Speaking Poetry with a Pathbreaking Poet Laureate

This kind of speech is typical for the new U.S. poet laureate, who breaks into metaphor without realizing it.

“That’s cool isn’t it?” she says, noticing that her description of poetry sound like a poem itself. “And that just came. That’s how poetry happens.”

Even though Harjo didn’t begin writing until college, she knows a good bit about how poetry happens. At 68, she has written eight books of poetry, won the American Book Award twice, and earlier this summer become the first Native American poet laureate.

A member of the Muscogee Creek Nation, Harjo says she didn’t find poetry interesting until she realized it wasn’t just for a certain group of people.

“I started going to poetry readings and met Native poets,” she says. “That changed poetry for me because I came to see that poetry wasn’t just written by people on the East Coast or in England or France, but poetry could be written by Native people with different experiences and a poem could involve places that were familiar to me.”

The poet laureate’s job, according to the Library of Congress, is “to raise the national consciousness to a greater appreciation of the reading and writing of poetry.” In other words, it’s to encourage people in the U.S. to appreciate poetry as Harjo does, as a shared language.

“One thing that I’m focusing on, it’s that poetry belongs to everyone,” she says. “We can all carry it in our pockets.”

Part of the reason that most people may feel intimidated by poetry is that they’re taught first to understand it, not to enjoy it. But poetry “has a place in all parts of our lives,” Harjo explains. “We often encounter poetry without realizing it, whether we hear it at a celebration, like a wedding, or a time of mourning, like a funeral.”

“There is a poem for everyone,” she says. “You may not like what you’ve read before, but there is a poem out there that can change your life.”

Harjo’s latest volume of poetry, which comes out next week, is called An American Sunrise. It’s about poems for every occasion: from praise to anger to stopping a storm.

Poetry can even address politics. In “Advice For Countries, Advanced, Developing and Falling,” Harjo writes, “We build walls to keep anyone who is not like us out of here. … ‘We will make this country great again.’”

America may be getting more polarized, but a good way to talk about political issues, she says, is not through political language, which relies on clichés and prohibits people from understanding each other.

“Poetry goes through those rhetorical walls,” she says. “You notice, politicians don’t speak poetry. There’s a certain kind of political speech because it has a different end. At least my experience with poetry, it’s about opening up to what you didn’t know, opening up to hear what you couldn’t hear otherwise. It has to do with the language, with rhythm, with metaphor. Metaphor makes everything possible.”

This doesn’t mean poetry always has to deal with such heavy subjects, though. Sometimes a poem is just a scene from an ordinary life. Even so, it can create a powerful emotional effect by traveling “into places that we often can’t speak.” All it takes is noticing subtle details.

“You can speak of something quite sacred with ordinary language,” Harjo explains.

That’s exactly what she does in “Fall Song,” a poem from her 2015 collection, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings. It paints a picture of a day in autumn, a day “strung perfectly on the necklace of days.”

The poem elevates the scene of a gray fall day through its language, rhythm, and simple but evocative images. It demonstrates exactly what Harjo says about poetry, that to be meaningful, it doesn’t have to consign itself to the extraordinary.

“It is a dark fall day,” she begins. But it’s not all gloomy, and the day carries its own form of joy: “Slightly overcast/ Yellow leaves/ Your jacket hanging in the hallway/ Next to mine.”

Madeline Fry is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.