In 2019, Joy Harjo became the first Native American to serve as United States Poet Laureate. She held the position for three consecutive terms, longer than anyone in over two decades. She also plays saxophone. She also makes music. She also writes children's books. She is a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, and everything she writes carries the weight of a people whose land was stolen and whose survival is a poem in itself. She did not start as a poet. She started as a painter at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, then switched to poetry because, as she has said, words were the more precise instrument for what she needed to do.

She Writes Memory Into the Landscape

Harjo's poetry does something that most American poetry does not attempt: it treats the land as a living participant in the poem. The red dirt of Oklahoma, the streets of Albuquerque, the Gulf Coast, all of these places appear in her work not as settings but as characters. The land remembers. The land speaks. The land carries grief the way a river carries sediment. Literary scholars at the University of New Mexico have studied Harjo's technique of weaving oral tradition into contemporary verse. Her poems move between the mythic and the personal without signaling the transition. A poem about driving through Arizona becomes a poem about creation. A poem about a bar fight becomes a poem about survival across five hundred years of colonization. Her collection An American Sunrise, published in 2019, takes its title from a phrase that reclaims the word American for the people who were here first. The sunrise is not a new beginning. It is a continuation. The sun has been rising on this land for millennia, and the people who watched it first are still watching.

The Music Is Not Separate From the Words

Harjo plays saxophone in a band called Poetic Justice. This is not a hobby. The music and the poetry are the same practice approached from different angles. She has described the saxophone as a way of reaching the parts of human experience that language cannot quite touch, the frequencies below and above the range of words. Ethnomusicologists at the University of Oklahoma have documented the influence of Native American ceremonial music on Harjo's jazz compositions. She is not playing standard jazz. She is playing something that uses jazz as a vehicle for older rhythms, older calls and responses, older ways of making sound mean something beyond entertainment. She carries a nation's memory the way other poets carry influences. Not as reference material. Not as subject matter. As the ground she stands on, as the air she breathes into the horn, as the voice that comes out when she opens her mouth and discovers that the poem has been waiting there the whole time.