Poetry Is

Joy Harjo wrote:
I guest edited the Winter 2004-2005 issue of Ploughshares,
a fine literary publication out of Boston. The publication date
is Dec. 15, 2005. Please check it out at the site: www.pshares.org.
Featured writers will appear in the next blog.

INTRODUCTION c Joy Harjo Honolulu 8/2004

I used to think a poem could become a flower, a bear, or a house
for a ravaged spirit. I used to think I understood what it meant
to write a poem, and understood the impetus to write, and even
knew a little something of the immensity of the source of poetry.

I was never the scholar and approached the study of poetry
like a fool in love with the moon. I mean, I am a reader
of poetry and know a little something about the various
indigenous roots of American poetry. The poetry sung
at the ceremonial grounds is poetry, I know even more about
European elements of verse because it was/is a
“truly civilized poetry” and was all we were taught in
public schools. I had to stand quite a distance from the earth,
beyond conquest politics, to see the foolishness of this
assertion. To assert one form of poetry above all others is
to insist on a hierarchy of value that arbitrarily rules
that a rose has more value than an orchid because it is a rose.

The first poetry I heard from my mother’s voice, for it is in song
that I first found poetry, or it found me, alone at the breaking
of dawn under the huge elm sheltering my childhood house,
within range of the radio, of my mother’s voice. I used to think
that the elm, too was poetry as it expressed the seasonal shifts
and rooted us. The elm was a presence and had a commanding voice
and spoke in articulate phrasings. I have given myself over
to poetry. And poetry like the earth was once decreed flat,
then round. I declare it as a spiral in shape and movement.
Each strand of poetry curls from classical form and springs
unruly forms that often overtake and become classical forms
as the tendrils of songs curl into the future.

I used to think a story would house a beginning, middle and end
and could be contained within the covers of a book then given
a home in the heart. Or that a story in any of its forms could
lead me safely away from myself, show me a world so different
I would return to gaze at my known universe with a newly shining
mind. I believed that myth was alive and was the mothering source
of stories, poetry and songs and within this field I would find
the provocative answers to the riddle of being a human
without wings or gills, or directions to a map for a lost wanderer.
I was looking for vision and the powerful and startling
and subtle strategies of language, pattern, style, character,
and voice would satisfy and even more, inspire. I have given
myself over to the making of stories and even as I found them
or they located me I was ecstatic, and then bereft. For then
there I was again at the same place I started, the beginning
of a page or a voice. I garnered hope, but hope is wistful
and empty and is like water in our hands.

I confess. At this moment in the time and context of being
a writer in America, I don’t know whether I believe
or know anything that I once thought I believed or knew about
our art of truth telling, of singing, of constructing the next
world as a story or series of stories that we will eventually
inhabit, as will our children and their children. Maybe
we’ve all been through this before, but it’s another version
and we’re in it deep. I used to imagine writing as a ladder
leading us from the blind world into the knowing world
but now to imagine a ladder means to imagine a land or a house
on which to secure a ladder. For many of us in these lands
now called America imagining this place has been a tricky feat
because there is no place that hasn’t or won’t get stolen,
polluted or destroyed, and for all of us now planted here,
the foundation is shaky though it is strong with vision,
the country was founded on violent theft. But this is what
we have, who we are here, together. And we can use the fire
still burning there to destroy this place, or build it anew
with bricks made of the trash, with fresh, shining inspiration.
The elm is still growing there in that yard.

Maybe the ultimate purpose of literature is to humble us
to our knees, to that know-nothing place. Maybe we here
on this planet we are a story gone awry, with the Great
Storyteller frantically trying out different endings.
Whatever the outcome, we need new songs, new stories
to accompany us wherever we are, wherever we go.
That’s the power contained in a book, journal or magazine
you can carry in your hands. So, these stories, poems and songs
are offered as such, as gifts for challenge, for inspiration,
for sustenance.

Joy Harjo 2004