, animal, mineral, we make a familial relationship, or maybe the word is we acknowledge it, because it’s innately there. There are connections every which way, but it does distill itself in the intimate human experience.
You linked violence between children with the loss of the ability to understand and create metaphor. Do you see our ability to engage metaphor as being an antidote for violence?
To engage metaphor is to be inside these innate connections between human, sky, earth. Then, we are earth or as earth. We are not standing at a distance looking at earth and then selling earth. Violence occurs with distancing. Many of those coming up in the age of television and movies as the prime storytellers feel no connection between themselves and the ability to make stories. Violence isn’t real. But it’s ever present. I was recently talked into going to the American Hollywood movie Mr. and Mrs. Smith. I knew better. It was a vehicle to show off two American movie stars, to make money. There was no story to speak of—the movie consisted of many head and body shots and a barrage of special effects: violence. The stars come out of tremendous violence untouched, or rather, retouched makeup, clothes. They win in the end, they always do. There’s no connection between this and their lives in these times. And no one can ever live up to the beauty of these humans whose images have been manipulated by light and makeup. Violence is part of the human landscape. The old stories, fairy tales, animal tales and such all include violence—but there are intimate connections between what occurs and meaning in our lives. Then you add being an Indian teenager to the equation and most likely you don’t look like these people, you don’t belong to the overriding story except as an Indian. And every day you’re reminded of this. The suicide rate is outrageous in Indian country. Many deaths that aren’t counted as suicide are probably covert suicide, like car wrecks.
Do you think there’s been a real change in atmosphere, or would you argue that it’s just a more vocal expression of what was already there?
Recently a friend who’s been doing everything in her life she can think of to escape the truth of her history, her family, to duck under the pain, with smoke, drink, lovers, the usual—made a small movement to get up from a sitting position, from a slope near a river about two in the morning, and her knee literally exploded. Suddenly. She didn’t fall, there was no apparent impact, just the usual movement associated with standing up. I told her, it didn’t just happen. This has been in the works for the last few years as she’s carried immense grief, from the death of an important relative-ally, the death of her childhood, the pressures she’s carried from her family’s expectations and guilting. It’s like termites eating out a piece of wood, then the house falls; 9/11 is like that. The United States has been involved for years, since the takeover of this country, in imperialistic forays into the world for territory, for resources, goods, workers. The bruise grows, then suddenly there’s an attack. It appears to have “just happened.” It didn’t. That’s not to say that I agree with it. Many, many innocent lives were destroyed. We were all changed. It was the built-up charge of suppression, and maybe deals gone bad between U.S. leadership and particular families in the Middle East. And so it appeared to happen suddenly, but there’s a trail that goes way back, like roots. They lead directly from the event to the White House, to Saudi Arabia, the heads of multinational corporations. I feel like I’m in a dysfunctional family in this country. We all see what’s happening, but many are pretending to not see, because the truth appears so devastating. So they pretend nothing happened, or no, not our country, our daddy. We’ve found ourselves as participants in the children’s story, The Emperor’s New Clothes.
At the heart of the myth of the American Dream story is cowboys-and-Indians. It’s dark against light, good against evil with the white guys or European/Christian ideas being the good and evil being the so-called primitive or earth ways and those who practice those ways, or have darker skin. And anyone who isn’t Euro-Christian is an Indian. The military not-so-code word for the battlefield in Iraq or during the Gulf War is/was Indian Country. The Iraqis are the Indians, the U.S. military the cowboys. This is the root assumption that underlies American education, most religious organizations. It shapes the process of thinking and being in this time and place. Classical traditions imply European, yet we have many classical traditions in this country: Navajo, Mvskoke, for instance. Cotton Mather called the Indians “devils.” We’re still being treated as devils. I never heard or saw the devil until I went to church. We are in the middle of religious wars, and the U.S. religious right is one of the main instigators. I grew up in Oklahoma. I know the story intimately! And because of the regime that’s in place, those people have power. It’s a false power, but a very earthly power. But power is a tricky thing. Try picking up a live wire. If you can handle it and plug it in you can light a city.
“There is music here,” Clifton suggested. Indeed, there is. And within that music sings many messages. Be still for a moment. Listen.