On Joy Harjo
An Excerpt from Ambiguity and Belonging by Benjamin Myers
By Benjamin Myers
This essay is an excerpt from Benjamin Myers’ recent essay collection Ambiguity and Belonging: Essays on Place, Education, and Poetry. NVR is grateful to Myers and Belle Point Press for permission to reproduce the essay here.
In her lyrical and moving memoir Crazy Brave, Joy Harjo remembers standing outside on a starry night with the young Jesuit who was her high school literature teacher at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She says, “He was the first person to talk about the soul to me. He asked me to pay attention to the poetry of living.” Readers of American poetry owe much to this anonymous Jesuit, as Joy Harjo has spent her career talking beautifully about the soul to all of us.
And we are, as one of my old teachers might say, in need of a good talking to. English departments in American universities have for far too long avoided the subject of the soul, and the result is a kind of literary education that is fundamentally disoriented and lacking in purpose. Mired in critical philosophies dependent on materialist frameworks, professors of literature have struggled to justify their profession. If the purpose of literary study is merely to foster “critical thinking,” would not the subject matter of our philosophy or political science departments better serve that purpose than the poetry of Yeats or Frost? Worse, if the purpose of the literature department were only to debunk, attack, and diminish the achievements of great writers—what we call, following Ricœur, “the hermeneutics of suspicion”—would it not be better to simply close the doors forever? Although the typical professor of literature would blush to say so, poetry—and novels and plays and films—must speak to the soul if they speak at all, if they are really worth hearing.
This problem of pointlessness has trickled down to affect the study of literature at the high school and even junior high level, where the only justification we seem able to offer for the reading of books is that it might make students better at math and science. So, of course, the audience for poetry continues to dwindle. Why would any adult, with all the math and science classes far behind her, ever again pick up a book of poetry? To adapt Flannery O’Connor’s famous quip on the Protestant view of the Eucharist, if that is all it is, then “to Hell with it.”
But poets like Joy Harjo insist that there is more to it than that, by insisting that there “are more things in Heaven and earth” than historical materialists or deconstructionists dream of in their philosophies. In one of the most moving poems in the book Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings, “The First Day Without a Mother,” Harjo seems to speak directly to her mother, saying “I will see you again,” but follows it up, without even breaking the line, with “is one of the names for blue— / a color beyond the human sky of mind.” Like the best mystic poets in all traditions, Harjo treats the ineffable as both fact and mystery. The spirit world is as there and as inexplicable as the color blue. (Try explaining “blue” to a colorblind person sometime.) Harjo’s poems do not offer themselves for easy paraphrase. They have elements of narrative—or at least of narrative situation—but they reveal the story only in glimpses and thus resist simple summation. One might say they are postmodern in this resistance, but Harjo’s deep connection to tradition might suggest to us that they are, rather, premodern or post-secular. Harjo does not simply mine the past for pastiche. She carries its weight as a responsibility. “I am carrying over a thousand names for blue that I didn’t have at dusk. / How will I feed and care for all of them?” she asks at the end of the poem, indicating the burden that comes with vision. Elsewhere in the same book, in one of the untitled prose poems interspersed throughout, she writes, “I am singing a song that can only be born after losing a country.” This loss is a serious matter, and too few contemporary poets can muster the gravitas to address such sorrow. Because Harjo takes the soul seriously, she writes with great authority on suffering.
In Harjo’s work, we know the soul is there by the longing it feels. While she does not seem to be a Christian, we can certainly see how her concept of longing and restlessness is reminiscent of Augustine’s Confessions, where we read that our hearts are restless until they rest in God. The poems in Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings repeatedly circle around the concept of longing for home, longing for rest, often conceptualized as “getting back” to an almost prelapsarian past. This theme is familiar to Harjo’s longtime readers from previous greatest hits like “Song for the Deer and Myself to Return On” and “Remember.” (New readers should see her How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems: 1975-2001 for an excellent introduction to and overview of her work). In her newer poems, the urge is often expressed very directly, interrupting the lyrical flow with plain statement. “I will find my way home to you” ends the delicate and lovely “Cricket Song.” “Goin’ home goin’ home” forms the blues-like refrain of another poem. Another musical poem, “One Day there will be Horses,” ends with a strong sense of yearning: “One day, I will have love enough / To go home.” When these poems of longing for home are read alongside Crazy Brave, in which Harjo recounts a childhood disrupted by an absent father and a series of lost homes, it is not hard to imagine where this longing originates. Yet Harjo’s poetic gift is to turn the personal roots of this sorrowful need into something more universal, something more Augustinian. She does this largely by avoiding direct confessional narrative and instead channeling the poem’s emotional energy into image and lyricism. “Every poem is an effort at ceremony,” she says in “In Mystic,” which begins with the arresting image of “a cross of burning trees, / Lit by crows carrying fire in their beaks.” In “For Calling the Spirit Back from Wandering the Earth in Its Human Feet,” she says, “Welcome your spirit back from its wandering. It may return / in pieces, in tatters. Gather them together. They will be happy to be found after being lost for so long.” For Harjo, the ceremony of return is a ceremony of wholeness.
She also transcends the merely personal by making constant reference to myth, particularly to myths of origin and fall. Harjo titles the first section of Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings “How it Came to Be,” and it contains multiple origin myths, including “Rabbit is up to Tricks,” which begins, “In a world long before this one, there was enough for everyone, / Until somebody got out of line.” She returns to the prelapsarian theme in “Once the World was Perfect,” and, even more inventively, in “We were there when Jazz was Invented.” This interest in returning to the beginning extends throughout the book. The title poem, for instance, ends by imagining a homecoming that blends the New Jerusalem with the restoration of native lands: “When we made it back home, back over those curved roads / that wind through the city of peace, we stopped at the / doorway of dusk as it opened to our homelands.” It is, therefore, extremely satisfying when the final poem in the book, “Sunrise,” offers a vignette of something like resurrection. “Our bodies were tossed in the pile of kill. We rotted there,” the poem’s speaker says after detailing a descent into hopeless struggle. But the poem turns unexpectedly toward hope:
And this morning we are able to stand with all the rest
And welcome you here.
We move with the lightness of being, and we will go
Where there’s a place for us.This restless book comes to rest in a sense of belonging. It is rare to read contemporary poetry with such a sense of hope. Indeed, in most contemporary poetry, even when hope is present, even in Christian poetry, it often seems unearned. Harjo’s poems face the darkness, a weight of history and loss, but they also look for transcendence, not by forgetting the things of this world, but by imaginatively redeeming them.
Despite the rare exception of a dud line here and there—one line, “I don’t know where I’m going; I only know where I’ve been,” sounds a bit too much like the 80’s hairband Whitesnake—Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings is an extremely well-crafted book of poems. The imagery is often fresh and astounding, the language full of song. There are personal poems—such as an elegy for the Native American comedian Charlie Hill, and several poems addressing Harjo’s children and grandchildren—as well as poems dealing in myth and history. Often, in true visionary fashion, Harjo refuses to separate the personal, the mythic, and the historical. While most of the poems in Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings are relatively brief lyrics, they are big-hearted and large-souled. With the prestigious Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets and a term as US Poet Laureate under her belt, it is clear that Joy Harjo is a poet of great national significance with true staying power. Perhaps we can take this well-deserved recognition as a sign that soul is making a comeback in literary circles.
A former poet laureate of Oklahoma, Benjamin P. Myers is the author of four books of poetry and one previous book of nonfiction. His poems, essays, and stories have appeared in Image, First Things, Rattle, The Yale Review, and many other places. At Oklahoma Baptist University, Myers directs the Great Books honors program and is the Crouch-Mathis Professor of Literature. He is a contributing editor for Front Porch Republic and writes from Chandler, OK.
