Harjo finds joy blending both poetry, music

Most of us think in categories.

A person, say, is a poet. Or a painter. A photographer, or a singer/saxophonist.

Joy Harjo doesn’t believe in such limitations. She embodies the very notion of blending.

For example, the Tulsa, Okla., native – who will perform at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday at Gonzaga University and at 10:30 a.m. Thursday at Spokane Community College – has written 11 books, most of them poetry.

She attended high school in Santa Fe at the Institute of American Indian Arts and then studied art at the University of New Mexico in 1971.

But after hearing Simon Ortiz, author of “Naked in the Wind” and other books, describe himself as a poet, she underwent an epiphany.

“Nobody had introduced himself to me as a poet before,” Harjo says.

“As a child I associated poetry as written poetry,” she adds. “It wasn’t until I was in my early 20s that I realized that poetry could actually be a possible vocation.

“You know, growing up, you know, we had stay-at-home mothers. We had cooks, waitresses, you know, mechanics and so on.”

The result: “I started writing about a year later – but not seriously until a few years after that.”

First, however, she had to make a break with the UNM art faculty.

“I remember going into my art class and telling my teacher that I was leaving,” Harjo says. “It was a huge decision for me.”

But ultimately the right one. Because her feel for poetry eventually helped combine her other talents.

“When I was a kid I loved to hear it, I liked to read it,” Harjo says of poetry. “And I would read it out loud to myself.

“But I came to it first through my mother, who liked to sing. And I liked the poetry of the song lyrics.”

That oral tradition was something that, as a member of the Muscogee tribe, Harjo experienced as a natural reality.

“In my community, poetry is still more oral,” she says. “Homes and families don’t have libraries and stack of books; it’s more oral and held together with music in its original state – not taken away from the live context and put freeze-dried onto books.”

Here, for example, is a stanza from her poem “Deer Dancer”:

“I had to tell you this, for the baby inside the girl sealed up with a lick of/

hope and swimming into the praise of nations. This is not a rooming house, but/

a dream of winter falls and the deer who portrayed the relatives of/

strangers. The way back is deer breath on icy windows.”

Harjo has incorporated that oral tradition into everything she does.

While she will appear alone at Gonzaga, she performs regularly with her band, Poetic Justice, for which she sings and plays the sax (which, she says, she will bring with her to GU). The group has cut a number of CDs

She’s completing what she calls “a major writing project” which combines poetry and music. She’s also been teaching at UNM through an endowed position, had her photography exhibited at a recent show (with another one forthcoming in May) and been on the road giving one reading/performance after the next.

Harjo calls Hawaii home, but she spends nearly as much time in Albuquerque.

“Home is in me,” she says. “I’ve had to take my home wherever I am.”

And inside that home percolate her many talents. How does she manage to do so many things at once?

“Oh, you learn,” Harjo says. “It’s like anything else. You just immerse yourself in it. And the more you learn the more you hear. It keeps on going.”