A couple of weeks ago I read a book that someone had recommended to me. It is a collection of excellent poems by the U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo. Joy Harjo’s poetry blew me away, and I am so glad that this person recommended her works to me. I first heard of Joy Harjo when I was reading this newspaper called World Tribune, which is one of the Soka Gakkai International’s publications, and in one of the issues there was a short news article on Joy Harjo becoming the U.S. poet Laureate. I was so glad to hear this, especially because after doing my senior thesis in college on Indigenous communities and the environmental justice movement, I was interested in reading more works by Indigenous authors. So someone I knew from a virtual book club told me about Joy Harjo because we were talking about works by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) authors. They recommended I buy her poetry collection, She Had Some Horses, and her memoir Crazy Brave. I started with She Had Some Horses and wow. All I can say is wow. While I read She Had Some Horses, I felt inspired to get back into writing my own poetry. Reading She Had Some Horses showed me the raw power and vulnerability that goes into writing poetry. I haven’t read many works by Indigenous authors, other than works by the scholar Kyle Powys Whyte, Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko and Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. She Had Some Horses really inspired me to write my poems from my lived experiences and to not be afraid of vulnerability. I worried for a long time about being vulnerable in my poems because I was worried what people would think, so I didn’t write poetry for a while because I thought it all had to sound like roses are red, violets are blue. But of course that’s far from the truth. Poetry is life, it is lived experiences, it is truth, and Joy Harjo’s She Had Some Horses showed me that. Every word I read in her poems sat with me for a long time. I found myself slowing down in time to take in every word, every syllable, and to listen, just listen openly, as the words moved on the page. Each word stirred an emotion in me, and I just listened, and absorbed, and listened. At the end I felt as if I had encountered this honest deep dialogue with Joy and listened to her narrative on womanhood, tradition, culture and human nature. Thank you Joy Harjo for inspiring me to write poetry again. You have shown me the importance of writing from the heart, from sharing my narrative so I could have a dialogue with myself and a dialogue with others. Thank you.
She Had Some Horses. Joy Harjo. Copyright 2008, 1983. 80 pp.
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