Joy Harjo, a Native
American born in Oklahoma, challenges the
prevailing boundaries of southwestern writers. She moves with ease
among the various tribes of the region, and her poetry has been
influenced not only by her own Creek traditions, but by the Navajo
Beauty Way (like Luci Tapahanso), and by Pueblo stories (as in the work
of Simon Ortiz). At home in the mesas, mountains, and sagebrush flats
of
New Mexico and Arizona, her work is grounded in her relationship to the
earth, on a physical, spiritual, and mythopoetic level. Like fellow
Oklahoman and Native American poet Linda Hogan, Harjo's writing
contains a disturbing mixture of darkness and beauty, at once a lament
and a moving incantation.
"Sacred space--I call it a place of grace, or the place in which we're most human--the place in which there's a unity of human-ness with wolf-ness, with hummingbird-ness, with Sandia Mountain-ness with rain cloud-ness? . . .It's that place in which we understand there is no separation between worlds. It has everything to do with the way we live. The land is responsible for the clothes you have on, for my saxophone, for the paper that I write these things on, for our bodies. It's responsible for everything."