Joy, when I read your poetry I’m aware that dancing and movement seem so important to you. What do you experience when you’re dancing? How does this image of dancing run through your words?
For me, dancing has always meant the ability to move about in the world without question. I was often the shyest person and the quietest person until I got on the dance floor. Those who thought they knew me would question: Who was that? Dancing was the one thing I could do and be absolutely myself without any restrictions. I’ve found a similar movement in the writing of poetry. I have found it in music. Writing poetry is a way of moving. How dancing works through all of my poetry, I’m not sure exactly, but I know it’s there. One of my best earlier poems is “There Was a Dance, Sweetheart,” in What Moon Drove Me to This? The whole poem was an awareness of dance, of the dance of life, of the dance of a particular relationship or movement from a meeting to a departure, from a sunrise to a sunset. We can either be dragged by circumstance or we find a way to dance. In a piece in A Map to the Next World I was reminded by my muse that if you’re going through hell, you might as well dance.
Following up on Harbour’s question, I was thinking about the poem “The Evening Song,” and how that it ends on the word “bury.” Bury is usually an ending kind of word, but in the rhythm of that poem it’s like the poem doesn’t end. We have an ending and a word that’s strongly associated with ending, but the rhythm of what’s happening at the ending of that poem isn’t really letting the poem end. So often in your poetry I feel like I’m entering into a poem that really doesn’t have a beginning or an ending. Is that something that you think about?
I still haven’t really worn that poem; it’s fairly new. Maybe in that particular poem it’s related to moving through water and I’m moving through in an outrigger canoe, moving through grief, a small bit of grief. Water is movement. Usually, you go back on earth to bury. On an island you take to the ocean for burying and healing. And yes, I think there’s something to your statement, I feel that often the poems aren’t so declarative in time and space. They are part of a larger narrative, lyric or song. What we see on the page, or hear in the air is just the earthly part of it. I am always aware of different kinds of time, every moment of past, present, future. Poems are often lenses to see into time, they aren’t always confined by the page, by air.
I feel sometimes like a poem was kind of there, like something preceded this poem and something goes on after it. And this little piece is just part of something bigger that doesn’t have an ending or a beginning; it’s kind of confined on the page, which is really exciting and wonderful.
Yeah, maybe that’s what’s happened. That’s a newer poem and in some of the older more prosaic poems, I may have overwritten. I read the long narrative poem “Wolf Warrior” the other day, for the first time in a few years As I read I realized that probably two thirds of it needs to be cut. Maybe this trimming need is part of a larger trend that’s come about from working on music, as I turn poems to lyrics, and sifting down to what’s most important. I have a tendency to over-analyze, and realize that I often indulged myself in some of those longer, denser narrative pieces.
Last night you said that you don’t have any illusions that the poem comes from you. I really like that. My own experience with creative things is I just got lucky and was there when it arrived. Can you elaborate on that some?
Yeah, I’ve had students who ask “if that’s true, then do you just go write when you get inspired?” and I tell them you can’t do that. If you just write when you’re inspired, you may never write. You have to sit there and be open, ready, even as you are writing to discover. Sometimes nothing will happen or will appear to happen. But I’ve learned that something is always happening. Then maybe months later what I thought wasn’t happening suddenly appears as a gift. I realize that there were roots to that poem or story or song that go back before all the meandering around. But as to where they come from, who knows? Sometimes I feel like I’m just constructing little houses for the poems or for the songs, I’m making a place for them, and if they like it, if they think it looks nice enough or they like the feel of it, a spirit will move into it and live there.
In talking about this place from which the voices come, don’t you sometimes write about tricksters, lots of times, maybe? When you’re in that place where voices come, are there tricksters that confound and fool you, too?
Oh, yeah. I think tricksters always have two sides to them. There’s a purpose to tricksters and sometimes they’re like laughter and crying all rolled into one, and they can startlingly open something up just as they can slam something shut. There’s always that duality to them. In our tribe, the Muskogee tribe, trickster is rabbit. I always remember Bob Thomas, the Cherokee culturalist and storyteller extraordinaire, telling me, “The rabbit’s not male or female, it’s both. It’s always walking that line between the sacred and the profane—the trickster is always about the duality between here and there, sun and moon, sky and earth. Somebody has to patrol, I suppose, or be on that line making sense of what really can’t be made sense of. Sometimes I think what I do as a poet or as a human being is walk that line. And when you walk that line and you listen and you watch, you meet the other tricky ones. And even as you think you might be fooling them, they fool you. I don’t think there’s anybody on earth who’s not beyond being fooled, or we wouldn’t be here. This is earth. But everybody, everything serves a purpose, and tricksters serve that purpose of embodying the sublime and the ridiculous.
I think I’m raising a topic to hear your wonder within. One of your earlier poems reminds me of what you’re talking about now. There’s a line in “I Am a Dangerous Woman” that made me look back at the date it was published, for it seems like a post–9/11 poem, but it’s not. There’s a line about weapons that security systems will never detect and about which guns can or even should always click in your head.
Security will never find these; of course, security has changed these days. We’re more insecure than ever, now one of the most despised countries in the world, thanks to our “security” problem. The meaning of the word “security” has acquired other nuances of meaning, heavy baggage from these times. That was one of my earliest poems, when I lived in fog and it was only poetry that would focus my psyche in the present-time field. Of course I wouldn’t write the same poem now. I don’t know about “wonder within”—there is no edge to wonder.
I was really struck last night hearing you speak, for I thought you were one of the few public speakers that I have heard in my life who was the least negative and the least judgmental and the kindest. You were so careful in everything you said, never talking about them without including yourself among them. You did not talk about your own ways of doing things as if they were some kind of universal law. I admired that so much. And I’m thinking it was not an accident that she’s presenting herself this way. What kind of energy do you see yourself putting out when you’re on a stage speaking or performing? Do you feel that you live by that kind of non-judgmental-ness, that you’re putting that positive energy out there?
We’re all putting energy out whatever we’re doing ... we’re in a constant stream of energy, and we’re either singing or making noise. Sometimes a little wisdom breaks through, other times (as you can see by the chaos of this spoken draft of the interview!), it doesn’t. I ask for help. I asked for help last night, as it can take awhile for yourself to catch up to yourself. I lean towards compassion but I struggle like everyone else with all my human complications. There’s an onomatopoeic word in Hawaiian, li‘ili‘i, which means “small,” as in small-acting. That self is quite energetic and likes to get its way. Last night I wasn’t up to it ... the compassionate self stepped forward. It always reminds me that I’m serving poetry, the source of poetry. It’s much larger than me, than the li‘ili‘i self.
Incredibly wise and mature.
So I’ve learned a lot along the way. That’s why it’s hard to come back to Oklahoma sometimes, because of my li‘ili‘i self.
Do you see anger as having a positive value?
Anger is anger and there’s going to be anger where there are human beings. Everything has two sides to it and more uses than two. We’ve all experienced the negative aspects of anger; we’re here. There’s a Gandhi quote I never get quite right about anger, anger is what he used to transform his country. It became a useful power. I try the “standing on the moon rule,” which means, stand on the moon and look down at your problem, your country, your family, your heartache, your failure. Then it all makes sense. Practicing the arts is a means to transform or transmute anger into something useful.
What you said this morning about war triggered my question. You were saying “there’s a war in me and I have been able to claim that, take responsibility for that, separate myself from it, even while condemning it.”
Yeah, it was difficult to recognize that War was in me. I have more than a fair share of pride. When I began to really examine this war within myself I then found a common link between myself and those I name my enemy. Maybe being born with the blood of two warring tribes within has come to some good use. Or I’m just fooling myself. The most difficult thing is to allow the contradictions to exist, side by side. One always wants to swallow the other.
Last night you said most poetry is not in a book. I want to hear more about that.
Books are a relatively recent invention in human time. The roots of poetry are oral; most poetry comes about with a guitar, a drum, or some sort of accompaniment, announces itself in the world with dance. I am not a good researcher or scholar, but I imagine if you were to go back and look at the roots of all cultures in the world, most of the poetry that has been produced is probably born in song. Many songs are languishing and lonely for people to remember them and speak them. It’s possible to call some of these forgotten ones back. I consider poetry as song language, as soul talk ....
From that, how do you define poetry?
Song language.
And “soul talk”?
Soul talk, song language. That’s only one definition. There are as many ways to poetry as there are to God. Say that to your poetry fundamentalist!
Your wisdom voice is so communicable and clear without simplifying things. The poem “When The World As We Knew It Ended” is powerful, haunting, and sometimes I’ve had tears in my eyes when I’ve read it; I feel you were singing about anger having the possibility for transforming. Maybe you were coming to the kitchen table to find what you needed to release, and maybe you wondered as Americans, you and me and all of us, or as humans, what it is we need to come to the table to release. I don’t know if it’s a question or just a place to go into.
That was one poem that practically wrote itself .... I don’t think I was coming to release anything in that poem. The kitchen table is at the heart of the human world. It is also a metaphorical device. Metaphor implies surprising link, a generative relationship. I had no idea what was going to happen once I stood there in the poetic field, the poetic house.
What do we need to release to each other in the world we find ourselves in?
There’s probably nothing better than to be able to sit down with people you care about, or friendly strangers when you’re exhausted and lonely and far away from home, sit across the table and eat with each other and visit and laugh. I remember going to my cousin George Coser’s the last time I was in Oklahoma. He’s always very sharing, very giving, and he knows the old stories, the ones that few people remember. Our last visit we talked about how those visits were our university seminars, our colleges. I used to drive my elderly aunt Lois Harjo around Creek country to visit her relatives, friends, and the old ones who still knew the stories. Genealogy is a web of stories about people, the tribe, and our combined journey from a mythical real past into the present. Within this web are retellings of historical events, philosophy, astronomy, origins of meaning, medicine; it’s all there. But he was bemoaning that we don’t have time anymore. Our communities have been blown apart by loneliness. No one knows who they are anymore, or where they belong.
How much time do we look at that little hourglass on the screen?
The computer is useful, and the Internet world is a genuine storytelling space. It is yet another experience of time and place. Nothing replaces the direct experience of story or song. Many stories and songs carry life-giving forces in them. They have certain purposes. E-mail language tends to be much more curt or short. Text messaging is communication in its barest form. There’s no face, no history, just an ever-present now in which we are too busy to craft a reply, no place for subtlety, history, or connection.
An assignment might to have students write an essay, and then to have a student say the same thing in an e-mail, to translate, from one rhetorical context to another.
Yeah, that would be a good one. And what happens in between.
I want to ask you about myth and talk about the importance of myth: myth as sacred truth and something that human beings need and yearn for. How does myth get transformed into pernicious ideologies? I think of the horrible things that have been done because people have used myths to defend the myth of ourselves as God’s chosen people who are bringing enlightenment to the savages, and conquest and imperialism and genocide and all kinds of terrible things done because people are connected to a myth in a kind of pernicious or poisonous or destructive way.
I guess we need another word then, because my translation of myth is root stories, or rather, the shifting, dynamic template of spirit from which a people or peoples emerge. It is not some imagined past, rather, the dream works of the communal self.
That just wouldn’t be a myth or ... story?
I hear what you’re saying ... Cotton Mather stands at the beginning of the “mythic” creation of American in his drab Puritan cloak, foaming with righteousness. Hence, Native peoples are evil. Who does this serve? An economy in which those on the side of God are the winners and keep all of the money? I’m heading back to the moon to take another look. My sense of the mythic is a root that’s larger than each small cultural group. We’re all eventually related. When you look from the moon, we all look the same.
I guess one of the inevitable questions when you come here and it is the state centennial, what different voices do you hear within you? Do you hear different voices, that polarity, that Oklahoma state centennial celebration?
Again, I climb back on the moon. Many of us with Oklahoma roots have dreaded the upcoming celebration of the Sooner State centennial. I can understand the state wanting to celebrate its incorporation, but not everyone in the state has cause to celebrate. The state represents land theft and second-class citizenship for many of us. The state came about over land theft, broken promises, and in the wake of Cotton Mather’s hatefulness, which is repeated in Bible belt fundamentalism. The Oklahoma state motto “The Sooner State” honors those who jumped the line for first dibs on land claims. They were the quicker thieves. Statehood is about gun power, and the ability to takeover and control, as much as it is about gathering together a community. At the center of Mvskoke philosophy is a term: vnoketcv, which is, compassion. You look for the best in any situation, and keep moving about with grace, no matter the trial. We were uprooted from our homelands and moved to Indian Territory, were promised to be left alone. Then oil was discovered on our allotted lands. Now there are genetic patents sought and secured on our plants, our medicines. Still, we’re dealing with gun power. So it seems to me that to celebrate the centennial means that we celebrating a takeover. The best possible outcome is perhaps a conversation between the citizens of Oklahoma. Has this come about from the centennial? One day there will be that conversation. Everybody will sit down at the table: Cotton Mather and his people, my people, the eagle, the stone, the plants, the winds, all of us. And we will be equal. And everyone’s voice will have a place.
Or “you have to learn English.”
The English Only laws are preposterous. There’s Cotton Mather again. English is not the Native or only language of this country, or of Oklahoma, either.
It’s interesting that you’re from here and the two states you live in, New Mexico and Hawai‘i, are more known for indigenous populations.
They’re the only two states in the United States with a non-European majority.
And you just gravitated.
New Mexico, I went there for Indian school. It’s been home to me; to my art. Oklahoma is also an origin place for me. It’s where I was born, where I was raised until I escaped to Indian school, to New Mexico. When I return I always return to a force field of contradiction, of love and hate. And yet over the years I return for family, tribal responsibilities, for the beauty, and to hammer and work it out ... and here we are at this table, so we all have a place at the table But that’s part of what I was given: the test, the puzzle. For me, Oklahoma is one of those challenges, and one of many gifts.
And for me Hawai‘i is a place of refuge and inspiration. I continue to learn from the water, and I also learn from the hula tradition. The stereotype of hula does not even touch the reality of this epic tradition. It’s an oral, poetic tradition that includes dance, genealogy, the ocean, astronomy. At my ceremonial grounds there’s a story that links us with Hawaiian. Sam Proctor tells of seven canoes coming up from Polynesia to the place we lived, before Oklahoma or Alabama and Georgia. We are since related. That’s something you won’t find in books; although I’ve been reading of archeological discoveries in the last few years that back it up. So there’s a Hawaiian-Mvskoke connection. It makes a poetic leap of sense.
You have talked about Toni Morrison and Emily Dickinson as writers who had a significant impact on you, and I was thinking, like with Toni Morrison, I can remember reading her for the first time and feeling like I was reading English, but it kind of wasn’t English, and part of what she had had to do was create a new language. As a reader I had to transform myself to be able to read the language, and that was what was so wonderful and exciting about it. I was wondering if you think of yourself as changing the language through the poetry you do, or creating a new language.
I like the way you put that. Toni Morrison did create her own world of English. She made a space in novel form that would allow her and her people and their stories, and her telling of them to live. Her stories have rejuvenated American literature ... world literature. All artists like to think their work will help rejuvenate culture, and art.
Most people just carry forward what they’ve learned without adding their own spirit. As a child in elementary school in Tulsa, I loved drawing and was constantly making art of some sort or the other. In kindergarten one afternoon, I intently worked on my drawing, a colorful design with people linked in a circle. It wasn’t anything I’d ever seen before. The idea just came to me. Then I took a break, looked up, and noticed that everyone was drawing the same square house with two windows, the same lollipop tree. I asked the group: “Why are you copying each other?” They looked at me like I was crazy, then started copying me. That stayed with me. To repeat the norm was to make a secure place. Some of us grow our art vertically as we create directly from classic traditions. Others work more horizontal and gather together from many other traditions and places.
This interview transcribed by Diana Silver and Ted Stoller.
John McBride is a geologist and avid reader who has followed his dream and opened what is becoming the finest bakery in Oklahoma City: Prairie Thunder.
Elaine Smokewood is a professor of English at Oklahoma City University, and served as chair of the English Department for six years. She is also a published poet and a teacher of poetry.
Harbour Winn is a professor of English and film studies at Oklahoma City University. He is the director of the Center for Interpersonal Studies through Film & Literature, as well as the OCU Film Institute. He directs the annual April poetry series.