18 Sept 23 Joy Harjo & Amanda Bailey – Poetic Spirit 06

Poetry Sisters? Joy Harjo & Amanda Bailey

Before we share today’s featured poet, Joy Harjo, we want to introduce you to Amanda Bailey who is geographically, considerably closer to Wannaska than Tulsa where Harjo lives. True, Amanda lives in Mankato, Minnesota. But Manitoba. Mankato. Potaaato Potahto, or however it goes. There must be some connection. Geography is one link between Amanda and the author of these Monday poetry posts. Amanda chairs a group called Penned Poets and JackPine Savage (Stenzel) is a regular member of the group which is an offshoot of the League of Minnesota Poets. Both Penned Poets and the League of Minnesota Poets are open to poets in any location. 

Penned Poets rotates agendas each month, including workshops, “somebody else’s poem,” performance poetry, and support groups wherein poets bring draft poems for assistance. 

Penned Poets Zooms every week on Wednesdays at 7 PM Central Time. If anybody would like to attend, they can send a request to Amanda at pennedpoets@gmail.com.

Please enjoy an example of Amanda’s poetry! Gosh! Do you suppose she hasn’t lived in Minnesota all her life? 

Big Mama Said

by Amanda Bailey

When ya push outcha breath,

Ever last bit of it,

Ya caint hep but take in new;

Ya don't even thank about it.

Ever last bit of it

Gone. I mean plumb gone.

And ya caint stays empty

Ya caint hep but take in new.

Ya just fill up, and 'fore ya know it

Ya gone done the whole thang over again.

Ya don't even thank about it.

This just keeps on going on

'til it don't.

Amanda Bailey’s Background:

Amanda Bailey writes poetry, stories, and memoir. Uprooted from the south early in life, she has explored every corner of the U.S. and its middle. Now living in Mankato, she’s active in her local arts community, and she has won several awards for her poetry. Her work has appeared in journals, on the Mankato Poetry Walk and Ride, and one of her cinquains is tattooed on a friend's arm. In 2019, she had poems included in the anthologies Upon Waking: 58 Voices Speak Out from the Shadows of Abuse and After the Equinox. In 2020, she received a Blackberry Peach Poetry Prize for written and spoken word. In 2022, her poem “Big Mama Said” was selected for the Redwing Arts Poet Artist Collaboration.

Joy Harjo – A Poet of Many Nations

If you are truly a poet, you have read Joy Harjo, or at the embarrassing least, heard of her. She is an ascended poet, one who has reached the heights of Poet Laureate of the United States – not one year, but three. She is one of the daughters of the Nine Muses who could have remained quite anonymous, scribbling at a paint-cracked table, the Great Plains wind wafting in through a shuddering window.

But no. Harjo knew from an early age that her path lay in the arts. Perhaps her First Nations heritage had something to do with that. Harjo is an enrolled member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. The daughter of Allen W. and Wynema Baker Foster, Harjo was not raised on the reservation. Coming from a family of painters, she originally planned on pursuing a career in the visual arts.

We have selected just one of Harjo's most famous poems, “She Had Some Horses,” that describes a woman amidst an inner struggle, yearning to achieve an integrated personhood from the inside view; however, the woman’s struggling “horses” depict feelings that are at odds with the struggling “horses” within the woman. She longs for a reconciliation between her many – often contradictory – feelings that result from experiences of personal emotional dismemberment. Still, she continues to search for a unified being in herself. 

She Had Some Horses

by Joy Hart

She had some horses.

She had horses who were bodies of sand.
She had horses who were maps drawn of blood. 
She had horses who were skins of ocean water. 
She had horses who were the blue air of sky. 
She had horses who were fur and teeth. 
She had horses who were clay and would break. 
She had horses who were splintered red cliff.

She had some horses.

She had horses with long, pointed breasts.
She had horses with full, brown thighs. 
She had horses who laughed too much. 
She had horses who threw rocks at glass houses. 
She had horses who licked razor blades.

She had some horses.

She had horses who danced in their mothers' arms. 
She had horses who thought they were the sun and their bodies shone and burned like stars.
She had horses who waltzed nightly on the moon.
She had horses who were much too shy, and kept quiet in stalls of their own making.

She had some horses.

She had horses who liked Creek Stomp Dance songs.
She had horses who cried in their beer.
She had horses who spit at male queens who made them afraid of themselves.
She had horses who said they weren't afraid.
She had horses who lied. 
She had horses who told the truth, who were stripped bare of their tongues.

She had some horses.

She had horses who called themselves, "horse." 
She had horses who called themselves, "spirit." and kept their voices secret and to themselves.
She had horses who had no names.
She had horses who had books of names.

She had some horses.

She had horses who whispered in the dark, who were afraid to speak.
She had horses who screamed out of fear of the silence, who carried knives to protect themselves from ghosts.
She had horses who waited for destruction.
She had horses who waited for resurrection.

She had some horses.

She had horses who got down on their knees for any savior.
She had horses who thought their high price had saved them.
She had horses who tried to save her, who climbed in her bed at night and prayed as they raped her.

She had some horses.

She had some horses she loved.
She had some horses she hated.

These were the same horses.

Background

Joy Harjo ( HAR-joh; born May 9, 1951 in Tulsa, Oklahoma) is an American poet, musician, playwright, and author. She served as the 23rd United States Poet Laureate, the first Native American to hold the position. Her educational background includes the Institute of American Indian Arts, the University of Iowa, and the University of New Mexico.

Harjo is the author of ten books of poetry, including the highly acclaimed, Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light: Fifty Poems for Fifty Years, several plays and children's books, and two memoirs, Crazy Brave and Poet Warrior, her many honors include the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the Ruth Lily Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Foundation, the Academy of American Poets Wallace Stevens Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

In 1969 at the Institute of American Indian Arts, Harjo met fellow student Phil Wilmon, with whom she had a son, Phil Dayn (born 1969). Their relationship ended by 1971. In 1972, she met poet Simon Ortiz of the Acoma Pueblo tribe, with whom she had a daughter, Rainy Dawn (born 1973). Harjo is married to Owen Chopoksa Sapulpa, and is stepmother to his children.

Harjo delivered the 2021 Windham-Campbell Lecture at Yale, part of the virtual Windham-Campbell Prize Festival that year. That lecture was the basis for Catching the Light, published in 2022 by Yale University Press in the Why I Write series.

As a musician and performer, Harjo has produced seven award-winning music albums including her newest, I Pray for My Enemies. She served as Executive Editor of the anthology When the Light of the World was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through — A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry and the editor of Living Nations, Living Words: An Anthology of First Peoples Poetry, the companion anthology to her signature Poet Laureate project.

She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Board of Directors Chair of the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation, and she is the first Artist-in-Residence for Tulsa's Bob Dylan Center. She lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Harjo Featured Project

We invite you to visit this Web site for one of Harjo’s “signature projects” while she held the U.S. poet laureate position.  Joy Harjo introduces this project, “Living Nations, Living Words, with the following at the same site:

As the first Native U.S. Poet Laureate, I decided that my signature project should introduce the country to the many Native poets who live in these lands. Our communities innately shared and share poetry from before the founding of the United States to the present.

We understand poetry to be a living language—whether it is in our tribal languages, or in English, or another language. We use poetry to mark transformations, as in love letters, elegies, or epithalamium. Poetry can be useful for praise and even to help deter a storm. Or poetry is a tool to uncover the miraculous in the ordinary.

We are intimately involved in our communities, which may be on our reservations or in the cities and often both. We are like everyone else. Some of us stay rooted. Others travel and even live internationally. This holds true for our individual approaches to the art of poetry.

The “Living Nations, Living Words” project features a sampling of work by 47 Native Nations poets through an interactive ArcGIS Story Map and a newly developed Library of Congress audio collection.

Keep in mind that each of the featured poets has many poetry ancestors as well as young poets who have or will follow in their footsteps. There are connections between all of the poets in “Living Nations, Living Words”—and connecting influences between these poets and many, many other Native poets who do not appear here, and many, many American and world poets from the present and generations before.

As you explore, you too will be connected.

Exploration 1:  What responsibilities should a poet laureate have? Does gender identification matter?

Exploration 2: Joy Harjo was not born, nor did she live on a reservation. Do you think this has anything to do with the themes, forms, and delivery of her poems?

Exploration 3: Does “She Had Some Horses” believably describe a woman’s inner turmoil and feeling of being torn apart, while searching for a melding medium? Is the poem sentimental?