Review: POET WARRIOR (+Friday56 LinkUp)

Title: Poet Warrior: a Memoir by Joy Harjo

Book Beginnings quote:

To imagine the spirit of poetry is much like imagining the shape and size of knowing. It is a kind of resurrection light; it is the tall ancestor spirit who has been with me since the beginning, or a bear, or a hummingbird. It is a hundred horses running the land in a soft mist, or it a woman undressing for her beloved in firelight. It is none of these things. It is more than everything. "You're coming with me, poor thing. You don't know how to listen. You don't know how to speak. You don't know how to sing. I will teach you."

Friday56 quote:

If I took those stories and thoughts of hell and placed them in a the crook of the tree in our yard, then the tree helped relieve the wheel of worry that followed the questions that turned in me. Why would the Creator-God make everything, then deem only those who were of a certain religion or church worthy of eternal life? 

Summary:  

Joy Harjo, the first Native American to serve as US poet laureate, invites us to travel along the heartaches, losses, and humble realizations of her "poet-warrior" road. 

Poet Warrior reveals how Harjo came to write poetry of compassion and healing, poetry with the power to unearth the truth and demand justice. Harjo listens to stories of ancestors and family, the poetry and music that she first encountered as a child, and the messengers of a changing earth.  In absorbing, incantatory prose, Harjo grieves at the loss of her mother, reckons with the theft of her ancestral homeland, and sheds light on the rituals that nourish her as an artist, mother, wife, and community member.

Moving fluidly between prose, song, and poetry, Harjo recounts a luminous journey of becoming, a spiritual map that will help us all find home. (Publisher)

Review: As I poetry reader, I, of course, want to experience poetry through the eyes, mind, heart of poets from many cultures and experiences. Somehow I have never read any of Joy Harjo's poetry before this time even though she is a famed Native American poet from the Muscogee Nation. This book, her second memoir, was a nice introduction not only to her poetry but also to her Native storytelling style. As she shared her story about how she came to poetry, music, and art, her Poet Warrior poems told her story. These poems were interspersed throughout the book. For example, Chapter 1 starts here:

Girl-Warrior perched on the sky ledge

Overlooking the turquoise, green, and blue garden

Of ocean and earth.

From there she could hear the winds

Lifting from their birthing places

She could hear where sound began.

I confess at times to be a bit confused by Harjo's organization of information in Poet Warrior.

Her story was loosely chronological but not necessarily on a timeline I could perceive. Sometimes she'd slip into dreams and conversations with ancestors and other times she'd speed ahead in time to reveal something of meaning to jump back at a later point. At one point, I decided to just relax and not to worry if I didn't understand or know everything. I appreciated the storytelling aspect to this memoir, since it was so different than any memoir I've read before.

I was so touched by the Friday56 quote. At this point in her story she was a child attending church alone. She loved church, the rituals, the fellowship but even as a child she came to understand that the what the church was offering wasn't for everyone since there was such a strong message placed on being saved or you will go to hell. She worried about her mother. Would her mother really go to hell so they would be parted for ever in eternity. Isn't that an awful thought to place on a child's heart?

I recognize that this book wouldn't be everyone's cup-of-tea but I do encourage readers of my blog to read broadly and Poet Warrior is a book to consider and to savor.

My rating 4 stars.

-Anne

Friday56 participants. Please give me feedback! Is it time to say goodbye to this meme? I've noticed that participation has fallen off steeply this season. Is it time to let it go? Do you enjoy participating and it is worth taking into the New Year? Please leave me your thoughts in the comments. Thank you.

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