Poetry Manifesta

Poetry Manifesta


1. Poetry is a gift from the spirits.
Some are ancestral. Some climb back through the web.
Some are sent as teachers and helpers. Others are troublemakers.
Some are quirks of fate. Some, angels.
2. We must honor the source of poetry. Feed poetry.
3. We give something back. Poetry loves beauty, stones, singing, outcasts and dreamers.
4. We must keep integrity about our words, however they occur in our living and dying.
5. The body is a word.
6. Words are powerful and create.
7. To know poetry we study it, with mind, heart, body and soul.
8. To study poetry only intellectually is to only know the crust.
9. We must become poetry, or, no, that’s not it. Get out of your colonized mind.
We are poetry.
10. Poetry is song language. It can be captured by paper and ink, by imaging.
When it is, it begs to be released.
11. To learn poetry we make poetry. We must give ourselves over to it.
12. All poetry is essentially political. Poetry can bear human failures,
the songs of flowers and antelope, heartache and ecstasy.
It abhors polemics and dictators and will spit out such swill.
13. My eyes, ears, lips, voice, feet, heart, liver, fingers, sex are poetry.
14. All poems are love poems.
15. Beware of those who brag they are poets.
16. Beware a society that has turned its back on poetry. That society is dead.


Joy Harjo August 2008