Joy Harjo Poem Analysis Paper

Ilona Willsey

English 11 Honors

Mrs. Drexler

Poetry Analysis Paper

One of the most distinguished, contemporary poets in America today is Joy Harjo. Born in 1951 in Oklahoma and a member of the Creek (Mvskoke) Nation, her work is deeply influenced by her American Indian roots and upbringing. She has won numerous awards and has published a fair amount of poetry books as well as a memoir, Crazy Brave published in 2012. She is currently a professor of English and American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. In 2014, Harjo has been named a Guggenheim Fellow, a prestigious award to further the development of scholars and artists. She is planning to use the award funds to complete her second memoir, Songline of Justice.

Joy Harjo advocates for the awareness of the destruction of the natural environment and the oppression of women by the patriarchal Western society; in essence her voice is that of an ecofeminist. Her upbringing and experience as a Native American woman is the lense through which she expresses her poetry in a narrative, storytelling way, breaking away from traditional patterns of poetry, thus classifying her as a modernist.
To begin with, the voice of the feminine is prevalent in the poem Perhaps the World Ends Here.

The subject matter within the poem revolves around fertility and the life of women as mothers, caretakers and providers. For example, Harjo relates a kitchen table to the center of life. Intimately connected with life is food (on the table) without which life is not sustainable. She says, “The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.” The first thing mothers do after the baby is born, is to feed it milk from their own bodies. This is an intensely feminine act of giving and sustaining life. Later, rather than giving food from her body, the mother prepares food and nourishes her family at the table. Another expression of the “life goes on theme,” is expressed in the poem When the World As We Knew It Ended. “But then there were seeds to plant and the babies who needed milk and comforting, and someone picked up a guitar or ukulele from the rubble and began to sing about the light flutter the kick beneath the skin of the earth we felt there, beneath us.” This poem speaks about the attack on the Twin Towers in New York, now known as 9/11. Too much greed, “raping” the Earth wanting too much from her will eventually backfire. But even the terrible event of a figurative rape, brings new life; in this poem, when the world as one knows it (whether exterior, or interior) gets destroyed, new (and tender) life always will prevail; in seeds, in babies, in the

softness of a ukulele’s string. The tender skin of the earth compared to the of the skin of a mother’s belly, protecting her child within; the light flutter and kicking within her is the unborn child, just as there is new life awaiting underneath raw and scorched earth. There is also strength in that perceived “weakness”: the tenderness of a new seedling or a baby to emerge in spite of impossibly difficult circumstances and the will to survive (and really, babies and seedlings have no choice, but simply follow to rule of life).
Lastly, in the poem “She Had Some Horses”, Harjo describes all the different kind of horses “she” has. “She” as Mother Earth and the horses can be seen as the varied kinds of beings, human and animal that roam the earth. The horses “who tried to save her, who climbed in her bed at night and prayed as they raped her” is more of a metaphorical rape of Mother Earth; people will pray for a good harvest, for a good hunt, or for a lucrative price for the lumber they cut down (in essence: “raping” Mother Earth.) The theme of ecofeminism is expressed in the linking of abusing the earth and women alike. Just as a mother births all her children, Mother Earth has “some horses she loves, some horses she hated. These were the same horses.” Some children will turn against you and other will protect you, yet they all come from the same womb, and mothers have little choice as to who her children are going to be. Even some men (who destroy the earth and diminish women) come from a mother’s wombs as well, after all.
Harjo’s poetic and musical work are expressed through her experience as a Native American woman.

Her poetry is full with such references, evoking ancestors, images of the sacred nature of the natural surroundings and the symbolic meanings of animals, such as eagles and deer. In her poem “Eagle Poem”, Hajo expresses that there is more to the world than the naked eye sees and that it must be felt and cannot necessarily be comprehended by the mind alone. Again, this is a reference to ecofeminism, connecting the natural world with the experience of the heart (more feminine) rather than abstract logic (more masculine). These classifications are not necessarily to be viewed as rigid, but are more symbolic. Both male and female have the eagle inside them, and the potential to live a life of beauty and wonder while respecting nature and each other, “Like eagle rounding out the morning Inside us. We pray that it will be done In beauty. In

beauty.”
Interestingly enough, Harjo works in both, concrete and abstract themes in her poetry. For example the poem “Perhaps the World Ends Here” is full of concrete references, such as eating, birthing, teething, gossiping, preparing burials, scraping knees and sharing stories of love and loss. However, her poem “A Map to the Next World” is completely metaphorical and abstract. She uses metaphors such as “climb through the hole in the sky” and “Monsters are born of nuclear anger” or “You will travel through the membrane of death.”
Looking at rhyme and meter of Harjo’s work, this concludes that she is a modern writer, doing away with most of the classical patterns. For example, there is no typical meter in her poetry like one is to expect from more classical poets. However, in spite of her narrative poetry style, she sometimes uses alliteration. For example in the poem “When the World as We knew It Ended”, Harjo writes “through the snage of stars, through the sun and storms form our knees…” She repeats the letter “s” multiple times to emphasize the natural surroundings.