Soul Talk, Song Language: Conversations with Joy Harjo
Ebook
Intimate and illuminating conversations with one of America's foremost Native artists
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.
"Soul Talk, Song Language gathers, makes, and shares stories that extend our vision of her work in and out of Indian Country." —Susan Bernardin, World Literature Today
"In Soul Talk, Song Language Joy Harjo provides a rare and treasurable acoustic: the sound of an artist and woman thinking for herself, and for us. Never afraid of large questions of purpose and identity. But never remiss either in providing beautiful, small details of craft and commitment. This is an essential book." —Eavan Boland, author of New Collected Poems
"A new book by Joy Harjo is a major event in American literature, and this collection of interviews is no exception. Harjo is a virtual Renaissance woman, the singer who stands at the center of a newly created universe warmed by her voice and her ability to rock n' roll. Harjo's comments on her own work in all its guises will be invaluable to anyone who cherishes poetry, music, oral tradition lore, and Native American history. These interviews bring us inside, to the kitchen table, where the universe is created over and over, by Joy Harjo, poet, fierce and tender singer, who revitalizes creation, makes it personal in her breaths. There is no substitute for the poet's own insights into her multifaceted body of work." —Marilyn Kallet, author of Packing Light: New & Selected Poems
"A fascinating, complex portrait of Joy Harjo, the poet musician, emerges from these conversations. Soul Talk, Song Language focuses on her process of making an organic fusion of the musicality of words with the language of the saxophone. Everyone who loves her performances and her writing will want to read this book, which includes Joy's monthly columns for the Muscogee Nation News." —Leslie Marmon Silko, author of The Turquoise Ledge
- Title: Soul Talk, Song Language: Conversations with Joy Harjo
- Authors: Joy Harjo, Tanaya Winder, Laura Coltelli
- Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
- Print Publication Date: 2022
- Logos Release Date: 2023
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9780819571519, 9780819574183, 081957418X, 0819571512
- Resource ID: LLS:9780819571519
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2024-04-03T19:53:24Z
JOY HARJO became the first Native American to be named Poet Laureate of the United States in 2019. She is a multitalented artist of the Mvskoke/Creek Nation. She is an internationally known poet, performer, writer, and musician. She has published seven books of acclaimed poetry including She Had Some Horses, In Mad Love and War, The Woman Who Fell from the Sky, and How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems. She has produced five award-winning albums of music and poetry including Letter from the End of the Twentieth Century, Winding through the Milky Way, and Red Dreams: A Trail Beyond Tears. She lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
TANAYA WINDER is a poet from the Duckwater Shoshone and Southern Ute nations. She is pursuing an MFA in poetry from University of New Mexico and working on her first collection of poetry.
LAURA COLTELLI is a professor of American literature at the University of Pisa, Italy. Her publications include Winged Words, American Indian Writers Speak, and an edited collection of essays, Reading Leslie Marmon Silko.