YouSaid · the spoken record

Joy Harjo

lines on the record: 38
first: 2019-10-09
most recent: 2019-10-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Remember, you are all people and all people are you. Remember that you are this universe and this universe is you. Remember that all is in motion, is growing is you. Remember, language comes from this. Remember the dance that language is. Remember.”
2019-10-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Joy Harjo: An American Sunrise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some of them I know I can do by memory. And then this one I'll do. Yeah, this is remember Remember the sky you were born under. Know each of the stars' 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 struggled 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 Remember her voice. She knows the origin of this universe”
2019-10-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Joy Harjo: An American Sunrise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then dealing with, okay, there's pain here. Well, let's sit at the. Why don't we sit at the table and talk with each other and enjoy food? We all like each other's food and the kids can all play together out and back. Would have been so, the history would be so much different rather than coming in with flags and guns and saying, you're not a human being.”
2019-10-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Joy Harjo: An American Sunrise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If I had a formula, that might take me a little while. Well, the first thing would be just to stop everyone if we could just stop. And listen. No argument, no political speech allowed. Only the sounds of these beautiful birds, the sound field, you feel the winds coming up. They also like to be acknowledged, yes. And then gratitude. Say, okay, we're here. There's a reason we're all here together. Sometimes I think America was created by a trickster god who says, okay. We have all of these diverse native nations here, and then we're going to bring all these diverse people from all over the world. And now let's see what happens. Let's see what you're going to do. But if we were to stop and listen, and then, okay. And then move with intention. Towards being kind”
2019-10-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Joy Harjo: An American Sunrise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That line has been years and years in coming. Because as much poetry has been a really big teacher because my mind is constantly, I have a mind that is constantly analyzing and working. And I know it doesn't look that way But it is always going, and I've had to learn how to stop and listen. And that can be the hardest thing, especially in a time when you feel there's so much to do in this world, there's so much, and there's family and there's, you know, I feel, you know, young families out there, people trying to make a living and dealing with just basics. And we're not given time to listen. I mean, everybody's got earbuds in. We've got our cell phones. If we stop and listen, then we're going to realize maybe that's the, you know, you realize what we're in.”
2019-10-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Joy Harjo: An American Sunrise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is a huge question. It's about listening. I mean, because if we listen, then we can hear all of that vibration, that movement between in the luminosity between everyone. If we knew that we were connected, there would not be the divisiveness in the nation. If we understood the way those must goge Creek and native elders had taught us that we are all part of each other, that we are everyone is related. And that all the children, our children are children.”
2019-10-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Joy Harjo: An American Sunrise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even though the internet supposedly connects you with everything, it does not, it does not connect you with your soul. And poems speak to the heart. They go to the soul or the gut or the heart of it. And poetry can be there. It's often a poem that will lead us out of despair. Because we go to poetry when there's a birth, when there's death, marriage, when we're falling in love, when we're falling out of love, when we want to praise this out of gratitude for these beautiful gifts that we've been given on this journey, or we want to not praise, you know, that's also part of the story.”
2019-10-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Joy Harjo: An American Sunrise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have to go through the wound. You have to sometimes go back several times. And the suicide, that's missing and murdered women. Epidemic. Where there's even the way the laws are now that non-natives can go, and this happens a lot in our community, they will come onto the community and rape and abuse our young Native women, and then they can't be prosecuted because they're non-natives. We cannot prosecute them. This day And so my poetry was born out of a sense of trying to make, trying to be helpful in the way that I know how I have words. Sometimes I have muses, words, music's in the words, sometimes I have music. But that is the way that I can. Come to helping to help change or to help any young person, the suicide, the suicide rate in the whole country is epidemic because we don't feel connected.”
2019-10-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Joy Harjo: An American Sunrise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of course, it is. Of course it is. I was thinking about people ask, well, what am I going to do in this position? Well, what can poetry do? And poetry gives us a way to speak. It gives us a way to at least express our thoughts so we can find pathways to healing. And healing is not a really not always a pretty thing.”
2019-10-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Joy Harjo: An American Sunrise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No. I used to think that I had to write a poem all at once in one sitting, so I would sit there all day until I got it pretty close. But it's different. In this poem, I revised this book I have revised more than any other. Have gone back, and maybe in a way it's like coming into contact with history because the poems connect me with that love.”
2019-10-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Joy Harjo: An American Sunrise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the poem came from We Return, my husband, who's also my tribe, the Muskogie Creek people, and we returned to the southeast for a job, but we wanted to be there to go around to the homelands. To see what had happened. And I was standing there. We were thinking about leaving. And I said, what did I ask the trees? I said, what? What did I learn here? And this whole book came Do not return. We were warned by one who knows things. You will only upset the dead. There will be no place in memory for what they see, the highways, the houses, the stores of interlopers perched over the blood fields, where the dead last stood, and then what? You with your words in the enemy's language, do you know how to make a peaceful road through human memory? And what of angry ghost of history? Then what?”
2019-10-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Joy Harjo: An American Sunrise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah And it slowed down so they see much more deeply in a way. They see in a way I consider stones like they hold, they anchor, but we need them.”
2019-10-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Joy Harjo: An American Sunrise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We get lost. It doesn't mean that I still have a quarrel with him, but I don't want to be attached to him forever. I don't want to be around, but it means sort of stepping back. And then there's also another place, if you step back farther There's even more, and you step back farther, and you start to see that there is no such thing as time, that really any, we're all stories, that ultimately that's what I come to believe after this and other times where I've seen this, is that there's not a sequential hierarchy of reincarnation. Rather, in a way, we realize that we're all stories. Your story is mine. The story of these plants here, this is my story too. The stone is my story, too. And so it's in a way, I think, and I could be wrong, this is just what is that we become all stories. And that's when we realize we remember who we are.”
2019-10-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Joy Harjo: An American Sunrise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One time in a dream, and my dreams are a lot of, some of them are just ordinary dreams and some go to another place and I travel in them. And in this dream, I was one of my guardians took me and we stood at the edge of this realm looking. And you could see all of this energy. It's like it's all energy. It's like all music, so to speak. It's all energy. It's moving. You could see all of the stories to all of the stories of everyone. You could hear everyone's voices and said, wow. And the spirit didn't have to say anything. I was just watching And then you could see that there is a luminosity even in the midst of the most horrible things. There is a luminosity that connects all of us. It connects everything so that everyone, even my stepfather, is a luminous being.”
2019-10-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Joy Harjo: An American Sunrise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not often easy. I mean, it's not easy. I don't know that any path is of being a human being. But so in order to do that, it is a kind of a path of a mystic because a mystic is looking into the spiritual realm. Of being, and it is a kind of path. In a way, I think all humans are, but mystics are more focused on that. And poetry is if you're writing poetry, you go into that. I feel like I'm like the hammer and nails because I'll be writing along in something really cool and it's like, whoa, that is, I never heard that before. Okay. And then I'm fitting in. There's all this other stuff that's not so. And then it's a process. You can see the process when someone is carving something.”
2019-10-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Joy Harjo: An American Sunrise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say that poets generally are. That it's the path of being a poet. I mean, when I took on this path, and it really is a path, it means, okay, if you're going to be a poet. And this I've learned along the way. I didn't have all of this right up front is that you have to learn how to listen. What is learning how to listen mean? It means listening beyond, listening into the challenge. Listening into the pain of someone who would destroy you, listening into the pain of your people and the atrocities that have been perpetrated against native peoples and against African Americans, against listening into all of this that makes this story, listening into that place where the man that you adore and love is coming at you.”
2019-10-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Joy Harjo: An American Sunrise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some kind of, I mean, the acknowledgement, I mean, what are reparations that you get the whole? I would ask the California native people what they would, you know, what it is that they mean.”
2019-10-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Joy Harjo: An American Sunrise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're over 500 tribal nations and we are here and we're thriving and we're human beings. We are human beings. There was a study done by Illuminative recently, this organization that collected data on what Americans think about natives. And would you know that a large percentage still of Americans still believe that we're not human?”
2019-10-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Joy Harjo: An American Sunrise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it was that poetry. And I found something in writing poetry that I had not found in painting. There was something compelling, and I don't know exactly what it was because it totally, I had no idea. I didn't grow up with like a poet down the street or, you know, poets in my, you know, they were people from long ago usually. But there was something so compelling. And I found that I could write about what was going on with Native women was what we were going through in these times of fighting for our rights, trying to speak out and say, we are here.”
2019-10-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Joy Harjo: An American Sunrise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and I would walk across. I had to get my kids, you know, I had to see to them, and nobody knew. And it was then I started.”
2019-10-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Joy Harjo: An American Sunrise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was that sense of this is what I had to do, and it surprised me because when poetry came to me, it was in the middle of what was like a breakdown and where I was no one knew because I could always move through. Nobody knew what was going on. And I had to count every breath. I had to count steps.”
2019-10-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Joy Harjo: An American Sunrise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and my mother was mowing the yard before he moved in, and she said, the yard was filled with snakes. This man is, that's a sign of someone who is evil. And then as my mother, again, she has her own knowing, and she had a very strong knowing that this is not a good thing. And I said, Then why are we coming here? And I have learned later it was because of the threats.”
2019-10-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Joy Harjo: An American Sunrise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And our whole life changed because our life with our mother and even with our father there, there was always music. We had musicians at our house and my parents loved to dance. It's one of my favorite things. And that was our home. But with him in the house, all the music went away”
2019-10-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Joy Harjo: An American Sunrise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I didn't want to go to his funeral. And but I went to support my mother. And I sat out in the car with his daughter, my stepsister, who is a lot like a mother to me. She was close to my mother's age. And I wanted to know what happened, how he got that way, because something, there's always a story and there's usually a story, some kind of sordid story of abuse. She said that he used to, his mother spoiled him rotten, and that's another kind of abuse. And then his father would drink every weekend, pull out guns, which must have been terrifying and shoot around in the house and the roof, and he would be seen the next morning up on the roof, patching the hulls that his father had shot on the roof.”
2019-10-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Joy Harjo: An American Sunrise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And to have to write, and I felt like I needed to because there were people going through that, there were women going through that, there were native women going through that people going through those moments. And then we carry them with us and they keep us from being who we were meant to be.”
2019-10-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Joy Harjo: An American Sunrise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I try to understand, even though I get angry at him still sometimes, even though I have forgiven him and he's come and talked to me and said he's proud of me.”
2019-10-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Joy Harjo: An American Sunrise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, suddenly, he had four children. I don't know. I've always tried to understand him because I think I carry a lot of him. With”
2019-10-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Joy Harjo: An American Sunrise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I'm still realizing that. Oklahoma was the land we were moved to. It was called Indian Territory. From our lands in the southeast. And it wasn't that long ago. I think a lot of people think history was something that happened a long time ago. But if you count generations, it was just a few grandfathers ago. Quite a few grandmothers ago when we were rounded up and moved illegally from our homelands in the south.”
2019-10-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Joy Harjo: An American Sunrise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well. I always felt bad that I didn't stand up. I've always felt that he would have respected me more if I had stood up and fought him. But then I remember I did try to fight him when he would go at my mom. And that I was too small.”
2019-10-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Joy Harjo: An American Sunrise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I wanted books of poetry, and my mother loved poetry. And she wrote song lyrics. But when I was asked what I wanted, I said, I want books. And my mother gave me this golden book of poetry. Lewis Untemmeier was one of the editors. And I like that all the voices were different.”
2019-10-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Joy Harjo: An American Sunrise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I had to walk through it. And it was around that time I was listening to there were all of these multicultural poetry gatherings and I was listening to poetry of native and it was the first time I heard native poets and I thought well we can write about our lives and they can be in poetry and I love poetry before that but it switched to something that was something I admired from a distance to something that Was something that I could participate in. And so I started writing and I wrote my way through. I wrote my way through that because I found in words were like the materials just like all the different colors of these flowers. That became my palette instead of paint brush or color.”
2019-10-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Joy Harjo: An American Sunrise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was a shock just like being named the US poet laureate because I was into painting and art like my grandmother, my Aunt Lois Arjo, and the idea of speaking in public or even writing my voice down was horrifying. My stepfather stole my journal and started reading passages out. And I decided I would never write I would not write anything down, but I was a student at the University of New Mexico. We were involved in native rights movements and human rights, and there was women's rights. And at the same time, I was starting to, I realized later I was having a breakdown, but I did not have the luxury of having a breakdown because I had two young children. There would have been no one. I had been banished from my home for speaking the truth.”
2019-10-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Joy Harjo: An American Sunrise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I know you could also say I was high strung and difficult. My mother used to call me high strung. But the knowing is that we all have it. It's either our guardian or one of our guardians. Or it lives, it's within all of us. The plants know about it very well. It's like a sensor that we all have right in here that we know when we're going in the right direction, we know when something is off.”
2019-10-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Joy Harjo: An American Sunrise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Babies know I've been at the births of as many of my kids, of course, my grandchildren, and someone always comes in with them. I've seen usually somebody an ancestor comes along with them to help them and I watch how they remember everything. They will look at me like, okay, I remember you and they'll even smile when they're not supposed to be smiling. The babies. Yes, and then you watch. That's what all that sleeping. You know, babies sleep so much because they have to adjust and they start forgetting. And every once in a while they'll remember. And I think when you get older, like a lot of us are, you start that remembering again. It becomes more present.”
2019-10-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Joy Harjo: An American Sunrise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had a rough birth. Yes. Yes. So it wasn't a real easy birth. It was, I kind of fought for two days and they didn't think I would live. So I have that kind of, I know that I struggled, but I can't remember. I can remember being an infant moments of being an infant and remembering that I struggled with even wanting to stay here. Yes, because it seemed everything, I could feel everything, and it's not just me, all children feel everything. Yes, I feel.”
2019-10-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Joy Harjo: An American Sunrise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I see that in poem, every poem has several ancestors behind it, just as every, I think being a teenage mother and I had children early, and then a grandmother in my 30s And now I'm a great grandmother. And seeing that, I watch how not only how we're moving forward, but it's enabled me to understand or see better the ancestral field where they're all, you start to see that it's all one large connected field or like a story matrix that we're all connected and they're there. You see that nobody dies. You see them coming up through the eyes of the children. You see all these gifts being passed on as the history too, which can be difficult to bear”
2019-10-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Joy Harjo: An American Sunrise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first thing that came to mind was its honors. Native people and my ancestors and the ancestors that feed the poetry, that feed, that have kept us alive and thriving through all of it.”
2019-10-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Joy Harjo: An American Sunrise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was told to call a number because they had a quick question. Yeah. And so I called next thing I hear, we're all here, you know, we're all here. We got the speaker phone on and then here's Carla Hayden, the head librarian of the largest library in the world asking me, we want you to be the 23rd U.S. poet laureate.”
2019-10-09 · Oprah's Super Soul · Joy Harjo: An American Sunrise · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source