Tag Archives: Native American poet

“Advice for Countries, Advanced, Developing and Falling: A Call and Response” – Poem by U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo

05 Sunday Apr 2020

Posted by in Poetry, United States

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2019 United States Poet Laureate Joy Harjo
Photo Credit: Joy Harjo Official Website (Photo by Shawn Miller)

 

My Poetry Corner April 2020 features the poem “Advice for Countries, Advanced, Developing and Falling: A Call and Response” from the poetry collection An American Sunrise: Poems by Joy Harjo, Poet Laureate of the United States. (Note: The following excerpts of poems are all sourced from this collection.)

Born in 1951 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the first of four siblings, Joy Harjo is a poet, musician, playwright, and author of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. Her father was Muscogee (Creek) Nation and her mother of mixed ancestry of Cherokee, French, and Irish. Her mother exposed her to poetry at an early age, but painting was her first love.

My mother was a songwriter and singer, Harjo relates in her poem “Washing My Mother’s Body.” My mother’s gifts were trampled by economic necessity and emotional imprisonment. // My father was a dancer, a rhythm keeper. His ancestors were orators, painters, tribal chiefs, stomp dancers, preachers, and speakers… All his relatively short life he looked for a vision or song to counter the heartache of history. Her father’s drinking and abuse ended their marriage.

At sixteen years of age, Harjo’s abusive and violent stepfather kicked her out of their home. She moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she received her high school education at the Institute of American Indian Arts. After graduation, she returned to Oklahoma, gave birth to a son, and returned to New Mexico to pursue a life as an artist. In 1973, as a second-year undergraduate at the University of New Mexico, she discovered poetry. After earning her BA in 1976, she moved to Iowa to obtain an MFA at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

“After all the abuse I had been through, I saw [poetry] as a way to transform what is harsh into something nourishing,” Harjo said, during an interview with Santa Barbara Poet Laureate Laure-Anne Bosselaar in January 2020. “I had found something in poetry not found in painting that was so compelling. I could write about Native women, fighting for our rights in over 500 tribal nations.” Continue reading →

“Making Quiltwork” – Poem by Simon J. Ortiz

05 Wednesday Feb 2014

Posted by in Poetry

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Native American Star QuiltNative American Star Quilt
Photo Credit: History of Quilts

 

Since starting my Poetry Corner in May 2011, with the exception of one poet from Chicago, I have featured only American poets I have met here in Los Angeles. Some of them have become close friends. This year, I will explore the poetry of diverse poets across the United States.

In my Poetry Corner this month, I feature the poem “Making Quiltwork” by Simon J. Ortiz, a Native American poet. Born in 1941 near Albuquerque, New Mexico, Simon Ortiz is an Acoma Pueblo Indian who grew up in an Acoma village speaking his native language. In an interview, he said that in sixth grade (11-12 years of age) the library opened a new world to him. In 1969, after attending Fort Lewis College and the University of New Mexico, he earned a Master of Fine Arts in Writing from the University of Iowa.

Scholars of Native American literature consider Simon Ortiz one of the most accomplished writers of the Native American Renaissance of the 1960s and 1970s. His 1982 poetry collection, From Sand Creek, won a Pushcart Prize, bringing him to national attention. Eleven years later, based on his body of work, the Returning the Gift Festival 1993 of indigenous writers recognized Ortiz with a Lifetime Achievement Award for literature.

Simon Ortiz sees himself more as a “storyteller” than a “poet.” In his poetry, essays, and short fiction, he shares stories of his peoples’ struggles and joys of everyday life. He doesn’t shy away from raising thorny issues of their historic encounters with the early colonialists and loss of their ancestral lands.

“Making Quiltwork” is one of thirteen poems by Simon Ortiz published on the University of Toronto Libraries website. This poem speaks to the struggle of piecing together the lives of a people marginalized by society:

Indian people who have been scattered, sundered
into odds and bits, determined to remake whole cloth.

Their triumph over adversity and continuance as a people are woven into their quilts. Perhaps this is the reason why this poem resonated with me.

High unemployment, homelessness, and low wages have also marginalized millions of working class Americans. Inspired by Ortiz’s poem, I call attention to this other America in my Haiku poem “Odds & Bits.”

Read the complete poem, “Making Quiltwork,” and learn more about Simon Ortiz’s life and work at my Poetry Corner February 2014.