In this Book
- Soul Talk, Song Language: Conversations with Joy Harjo
- Book
- 2012
- Published by: Wesleyan University Press
Joy Harjo is a "poet-healer-philosopher-saxophonist," and one of the most powerful Native American voices of her generation. She has spent the past two decades exploring her place in poetry, music, dance/performance, and art. Soul Talk, Song Language gathers together in one complete collection many of these explorations and conversations. Through an eclectic assortment of media, including personal essays, interviews, and newspaper columns, Harjo reflects upon the nuances and development of her art, the importance of her origins, and the arduous reconstructions of the tribal past, as well as the dramatic confrontation between Native American and Anglo civilizations. Harjo takes us on a journey into her identity as a woman and an artist, poised between poetry and music, encompassing tribal heritage and reassessments and comparisons with the American cultural patrimony. She presents herself in an exquisitely literary context that is rooted in ritual and ceremony and veers over the edge where language becomes music.
Table of Contents
- Foreword: A Carrier of Memory
- pp. ix-xv
- Acknowledgments
- p. xvii
- I. Interviews
- Becoming the Thing Itself
- pp. 3-26
- The Thirst for Artistic Brilliance
- pp. 38-45
- Writing, Constructing the Next World
- pp. 50-53
- You Might as Well Dance
- pp. 68-77
- The Craft of Soul Talk
- pp. 78-80
- II. Columns by Joy Harjo
- Global Roots
- pp. 87-89
- Censorship and the Power of Images
- pp. 93-96
- It’s Difficult Enough to Be Human
- pp. 97-100
- Dehumanization Flatlines
- pp. 101-103
- We Are Story Gatherers
- pp. 104-105
- We Are the Earth
- pp. 106-107
- A Way to Speak Their Souls
- pp. 108-109
- Energy of the Transaction
- pp. 110-111
- Watching the World Shift
- pp. 112-113
- III. The Last Word: Prose Pieces by Joy Harjo
- Preface for She Had Some Horses
- pp. 121-122
- The Art of Resistance
- pp. 123-126
- In Honor of Patricia Grace
- pp. 129-132
- I Used to Think a Poem Could Become a Flower
- pp. 133-134
- Talking with the Sun
- pp. 135-136