Joy Harjo and the work of transformation

So Joy Harjo has extended an invitation to readers of her blog (http://joyharjo.blogspot.com/2010/08/your-chance.html) to ask her readers if there is anything we would like her to address in her upcoming memoir, which is about “moments of transformation.”

I am very, very excited by the news that she is working on a memoir, and reminded of the fact that what I love about her poems like “The Power of Never” from her collection A Map to the Next World is that they offer the reader meditations on the power of language, reflections on processes of transformation , and a working through of the complicated relationship between the words we speak and the changes we enact.

The insight that many of Joy Harjo’s poems about the difficult, sometimes painful, and often beautiful work of transformation was brought home to me by a mathematician, Siggy Moore. In addition to being an astute mathematician, Siggy had built a reputation on campus as a gifted dancer, and in a Contemporary Women Writers class, as part of a group presentation on Joy Harjo’s work, Siggy invited all of us in class to stand in a circle and to do a kinesthetic exercise in which we were to act out our interpretation of central images in Joy Harjo’s work.

The group had come up with a list of images – crows, trees, perfume, snakes, flowers – that recur in Harjo’s poetry, and Siggy told us that he was going to choose one of the images, act it out and have the person standing next to him enact her own interpretation of what she had seen, and so on around the circle. As the interpretations were moving from body to body, we were supposed to try to mark the points at which, in our eyes, the image changed.

I never thought that I would be in a position in which I would be standing in front on my own classroom following a student’s directives that would have me take on the role of a non-migratory bird, which the person next to me saw as a tree -- or at least that’s what I think was what she saw. Suffice it to say that for me, the exercise became a profound enactment and reflection of the ways in which individual interpretations and actions can transform our communal vision of this crazy and beautiful world.