Answer:
Explanation:The 68-year-old Native American writer first felt that restorative power during a difficult time early in her life. “Poetry came to me at a point in which I had no words to express the depth of experience of being native in this country,” she says.
Now Harjo has a chance to offer that medicine to the whole nation. She was appointed 23rd poet laureate of the United States on Wednesday. As a member of the Muscogee Nation, she will be the first Native American to serve in that honorary position when she begins this fall.
Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, who made the selection, said in a statement, “Joy Harjo has championed the art of poetry — ‘soul talk’ as she calls it — for over four decades. To her, poems are ‘carriers of dreams, knowledge and wisdom,’ and through them she tells an American story of tradition and loss, reckoning and mythmaking.”
Hear poet laureate Joy Harjo read her poem ‘This Morning I Pray for My Enemies’ on Post Reports
Harjo’s poetry is celebrated for its insightful attention to the spiritual and natural worlds. In lines that can be deceptively simple or strikingly complex, she often explores the persistence of myth in contemporary experience.
The author of eight collections of poetry, including “In Mad Love and War” (1990), Harjo has won the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and the Wallace Stevens Award, and earlier this year she was awarded the $65,000 Jackson Poetry Prize. She has also distinguished herself as a teacher, actress and writer of nonfiction.
“I came to poetry first through music,” Harjo says. “My mother wrote songs and sang in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She particularly liked to write ballads, heartbreak-heartache songs, and so I grew up with a lot of country swing musicians in our house playing music.
She acknowledges that the world could use some shifting now in this politically contentious era, and says that poetry offers a crucial way forward. “Poetry demands that you stop, put everything down and listen, and you listen in poetry with your soul,” she says.
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The poet laureate position, maintained through the Library of Congress, comes with a beautiful office in the Jefferson Building and a modest stipend, but no official duties. Each poet is free to design the one-year position however he or she would like. One of Harjo’s first projects will involve using her new pulpit to humanize Native Americans for a country that still harbors so many misconceptions about them.
Harjo’s appointment adds to a resurgence of appreciation for Native American writers. Louise Erdrich won the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction in 2015 in recognition of her series of novels about the Ojibwe.
“We’ve always been here,” Harjo notes wryly. “I guess it’s a renaissance of publishing.” Along with several other editors, she is currently working on a major new historical anthology of native nations poetry called “When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through” (forthcoming August 2020, W.W. Norton).
The new attention to native writing is gratifying but not entirely surprising to Harjo. She remembers when she was very young hearing elders in her community predicting the kinds of disruptions we’re seeing now in the world
Harjo’s mother died in 2011, but she knows how proud she would have felt to see this moment. “The experience of poetry was so close to her heart. I kind of carried that gift from her and took it to another place.”
