Catching the Light by Joy Harjo

Author:Joy Harjo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

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Years later during a long flight from the West Coast to the east, I flew directly over Iowa City. I saw cornfields below and imagined how the winds enjoyed making a flute-like music as they blew through dried stalks in winter. I was reminded how I took to James Welch’s poetry and novels to find the wryest of humor to counter dread and loss. Dread and loss are the tinder elements of humor. Oh, and those family opponents who test you most profoundly. Anything can light from it.

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I consider my poems, stories, or music compositions as houses, or transforming stations. I must tend to the form, the architecture, even as content dictates the style, shape, and mode. The location of these houses, though they may appear in pages or in recordings, is in the liminal of the imagination. What a country that is!! The liminal of the liminal is where the most unusual forms and possibilities live. This territory is marked by the kinds of forms that live where all possibilities of light shooting through dark gather. To speak and sing a poem into place will make it stay if there is a beautiful and stunningly crafted place for it to stay.

A house is not limited to a hut, a shed, a larger single-family home, or even a vehicle. The beloved Earth can be considered a house, a house of earths, a myriad and diversity of plants, animals, rivers, waters, trees, and many kinds of living beings. The sky is the roof, made of clouds, sun, and is a place of envisioning, of calling out to helpful forces. The ocean and below-Earth are the dominion of unseen and unknown hopes and fears. In our Mvskoke cosmology these are the Middle World, the Upper and Lower World. The heart is the fire in the house that gives light. My house is the red Earth.

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