First American Poetry

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Not everything is about the Democratic or the Republican convention or the presidential race. I'm very pleased to have back with us US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo, who has a new collection of poems from various Indigenous American poets in a new book that she edited called When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through. Joy Harjo, such a delight to have you back. Welcome back to WNYC.

Joy Harjo: Oh, it's great to be back here with you, Brian.

Brian: For people who haven't seen it yet, what ties the poems in this book together?

Joy: It's a Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry. The editors, there was a huge editing team, not just me, were native poets. It includes poetry of the earliest Indigenous poetry in this country to some of the youngest poets writing these days.

Brian: To get a sense of what the book is about and just for the sheer joy of hearing you read, we're happy that you've agreed to read a selection from the book called My Industrial Work by Gerald Vizenor. Do you want to set him up a little bit or set up the poem?

Joy: Actually, this one is not by Gerald Vizenor. It's by an anonymous Carlisle student. Carlisle Indian School was an Indian school that was founded by Lieutenant Colonel Richard Henry Pratt in 1879. His infamous motto was, "Kill the Indian and save the man." More than 10,000 children went to that school from 141 tribes, including some of my relatives. This poem, they had a newsletter or a student newspaper and this poem appeared in it. The student didn't want to be named. It's called, My Industrial Work, by anonymous poet from room 8. I'll read this poem.

My Industrial Work

At half-past 2:00 in the afternoon

You can find me in the 28 room about three or four covers deep.

You turn them back and you'll find me asleep.

And there I lie and patiently wait for the final exams we have in room 8.

When the whistle blows at half-past 5:00, once more I am up and still alive.

And then I run down and wash my face, then comb my hair and I'm ready for grace.

In 15 minutes, there's a Bugle call.

The troops fall in and the roll is called.

Then out in front the troops all stand, saluting the flag with our hats in our hand

While standing in the wind, our hair gets wavy.

But just the same, we right face and match to gravy.

Now, this may sound like going or fishing

But this is my only industrial position.

Brian: Could you give us your thoughts about that poem and why that resonated with you?

Joy: I love the humor in it and this kid. He certainly humanizes history and a particular person and the militarization. The policy was, well, if you "civilized" that the Indian will disappear by a civilized person. As if we didn't and don't have civilizations and still have civilizations. It also reminds me, I went to Indian school too. It was a little different by the time I went to Indian school.

I went to a school that was an experiment in Indian education where we had some of the best arts classes. Even so, in the late '60s, in one of my classrooms for English, we still had stoves lined up against the wall that were just a few classes before. A few years before, the women students were taught how to clean and cook so they could clean and cook for people in town.

Brian: Wow. Where was that?

Joy: In Sante Fe.

Brian: What was the notion of, did you say experimental, Indian school at that time, the larger idea?

Joy: Well, we had some of the best art teachers in the country like Allan Houser, Fritz Scholder, Otellie Loloma, and Louis Ballard, a major composer composed for Maria Tallchief. They were our teachers. We also had the old BIA system, Bureau of Indian Affairs system. I recognized we didn't have to go out like troops as this student did where they militarize their education, but we had all of the military lingo and we had details and restriction. That was in place. We still weren't allowed to speak our native languages and this was in the late '60s at school.

Brian: You are a member, I believe, of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and the collection focuses on giving a voice to Native American poets from around the country. In fact, the poems I see are broken into different regions of the US from the Northeast to the plains and mountains to the Pacific and more. Would you point out any particular stylistic difference? I'm sure there are many, many, many of them, but that might be an interesting one that we see in the work of Indigenous poets coming from different parts of this country?

Joy: What was interesting, we decided to divide it into five geographical areas. Of course, there are many more, but just general. What we started noticing once we assembled the poems is you could see how the tools of colonization were used and affected according to geography and also according to the different settlements of Europeans and so on. We also began to see geography, how it really makes a difference in how you use language. If you live by the ocean, if you live by an Eastern ocean where there was the onslaught versus the Pacific and you start seeing connections too between Hawaiian and Alaska and the whole Pacific coast on the West, it's interesting that way.

Brian: You note in the book that colonizers from Europe considered Indigenous Americans illiterate because your history is primarily told orally rather than in written languages. Is that reflected at all in the kinds of poetry that people write even today?

Joy: I think so. There was great respect. It has to do with oral and the appreciation of orality. Any of our stories, I think even novels, have basis of orality. Even these more Western European forms, their basis, I think all the basis of all literature go back to oral forms. Poetry, you can still put poetry in a book and read it, but it is still an oral-- that you're still dealing with an oral event.

Brian: How did you come to find the work of these 161 poets, if I'm seeing that number right? Some of whom were alive in the 17th century. What's the scope? I guess you're a scholar of poetry as well as a poet.

Joy: Well, I think any poet, you become a scholar of whatever you do. We're always reading and listening and so on. We just decided to collect the best of what we could find. Of course, we also had parameters, challenging parameters, I mean. You think we have over 573 federally-recognized tribal nations in this country and several state-recognized tribes. Many of the state-recognized aren't really legitimate tribes and that's another story.

At first, we were given 300 pages and it's like, how can you-- and then we're trying to cover from time immemorial to now. We got our pages extended, but it was still an almost impossible setup. We did the best we could and we think we assembled a really solid anthology of poetry that gives you a sense of Indigenous poetry in this country.

Brian: My guest is the US Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo. Her new collection or the one that she edited, let's say, is called When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through. We'll continue in a minute. She's agreed to read one more of the poems and we'll continue to talk. Stay with us.

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Brian: Brian Lehrer on WNYC with us the US Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo, whose new collection that she edited is of Indigenous-American poets from different times and places and it's called When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through. You're going to read one more thing for us, right?

Joy: Yes. I think what I will read next is from the Kumulipo, which is a Hawaiian creation chant. It's much, much longer than the excerpt I'll read here. I'm going to attempt to read part of it in the Hawaiian language because our languages are important and they're really at the fruit of our poetry. English is a trade language. We consider it a trade language, but it's been useful because here I am speaking, we're speaking together, and then people can speak across languages to each other. This translation into English was completed by Queen Liliʻuokalani in 1897 and I will read first summon in Hawaiian and in English. Keep in mind, it's part of a larger chant and the Hawaiian part would be chanted beautifully.

O ke au i kahuli wela ka honua

O ke au i kahuli lole ka lani

O ke au i kuka'iaka ka la

E ho'omalamalama i ka malama

O ke au o Makali'i ka po

O ka walewale ho'okumu honua ia

O ke kumu o ka lipo, i lipo ai

O ke kumu o ka Po, i po ai

O ka lipolipo, o ka lipolipo

O ka lipo o ka la, o ka lipo o ka po

Po wale ho--'i

Hanau ka po

At the time that turned the heat of the Earth,

at the time when the heavens turned and changed,

at the time when the light of the sun was subdued,

to cause light to break forth.

At the time of the night of Makalii

then began the slime to establish the earth,

the source of deepest darkness, of the depth of darkness,

of the darkness of the sun in the depth of night,

it is night, so was night born.

You can tell by where that ends there is that it's just the beginning of a story that continues even right now in this particular kind of darkness that we're all in.

Brian: Absolutely. In fact, it seems that it indicates the title of the whole collection, which, again, is When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through. Why did you choose that title and did you have that particular poem in mind to any degree?

Joy: Yes, I did. I've been inspired a lot by Hawaiian chants and literature and I just thought how-- and I was inspired by this poem thinking of, "Yes, we're in a time of this world when the light is subdued." It's subdued because there's so much emissions, which are now out of control into the sky that we cannot see the sun as clearly as we used to be able to see it. Just like we can't see till the water is clearly as once before. Yet in the midst of all this, in the midst of when we are forced away to Indian School, forced out of our homes and families, and often those were little children like at Carlisle, they were taken babies from their mother's arms to go far, far away.

That's when the light is also subdued and when there's people being killed on the streets because of their skin color and natives have some of the highest rates of this kind of violence, but we don't usually wind up in the stories. It's rare that you even have a native poet or a native anybody on any program that the light of the world is subdued, but we need our songs. We need all of our voices, every voice at the tables speaking and singing and sharing and not a kind of attitude of force or a flag that represents hatred flying over parts of our country.

Brian: I'm curious how this year of the pandemic and then the flowering of the racial justice movement into its current phase since May has influenced your work or changed the nature of your work as US Poet Laureate.

Joy: Yes. It's changed everything, I think, for everyone, but all of this was predicted. All of this has been predicted. It doesn't mean that it's any easier to live through. Most of my work, I wound up finishing a memoir that will be out next fall called Poet Warrior: A Call for Love and Justice. That's what I've been working on while I'm hiding out, somewhat hiding out thinking about where I stand at my age nearing 70 and looking out and thinking about all that I've learned and all that seems to come and done from the work of our generation, but it hasn't really when you look in the eyes of the children and the young people. You know we will continue on this earth, but we have to make sure the earth will have us if we don't change our ways. I don't know much about how long humans will be even necessary to the earth.

Brian: Your working title for your memoir, Poet Warrior, in what sense do you mean warrior?

Joy: Warrior in the sense of someone who has vision and loves the people and loves the earth, loves life, and will stand as a witness. As a poet, we're put here to be the observers and the voices of even what we don't understand of those who come forth to take care of culture, to take care of knowledge and meaning.

Brian: Joy Harjo is the US Poet Laureate. She added a new collection of works by various Indigenous-American poets called When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through. Thank you so much for singing in your poetry, spoken word and conversational voice with us today.

Joy: Thank you.

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