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Melissa Harris-Perry: You're listening to The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry.

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Joy Harjo: Remember the sky that you were born under,

know each of the star’s stories.

Remember the moon, know who she is.

Remember the sun’s birth at dawn, that is the

strongest point of time.

[music]

Melissa Harris-Perry: Joy Harjo was the 23rd US Poet Laureate. The celebrated award-winning poet and performer served three terms in this role. Harjo is a member of the Muscogee Creek Nation and has published 10 books of poetry. Now, one of her poems, Remember, which was originally published in 1983, has been crafted into a children's book. The poem invites young readers to reflect on the world around them, to ponder how all of life is interconnected, and to remember their heritage and unique place in the world.

Joy Harjo: Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their tribes, their families, their histories, too.

Talk to them, listen to them. They are alive poems.

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Melissa Harris-Perry: With us now is Joy Harjo, former US Poet Laureate and author of the new children's book, Remember. Joy, thanks for joining us on The Takeaway.

Joy Harjo: I'm so glad I could be here and be here with you.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm excited. I understand that you are actually in our studios in New York with the team, even though I'm remote, but it's so lovely to have you in our space.

Joy Harjo: Well, it's good to hear your voice. The voice always says so much about someone.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Indeed. I had the pleasure of hearing your voice live. You visited the university where I teach, Wake Forest University, last year in 2022, and your moment, your reading, your performance engaged so many different aspects of voice, song, poetry, your connection to us as an audience. Can you talk to me a bit about how you understand poetry across all these spaces?

Joy Harjo: Yes. I came to poetry through music. My mother was a songwriter and used to write songs on the kitchen table, and we danced a lot. My father was also a good dancer. I came to understand the power of lyrics, the power of rhythm, and the connection that it connects orality, which is the basis of all novels, poetry, writing. Orality, it's a living thing and it's not just about the performer. There's no performance without everybody else.

Melissa Harris-Perry: In building on that, what does it mean to be a poet warrior?

Joy Harjo: The qualities of a warrior. Okay. When I was younger, I was an art major for a while at the University of New Mexico and my project that I never did, I'm thinking about starting it back up, was to do a portrait series of warriors. Usually, you see Native warriors as men from the shoulders up or whatever and they were often the people who the English-speaking people knew, and they were incredible in their time and place, but I started thinking about contemporary warriors too and what makes a warrior. I started thinking of all the women, their mothers. I started thinking of their mothers. I watched, and I did it myself, I have watched so many young women going to school, having a job, taking care of a home, getting up in the morning, making sandwiches for the kids, getting them ready, working with them when they get back. There's just so much to attend to. It seems like in this day of virtual reality and so on, it's speeded things up even more. Those young women are some of our bravest and most powerful warriors.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I love that you begin that in part by talking about this art project that could be part of it. Let's go back to the new children's book built on and adapted from an earlier poem, Remember. Part of what happens in this children's book is the illustration. It is the artwork. It's illustrated here by Michaela Goade. Can you talk to us about why you wanted to bring this poem to life through illustration?

Joy Harjo: This poem has a life of its own. It was first published in '81, but I wrote it while I was still an undergraduate at the University of New Mexico, and I realized this poem came to me because this is what I needed to know [chuckles] as I was still growing up. We're all still growing up. We continue to learn. This poem, it's on the Lucy spacecraft right now, people have loved this poem, taken it to heart, have read it at funerals, weddings, and so on, and so it was time for it to have its own place this way. The art by Michaela Goade is magical.

Melissa Harris-Perry: What was it like working with Michaela to bring this to life?

Joy Harjo: Well, it was amazing to watch it come to life. I had a choice of artists, and her work is incredible. Our first conversation was, well, she could study my Muscogee people's art, motifs, and images, but would I mind if she based it on her Tlingit people? I know her people. I've been up in her community, different communities, and I told her, "We want you because of your art and your instincts." I said, "Go ahead. Make it from your community." Her other projects are incredible. Maybe I'm partial, but [chuckles] this one is amazing. It gives the poem another kind of life and it does what the poem is supposed to do, is to go out and remind us that we are this earth. The plants are relatives. They help take care of us. The animals, the winds, we are all one being.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Okay. Take a pause with me for just a moment. We're going to be right back with more with the poet Joy Harjo right after this. It's The Takeaway. We're still with Joy Harjo who served as the US Poet Laureate from 2019 until 2022. She has a new illustrated children's book which brings her poem, Remember, to new life with illustrations by Michaela Goade. Joy, as you were talking about the ways that your poem, which comes from your set of experiences, and then Michaela's illustrations from her peoples, are also now on a spacecraft, I suppose the illustrations are, but the poem is, can you talk to me about what it felt like to be and what it feels like for you to have your words going intergalactic?

Joy Harjo: [laughs] Well, it's not something I ever could have predicted. You never see poetry at Career Day.

[laughter]

Joy Harjo: It's something that I think you pursue it or it pursues you. It almost feels to me like it's inbuilt. You come into the world as an artist, and a poet is a kind of artist of sorts, and that's built-in. It's a different kind of way, but it's absolutely necessary. The arts are absolutely necessary for culture, for the definition, and for cultures to flourish. That's how we know who we are as human beings, is in our arts and in our words, our languages.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I love this, I'm never going to forget this, that you don't have a poet featured at Career Day. I wonder, as you're making this point, certainly the yearning towards all of the things that make possible, sending up the Lucy spacecraft, the science, the technology, the STEM, the AI, all of those things, but also, there's a rootedness that you give us in your work to this extraordinary spaceship that we're on, Earth, to what we have here and our need to protect it.

Joy Harjo: Yes, it is the root. I remember being shocked, but it made sense when I heard another poet speak, Linda Hogan, years ago, and she told us in the audience that that image of earth, that NASA image of Earth was-- It was what do you call it? Classified document for a while and not allowed for public because it was so potent and powerful. We saw what happened when the image of Earth was released, suddenly you were hearing holistic, environmental. We never heard that in the vernacular, in the every day because suddenly, there we were [laughs] a living being, blue, and the blue of oceans, and green, and there was a light coming. There was a light, and there we were together as a person. That was astounding and it shifted culture. We need to remember that in these days. Every day there's stories that show that, yes, we are shifting. We're always shifting.

Everything is always moving in a living biosystem and a living mentality system, [laughs] system of mentality and of spirituality. To live, there's always movement, but we're seeing now it's speeded up. Just like our technology has speeded up. We're seeing the world, the changes, Earth changes speeded up.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm interested in the notion that Remember is calling us to do that, to remember these things, to remember our earth, to remember our parents, to remember our people, not to learn it. Not to learn it anew, but to remember it. Do we all have it? Are we able to remember it? Do we know it well enough to recall it?

Joy Harjo: It's there, but it seems like our technology is set up so that we don't remember. [laughs] We used to know everyone's phone numbers. We don't even call it phone anymore. I know I'm sounding old and I am, but [laughs] it's all in our machines. What happens when our phones go away? What's going to happen? I think memory is like anything else. You pay attention to it, you build it, you build it with stories, with songs, but it's still there. It's all there at the root. I think at the root of every culture in the world is this knowing that we are absolutely interdependent with the plants and with the gifts of the Earth. It's just that in our indigenous cultures, at least the ones that I'm familiar with, I don't know all of them or everything and I'm not an expert, is that what's at the root is that we are all related and no one is above the other. There is no hierarchy, and the Earth is a living being versus, well, you can take what you want and dig up and it was given to us by God for us to take what we want. It's two very different ways of thinking about Earth, or [unintelligible 00:13:11] as we call her in our Muskogee language.

Melissa Harris-Perry: The poem also calls us to not only remember the plants, trees, and animal life, but to talk to them and to listen to them. How do we talk to them?

Joy Harjo: Everything is energy and vibration, and there's communication going on all the time. What I have learned is that if I'm quiet enough, then you can hear. I was surprised. One time, my mother had bought us some plants and said, "Put it over there on my porch there," and for the first time, I heard the plants sitting there saying, "We don't want that plant here." [laughs] I thought, well-- I didn't question it at first. Later I thought, what in the world? But I realized, one, plants are like human beings and they have their likes and dislikes, but I heard them, and it's everywhere. Everything has life, our printers [laughs] even. You know they can be wacky and they're very temperamental, but everything has energetics and it's moving. It's vibration. Everything. Every living thing. Even our technology, it's made of living stuff. When you look at the world that way, the interconnections are absolutely there and living. I have a lot of other stories, but [laughs] I won't go into them all now and you might think I'm crazy.

Melissa Harris-Perry: As you're telling stories, is there a story that for you represents maybe what was the best of your time or what you most enjoyed or learned, or what you will remember from being US Poet Laureate?

Joy Harjo: Well, there's so much, and so much of my term happened in my home [chuckles] on Zoom because COVID hit not long after I was made US Poet Laureate, but what I remember is how astounding the reaction was, especially with native people because to have someone in this position, a native person in this position, told the world that we're human beings. There was a recent study done that showed that about 20, 25% of Americans think that we're all dead, that we're human beings, and another was that there were many native poets and many poets, period. The outpouring from communities was quite amazing. I was Poet Laureate too at a time when people were hungry for poetry. We always turn to poetry in times of great transformation, whether it's birth, death, marriage, all of those important moments of shift and change. Adolescence. There's a reason adolescents are usually fervent readers and writers of poetry and music and so on to document their time of great shift turning from children to men and women.

Also, the ending event I will never forget. We had started one of the first native poetry organizations to help bring up younger native writers. Their native poets were there. A young native poet from my community read an incredible poem she wrote for the occasion, and then the last day after the event, the performance, we had a dance party out outside Library of Congress with a great DJ. Oh, we could see the capital and there we were all dancing. [laughs]. I remember that. I'll remember that.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Joy, I love that story. Joy Harjo, thank you so much for joining us today.

Joy Harjo: Oh, thank you.

[music]

Joy Harjo: Remember the sky that you were born under,

know each of the star’s stories.

Remember the moon, know who she is.

Remember the sun’s birth at dawn, that is the

strongest point of time.

Remember sundown and the giving away tonight.

Remember your birth, how your mother's struggle to give you form and breath.

You are evidence of her life and her mother's and hers. Remember your father, he is your life also.

Remember the earth whose skin you are.

Red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth, brown earth. We are earth. Remember the plants, trees, animal life, who all have their tribes, their families, their histories too.

Talk to them. Listen to them. They are alive poems.

Remember the wind. Remember her voice.

She knows the origin of this universe.

Remember, you are all people and all people are you. Remember you are this universe, and this universe is you. Remember all is in motion is growing as you, remember.

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