Joy Harjo
speaker
82 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Joy Harjo’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Recently, to me, this is the biggest risk. I sat in at the Blue Note in New York. And when you say sat in... I played a song. You played? To me, that was like bungee jumping from the bridge of the Royal Gorge.
Every poet has their themes, and I realize mine is transformation, what happens in those transformative spaces.
Thank you so much for being game to do this. It's intriguing, and so that interests me. All right. Let's go.
As a kid, I would escape into the closet, as a little kid. And my drawings, they're probably still in that closet or outside. I would go out at times when everyone was asleep or the world was quiet. And I still like that. That's where I find things. That's where I find images and sounds and fresh ideas. That's how I discover, I guess you could say, a kind of peacefulness.
But also a kind of depth that isn't always present when you're in the realm of chatter.
Yeah, I needed to get away from adolescence. I know I always feel for those kids when I've gone in and talked to them and vibed with them because, you know, I still understand that period, which is a time of, I think of adolescence as being like a chrysalis moment. Like here you've got the caterpillar and eating leaves and
experiencing the world as a caterpillar, and then they build this chrysalis. And the chrysalis is where they essentially liquefy and then reform. So it's a time of chaotic form of, you know, I was this, but I'm going to be something else. And I would imagine in that chrysalis period, the known parameters have fallen away to some extent, to some extent. And then the butterfly emerges.
And that's how I think of adolescence, is being in that chrysalis stage. But in that stage is a lot of innate power, any time of transformation, whether it's a transformation of a country, a transformation of a human being or of a butterfly, a caterpillar becoming a butterfly. There's a lot of power, creative power in that. But I'm fixated on that closet for some reason.
What did the closet look like? I could go in and it had a door that shut, you know, with a door handle on it. So I could go in there and sit. I would sit on the wood floor because, you know, I didn't have a chair in there, of course. And I could sit in there and have peace. And you know that people aren't going to come looking for you like, you know, they might look for you elsewhere.
But, you know, we would, if my mother, and I know she wouldn't like me saying this because she's proud of me and what I've done. But if she saw us with books, she'd say, get up and do something.
Yes, that we had to be doing something. Yeah, we needed to be doing something because there was always so much to be done in a household with all of those kids. So I understand that. But I wasn't in there to escape doing things because I contributed. I was there for my own peace of mind.
Okay, next three.
That's interesting. That's like it's related. It's like falls right in line with the first one. What place shaped me? You know the places that shaped me? Okay, a couple. There's places in the physical realm and places in the dreaming realm.
And the physical realm was going to the lake. Like my father, I loved the water. So we would go over to Fort Gibson Lake. My mom would cook fried chicken, mashed potatoes, all that really good stuff. But again, it was taking us out of the ordinary, in a way, taking us out of the ordinary world to the water, the place of water. I think of my father.
I think we all have predominant elements in our being. And my father, I've always felt, was more water and my mother was more fire. And I feel like I'm both. I'm very much both.
Yeah. So the other place is in my dreaming realm. And I've dreamed, even as a little kid, I would dream places that I didn't know the names. I would come back knowing names of places, and I still do that, that I didn't know. There was no way.
Maybe I was four years old or three years old, and I didn't know the name of those places, but I would come back knowing those places because I had gone there in the dreaming realm and experienced life in a very, very different way.
Yes, I'm trying to remember. It was in Egypt, and it was a long time ago, and it was like I was with different people and I was somebody else, but they made a kind of prison out of like adobe, and you could see the prisoners' faces through the adobe, and they had basically cemented them into this wall. It was a really horrible way to deal with people.
You know, it was long before I even read about it. I didn't know there was an Egypt. I mean, I was a little kid. Yeah. I was a little kid in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
I like going places, like going to the moon or flying, you know, like having that sense of flying somewhere. I mean, it still happens.
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