PEN interview with award-winning poet and musician Joy Harjo

What’s the most daring thing you’ve ever put into words? Why does it stand out for you?

There was a scene in my one-woman show Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light, that was always excruciating to perform. My protagonist admitted to incest by a stepfather. She tells how it happened, and more importantly, admits that it did happen. Night after night as I acted that character and that scene, I knew the audience thought that I was playing out what happened to me personally. There were autobiographical elements in the play but not everything that happened in the play happened to me. That thought horrified me.

We all have a language and system of images that are our own, that were built into our lexicons from the fragments and musics of places and people we come from. What is a word or image that haunts your writing or that you find yourself revisiting, and what does it mean to you, what or where of your life is it made of?

I go through phases. When I was writing A Map to the Next World, the word monsters was a kind of word-worm. My editor Jill Bialosky questioned me on the word and its obsessive presence. In that collection I was aware of the swirling ruin of colonization as it was going down at the border of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The word world inserts itself too frequently, yet I need a word that will encompass world, that is, all of the worlds we inhabit and how they exist in a continuum.

When I hear the Mvskoke word vnvkeckv, I am taken to that place of great tenderness for the gift of life that characterizes Mvskoke people. I see my elder cousin John picking up a turtle at the side of the road and speaking to her, her mouth red with berries. I hear a prayer in Mvskoke as the sun comes up to the edge of the horizon after we have danced all night. I smell medicine plants.