Ada Limón is the current Poet Laureate of the United States of America and Joy Harjo was the one before her. As poet laureates, they are the practical and ceremonial keepers of the nation’s voice, and this is an interview with both of them.
We talked about how to write beautifully, find your voice as a writer, and why poetry is so poorly taught in schools. Poets are my very favorite writers to interview because they have the deepest and most sensitive souls.
Some lessons:
Every poem instructs you on how to read it via line breaks.
Poetry is like a song, except that all the music has to be on the page.
For most of our lives, language is merely a utilitarian tool. A blunt object. To be a poet is to reimagine language as an ecstatic, ethereal, and transitory thing. When you do it right, words cast a spell on their audience.
To read poetry is to recommit to language in a way that feels life-giving instead of soul deadening.
People think of writing as a process of creation, but so much of it is actually a process of receiving. It’s a writer’s job to look and listen to what the world is already presenting them, and translate that onto the page.
Your voice as a writer is the essence of who you are, and if you’re struggling to find your voice, it’s because you’re unsure about who you are and what you stand for.
“I didn’t cultivate my voice. My voice cultivated me.” — Joy Harjo
You don’t just read poetry for the meaning of the sentences, but also for the music of the words, the experience of reading them, and the multitude of meanings that good poetry offers.
“If we wanted to make exact / literal logical sense, we wouldn’t be writing poetry.” — Joy Harjo
Sometimes you hear the poem before you start writing it.
Music used to be a full-bodied experience. You wouldn’t just listen to it alone in your ear. The sounds themselves would fill up the entire room, so the room would listen as well.
A writer’s core trick is to remain curious.
What stuck with me from this episode is the loudness of silence. When you first start to sit in silence, the world sounds quiet, as if there’s nothing to draw from. But the more you sit, the more you hear. Nature is loud. The mind is loud. And God’s voice is loud as well.
I was reminded of a trip I made to Patagonia last winter. We were in a large canyon, next to glaciers and waterfalls, when our guide told us to be quiet for five minutes. The more I sat in silence, the more I heard the layers of noise that’d been all around me but I’d drowned out with the human voice. I heard the birds talking, the waterfalls rushing, and glacier rocks crashing into the water below as they melted in the mid-day sun. The quieter it was, the louder it became.
For writers, the question is obvious: What creative ideas aren’t you hearing because you’re too busy and distracted?
I’ve shared the full conversation with Ada Limón and Joy Harjo below. If you’d rather watch it on YouTube or listen on Apple / Spotify, check out the reply tweets.
Transcript
Table of Contents
[09:05] Finding Rhythm in Poetry Writing
[17:53] Inner Voices, Songs, and Timeless Themes
[29:11] Poetry's Building Blocks: Sound to Sentence
[37:19] Patriotic Songs and Emotional Release
[47:12] Acknowledging Grief in Everyday Life
David Perell:
This episode has two guests, not one: Ada Limón and Joy Harjo. They're the two most recent poet laureates for the United States of America. They're like the secretaries of rhythm and rhyme. Poetry is one of the oldest art forms. It goes back to the Greeks with singing and dancing, people memorizing the wisdom of a society.
But now, if you ask the average person about poetry, they'll be like, I don't really read poetry. It sounds too much like school. We talked about that. We also talked about how to use metaphors in your writing, how to put words to emotions that are beyond words, and then also how to listen to nature, God, the divine, whatever it is; how to really listen.
And this conversation, it's what how I write is all about. I love interviewing the poets. If these are the kinds of conversations that you want to hear more of, well, you know what to do. Like the show, follow it, subscribe to the YouTube channel. But also, I'd really appreciate if you shared it with a friend. All right, let's get to it.
I want to start off by talking about listening, because there's something that I sensed in both of your work, that there's this deep practice of listening beyond words that is core to your work.
Ada Limón:
I think so much of writing is receiving. I think we have a misconception that making art is always about making or putting something into the world.
Ada Limón:
But in reality, much of what we do as artists is to receive the world, to look, to listen, all the senses alive and to be present in that listening. And I think that's, at least for me, that's where my best poems come from, is when I'm really listening to the world and what it's offering, as opposed to constantly trying to translate that into my own experience, but to really listen to the experience that is the vibration of the planet.
Joy Harjo:
Yes. I mean, if you look at the Earth, it's all about perspective, and it's all about vibration. Or if you look at the Earth from, say, a spaceship or from, if you're in your dreams and you look at it from way out there, Earth is one being, and it has its own song and its own vibration, but it's made up of everyone's, you know, everyone's, I don't want to say vibration; it's resonance.
You know that everyone has a resonance. It's rhythm. I know when I write, it's about listening. It's always about listening and not imposing myself. I mean, we're who we are. We're all personalities, we're who we are. But it's about listening and translating. Sometimes it's like translation from what you're hearing to using your craft to make it into something, so that the coolest things that will happen in, say, a poem or a song or things that just come through, and then I'll say, thank you. That's really cool.
David Perell:
Is there an experience of listening that stands out for either of you?
Joy Harjo:
It's, you know, I think it helps, like we were talking about trees earlier with Tracy, but, you know, being around trees, being out in the natural world, assists with that. If you're on your phone, if you're constantly interrupted by your addiction to your phone or to the Internet, that breaks up, that breaks up the resonance.
Now, I like my dreams. I've been a kind of dreamer my whole life, and when my dreams, and they're usually long, you know, they're longer, they have a certain kind of quality that's a lot like poetry, that's a lot like the creative process. But when my dreams started flipping quickly by like videos, like reels or TikToks, I knew that was the end of that for me because, you know, I did not want, it was interfering with my thought. It was interfering with my thought process and lengthy thought process.
David Perell:
So your dreams, you're saying, begin to change based on the as a response to the media you were consuming?
Joy Harjo:
And the kinds of media, when things are quick, it's like if you read a novel, a poem, or short story, or you look at a painting, or you paint or listen to music. We used to lay around and listen to LPs and stuff, and you were more immersed in the music. It would be in the room. It wouldn't be just in your ear solo, but it would be in the room, so the room is listening, too. Everybody's listening.
So then what happens? Our experience of the world has shifted because of this interference. Yes, it's cool. Yes, you can talk to people and get information all over the world any time of day, but what is your relationship? You have no relationship. It's like when you come back to writing or to poetry, it's a different kind of listening in which it's interactive.
I mean, there's listening, but I think even listening is interactive, even as you're quiet. But I'm thinking as I go because I hadn't thought of that. It's interacting. What are you interacting with?
You know, there are resonances when you start to listen. That's when you can hear the plants. That's when you can hear the rocks. That's when you can hear what's going on in the beneath the beneath. Yeah, that's my short answer.
Ada Limón:
I completely co-sign that.
David Perell:
Yeah, what about it?
Ada Limón:
For me, it feels like there's so much about we don't have a lot of silence in the world. And so when I am writing poems or writing, making something, I can't listen to music when I do it because I love music, but I will be taken away by it. So I have to listen to my own music or the music that is present.
At one moment, I was writing something and I was working on a poem and it was a longer poem, which is always fun when that happens, and you know it's going to be long and you start to get a different kind of music that is patient.
I went downstairs to get tea and I came back upstairs, and I thought, what was I just listening to? And I really thought, was it a podcast? Was it? And then I realized it was my own poem. It was the poem that I had been listening to, but the sound was so loud in my own body that it felt like it was coming from outside. And so when I sat back down, I was like, oh, this is what I was listening to.
Joy Harjo:
Oh man, cool.
Ada Limón:
And that was when I recognized that listening was so intricate and so important to my own art-making process.
Joy Harjo:
You know, I can't listen to write now. I've done some things writing to music. I mean, I write music too, and I'm a musician.
David Perell:
Yeah, but I like listening to your flute music.
Joy Harjo:
Writing a song is different. I have to be on a panel next week in Nashville. It's much different from writing poetry, and if I'm writing poetry or even prose, I can't listen. I get taken away by the music.
It always intrigues me because Leslie Silko, a novelist—she's also a poet, short story writer—she listens to music loud, and it builds. It's a kind of wall. It makes a wall of sound behind what she can write.
David Perell:
How about rhythm in writing? Like with you, Ada, I'm thinking like the rhythm of a horse, like a horse gallop, and with you, like the rhythm of sound and music.
Ada Limón:
I think that comes through the poem itself, and sometimes you hear the poem before you start writing it. There can be a phrase, or there's something that happens that alerts you to a different kind of music that is thrilling or true. You think, oh, this sound is interesting to me, and I want to figure that out.
For me, there's a moment in which the poem makes a rhythm. I can't tell if I've translated a rhythm that I've heard into the poem, or if the poem has made it on its own, and I then have teased it out or amplified it, but I'm not always sure.
[09:05] Finding Rhythm in Poetry Writing
Joy Harjo:
No, rhythm is crucial. It's everything.
Ada Limón:
Yeah.
Joy Harjo:
It's behind everything. Your organs, I mean, every organ and even every cell, has, you know, it's held together by rhythm. We're held together by rhythm.
The heart goes, loses its rhythm. That's the end of it. But that rhythm runs through the organs, all of the systems in your body, all the earth systems, the rocks.
It just depends on how attuned your perception is. I think poets, especially when it comes to language over any of the other word literary arts are especially attuned, I think.
To especially attuned. I mean some writers too, some writers who are very not literary. There's just some, you know, that's just a kind of attunement to it.
There are people who take care of plants who are like that. I mean, there are people who can listen to an engine. You know, I came up with a father and brothers who were mechanics and stuff.
You can listen to an engine and hear it run. I have a little bit of that, and I can tell what's wrong. It's kind of a rhythm thing.
Ada Limón:
I think that goes back to silence too, in that people think we're looking for silence, but really you're looking to hear what's already happening, what's alive and what's moving in the world.
I think that silence can feel like it's whitewashing. That it's supposed to be. But really it's about hearing the music that is constantly alive in the world.
David Perell:
Right, as if silence is depth, not nothingness.
Joy Harjo:
It's a lie. We're a living being. I just had a deja vu moment.
Joy Harjo:
As before, when you were saying.
David Perell:
I had this moment in Patagonia last winter. We went out for a hike, and we were basically in this giant canyon. Giant canyon. Magnificent.
Joy Harjo:
Argentina or Arizona?
David Perell:
In Argentina. So we're out there, and the guy goes, "Hey, we're gonna sit in silence for a few minutes."
What was interesting to your point about the depth is when you start sitting in silence, the first thing that pops in your mind is, it's quiet. Then you sit, and you sit, and you sit, and you're like, "Whoa, it is loud."
There's the eagles chirping. There's the waterfalls falling. There's the glacier snow melting and falling into the rocks. Actually, the silence was super loud. I was like, "Whoa, this is crazy."
Ada Limón:
People don't recognize that. When I was in high school, I was so attuned to noise that I could hide anything with my hair, so I would not put in headphones. I would put in earplugs just to dampen it so that I could move through society because I was so sensitive to the loudness of teenage people.
I was 15, and it was just so loud. I had to dampen it a little bit. I think it's because I am attuned to the music of the world.
Joy Harjo:
I get that. I always like to spend a lot of time alone, even as a little kid, even when I was really, really small, just for sanity.
Ada Limón:
That's the best part about being a poet.
Ada Limón:
I mean, you make music, which often involves other people, which is beautiful. But really, one of the things that I love about being a poet is that you can do it alone.
Joy Harjo:
I like that too. I spend a lot of time alone.
David Perell:
How have you thought about cultivating your voice? When I was younger, I felt like I didn't have a voice of sorts. I don't want to put words into your mouth. But then now it seems like that's something you've really cultivated, both in music and in writing. How did you go about doing that?
Joy Harjo:
I don't think I went about cultivating my voice. Maybe my voice cultivated me because I feel like it's the same voice. Whether it's kind of timeless, whether it's the saxophone or the speaking or singing, it's the same voice. I guess my perception or experience of it shifts with experiences and age.
I know a lot of young students when I taught were looking for their voice, and I said, "It's right there. Your voice is there." I guess what they're really trying to say is, "How do I find what's unique? How do I find what's unique to me, or my own expression? How do I develop that?"
David Perell:
And what do you tell them?
Joy Harjo:
Well, you just learn. You get to know yourself, which means getting to know the world at the same time, always questioning and investigating with curiosity the world, why you think a certain way, what your belief systems are made of.
Ada Limón:
Where your mind travels to.
Joy Harjo:
Where it likes to go.
Ada Limón:
Where it obsesses, where it feels safest.
Ada Limón:
All of those things. Voice is really the underneath thing. It's the thing that's always been us. It's weird because I'm not super comfortable with the word "soul," but it is in that realm.
The ethereal voice that we talk about in poetry really is the usness, the isness of this material body at this time and space. To know it is to not just listen to the world, but to listen to the entity that is yourself and to not censor it. Don't think about what is appropriate for this moment, or what things have been taught to me as the way someone should move into the world.
When I'm alone and I'm quiet, silent and listening, what are the words that come up? I'm always interested in that. If I've been alone for a long time, what are the words that come up? Sometimes it's just, "I'm sorry," and I think, "Who am I apologizing to?" Sometimes it's just, "Thank you." And sometimes it's just, "I want to sing." Songs and music come back. Not music that I know or songs that I know, but songs that exist somewhere in me. I think that's part of it; it's not necessarily a voice.
Joy Harjo:
Some voices fit an age, and some don't. I'm always aware that I don't want my voice or my theme to be caught in a particular fashion of the times. And yet there are voices or people who are part of that's their place, that's what they do.
I just know that's not where mine fits. I've tried to do that, and it doesn't work. It gets harder when so much of what you see in the contemporary poetry world is so youth-focused and focused on trends. Not always, but even poetry can get really focused on trends, groups, ideas, certain theoretical notions, which is another whole realm. I don't deal with that.
I mean, I always wrote the way I wrote, which didn't always make it easy to be seen or understood. But that was just where I was doing what I needed to do.
[17:53] Inner Voices, Songs, and Timeless Themes
Ada Limón:
You were speaking back and are speaking back to a longer period of time.
Joy Harjo:
Clock time is so recent.
Ada Limón:
I know.
Joy Harjo:
It's so small.
Ada Limón:
Yeah.
Joy Harjo:
That's what I tell, especially young native writers or natives. I say, "Think about it this way."
It seems like we always have to deal with colonization and history, but Columbus didn't even land in North America. If you look at the time versus eternal time and how long our people have been here and had our culture, this time is like you can't even see between. It's like that. It's here, but it will go away because we've been here much longer, and we will be here after.
Ada Limón:
Yeah.
Joy Harjo:
And we know that.
Ada Limón:
Yeah.
Joy Harjo:
I think that's something tricky, you know.
Ada Limón:
Because everything, when you have that view—and I can have it for moments, and then it goes away.
Joy Harjo:
Yeah, true.
Ada Limón:
You know, I have this moment and I feel more comfortable in it.
Joy Harjo:
I think that's true for peoples all over the world too, because this kind of clock time or industrialization—a lot of that came about. It was certainly developed intensely around the time of the Industrial Revolution and so on. I mean, we've had clocks that measure the sun.
Ada Limón:
Yeah.
Joy Harjo:
But we haven't, you know, we're so bound by it.
David Perell One thing that's nice with clock time is the time of day really influences it.
I've been thinking a lot about how there's a bigger difference between 2:28 on a Tuesday and 2:30, and a bigger difference in those times between 2:00am and 5:00am on a Saturday night. There's three hours, but somehow the time goes away. But if it's 2:28 versus 2:30 on a Tuesday, I need to know what time it is. Those are completely different states. But if I'm just with my buddies on a Saturday night, it's way too late. Who cares?
Ada Limón:
And yet you can look at 2:28 and be like, "I've got two minutes to do something before 2:30 strikes."
David Perell:
Yeah.
Ada Limón:
And it has to accomplish something on my list.
David Perell:
It's hard to get that deep, cultivated, focused presence.
Ada Limón:
Yeah. Yeah.
Ada Limón:
To lose track of time is such a gift, and difficult.
Joy Harjo:
Yeah, because of all of this Internet and so on. All of these things are meant to make our lives easier, like the cell phone. They eat time, and they eat up our time.
David Perell:
You're talking about the producer side of what cell phones have done. Also, from the consumer side, it completely changes our relationship with poetry. Because when I read a poem the first time every time, I don't get it.
Then I have to come back to it, and I have to come back to it.
It's not just reading and rereading, but listening and the multimodal nature of poetry. So from a consumer perspective, it's so hard to have that sustained attention so that we can come to appreciate a poem.
Ada Limón:
Poetry takes repetition, I think.
Joy Harjo:
For.
Ada Limón:
I mean, I'm someone who reads a lot of poetry, and we've devoted our lives to poetry. Still to this day, I can read a poem and wonder about it, and then read it again and wonder more deeply about it, and then read it again and it opens up more. It's the way you listen to a song over and over again.
That song shifts, and how you feel on a certain day shifts that song. The way you feel in your body or what happened to you then shifts that song.
There are times where I've been really resistant to poems that I thought, "I'm not a big fan of John Ashbery," and I have friends that would always say, "You're going to like him." And I'm like, "I just don't."
Recently, or in the last 10 years, I was revisiting a lot of his work and just loving it. Your own body shifts and you think, "This is the time for this poem." Some of it was taking the time because I didn't have the patience for the abundance of his work.
Joy Harjo:
It's like listening to jazz.That's what I love about jazz is the places you can go as a performer. I love to improv, and it's the places you can go. Especially if you're improving, you have to listen and be alert. It works best the more you have in your pocket, the more skill, the more craft you have, because you get to.
Ada Limón:
A lot of places.
Joy Harjo:
That's like listening to John Ashbery at this point. You have more craft under you, so you can hear more what he's doing.
Ada Limón:
Yeah.
Joy Harjo:
Which is similar to jazz. His poetry is similar to how some jazz works, like a jazz of words in the way he moves with phrasing.
Ada Limón:
Yeah.
Ada Limón:
And I think I was impatient.
Joy Harjo:
I get impatient with him, but still.
Ada Limón:
And so I think that that's something that we lose a little bit when we don't have the book in front of us or the poem in front of us. Instead, we think, oh, we just look at it on our phone really quick and see if we understand this poem.
David Perell:
So when you say that you read poetry, what do you do? Do you just flip through them? Are you like, oh, I'm going to do this one tonight? I must force myself 20 minutes. How does that actually work? How does a poet read a poem?
Ada Limón:
Isn't that funny that that's a question?
Joy Harjo:
Yeah.
Ada Limón:
It's true, though.
Ada Limón:
I have a stack. I have a library of books that I'm constantly pulling out. Sometimes I just need a certain poet, and sometimes I don't. Sometimes I go, this is not what I need right now. And I put it back, and then I pick something else up.
Joy Harjo:
Same thing. It's very similar.
Ada Limón:
And then sometimes I just will keep that stack on my desk, and then sort of when I feel like I've moved on, I need to put those back, but then they come back in rotation, you know, and then sometimes it's new work and beautiful. There are so many amazing contemporary poets.
Joy Harjo:
Oh, yeah, there are.
Ada Limón:
I'm constantly gobbling up their new work and all of that. But I'm still a book person. I like to read the actual book.
Joy Harjo:
Yeah, I like the books.
David Perell:
I'm always surprised when I'm prepping for these interviews. I go to bookstores and I look around and the poetry section's always small, and I'm like, man, is poetry dying in text a bit? And then I go on YouTube and the poetry readings on YouTube are just so popular. People love listening to poetry.
But it's funny, because I think back to school, and it was like, read this poem. What does it mean? Break it down.
Ada Limón:
As if poetry had an answer, right? It's as if life had an answer.
Joy Harjo:
That's what I always tell students. I said, if in elementary school, the teachers always hated the poetry time, but the poetry unit, if they would have said, just listen to this poem the way you listen to a song, this is song on paper, just listen to it like that.
Now, what do you hear? And now listen to it again, just like you would. You get more out of listening to. I always use Hotel California. Who knows what that means, and who cares? It's really about the experience, the experience of it. Because if we wanted to make exact, literal logic sense, we wouldn't be writing poetry.
Ada Limón:
You don't read poetry to get the meaning of the sentence. You read poetry for the music and for the experience and for the multitude of meanings that it offers, that the line break offers.
Joy Harjo:
It gets back to rhythm and sound sense and open sounds. At the end of a phrase, phrasing a sentence is a phrase. Like, if you play four bars of something, four bars is kind of the standard in songwriting, too. It's like four bars, and you get to the end of that.
If the last syllable is open, that leads in kind of a certain shape. Or if it's percussive and ends, if there's three syllables, it's all mathematical. There's a way, but there's just something you'll hear once you start breaking down listening to songs, like songwriters like Rosanne Cash, or other songwriters and poets. Everybody's got their own signature, their own feel around things like that.
Joy Harjo:
And then you watch over a lifetime of, like you said, like Emily Dickinson, and I don't know what you've discovered about her changing, as I haven't studied her enough to watch that. But it's interesting over a long period of a poet or a songwriter or a singer to watch how usually there are themes set into place, things that we engage with.
Ada Limón:
I think that everyone has a relationship with the sentence or syntax in a different way, and that changes as people age, too. But when we think about a poem, one of its signature things—it's not always the case with a prose poem—is that the sentence and the line are interacting so that the line is breaking in a different way. The line breaks the sentence.
We start with the really small units. We start with the sound, we start with syllables, then we go to the word, then we go to the clause, and then we go to the line break, and then we go to the sentence. We really start in these very small units.
It's unlike if you're working in prose where you just think, "Okay, I'm working. The sentence is the unit." But we really begin in the sound even before we get to the syllable.
You're constantly having a different relationship with the sentence. When people say, "Well, poems can have sentences," sure, but the elemental quality of it is different than working just with a sentence.
[29:11] Poetry's Building Blocks: Sound to Sentence
David Perell:
What I'm hearing you say is that there's an aesthetic quality beyond the words. So, when you listen to a poem, there's the musicality. When you read the poem, the aesthetic experience has to do with the line break and the way it looks.
Ada Limón:
It's the same. They're united. The line break tells you how to read the poem.
Joy Harjo:
Which are the pauses or the silences.
Ada Limón:
Those are the instructions on how to read the poem. So the line break is going to tell you something. The clause, and whether or not you're using punctuation, is going to tell you something. The sentence will tell you something. All of those things will tell you how to read the poem.
The music, Joy has said this before, but it's like a song, except all the music has to be on the page.
Joy Harjo:
Right.
Ada Limón:
Everything is there. It's not waiting for music to join it. It's not waiting for the percussion to come in. The percussion has to be the periods or the ellipses or whatever it is, or the caesuras.
Joy Harjo:
That's the rhythm section.
Ada Limón:
Exactly.
Joy Harjo:
Yeah.
Ada Limón:
The repetition, often the bass line. So the way a poem is made is also the way the poem tells you how to read it.
David Perell:
How do singing and dancing factor into all this? Poetry is as old as it gets, but it wasn't delivered just in words on a page. It was spoken, it was danced out.
Joy Harjo:
Hula is a good example. I lived in Hawaii over 11 years, and I trained some in hula, mostly in canoe racing. But it's poetry. The root of it is poetry, and there's music.
It's true with cultures all over the world. It's dance. It's images. They're dancing poetry. Poetry's connected to land, places in the Earth. You could have star patterns in it. There's all kinds of things that could go in there, but you're dancing it, you're also singing it. It's all there.
You can find that in a lot of the classics and indigenous cultures all over the world: that the music and the poetry and the dance are all part of each other. They're all linked.
Ada Limón:
It's also a way of remembering and honoring a moment in time or honoring somebody.
Joy Harjo:
Elegies, love poems, or reinforcing a template of cultural philosophical understanding.
David Perell:
In what way?
Joy Harjo:
How do we know who we are in a culture? Human beings? It's our arts, it's our designs, it's in our literature, whether it's oral literature or literature that's been written down.
It's in our symbols, it's in the story structures that tell us who we are and why we're here and how we got here and where we're going. That's all part of it.
Ada Limón:
Yeah.
Ada Limón:
And it feels, you know, the embodiment of a poem. Like when someone reads a poem, to hear it out loud is my favorite part. I love to go to poetry readings. I love to listen to someone read their poems. It's a really moving experience.
It feels to me that when people like poetry but they've never heard it out loud, I think, "No, no, no, you need to hear it." You need to experience in a sensorial way. I think about even when you have ASL poets that are deaf and it's the embodiment of the poem in ASL. So the sign language is part of that embodiment.
Joy Harjo:
Yeah.
Ada Limón:
There is something to be said for not just the words on the page, but that it becomes a fully expressed thing in the body.
Joy Harjo:
There was somebody in my signing line who came up and said her husband is a medical doctor and teaches somewhere in the medical field. He said he had never really understood why people like poetry, so she dragged him to our event.
After hearing us read our poems, he said, "I get it. I get it now. I get it." He was really excited and turned on. He said, "I get it."
Ada Limón:
That's great.
Ada Limón:
Sometimes people need to have that experience.
David Perell:
It's crazy because I've memorized enough poems that I'll sometimes recite them. If I'm at dinner with somebody, it's funny because we'll be chatting, blah, blah, blah, and they're in a completely normal state. Then I'll go into poetry mode.
The tenor of my voice doesn't change that much, but the quality of the words does. It's almost like they're arrested by the words. It's like they've been captured. You can see it in their eyes; they light up. All of a sudden, they're like they're with you. It's this experience of looking at someone as they have a thought in their head: "Whoa, I didn't know language could do that. I didn't know it had that power to cast a spell on me that fast."
Joy Harjo:
I remember the first time I went out of the country for a poetry event in Amsterdam in the late 70s. One of the readings was by the dub poet Lynton Kwesi Johnson from Jamaica.
He didn't have his band; he was just reading his poetry. We were all moving like reggae, just with the cadence of his voice and what he was saying and how he was saying it. Pretty soon we were all dancing. He wasn't singing it, it was just the rhythm of the words and the way he followed it. Was it the rhythm of the music, or did it have to do with the ocean there? It really affected me to hear him.
Ada Limón:
Yeah.
Ada Limón:
Sometimes people will just throw a poetry quote out there, and even then I get it, even just a small line. The Emily Dickinson poem that keeps coming to me is, "Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." This idea...
Joy Harjo:
It just throws you into deep space immediately.
Ada Limón:
Immediately.
David Perell:
I've had that experience. A lot of times at baseball games, they'll play America the Beautiful and God Bless America in the seventh inning. It just completely moves me. "From sea to shining sea. God bless America, land that I love. Stand beside her and guide her."
Some of my favorite moments as a kid. I was at the Yankees game two weeks ago, and those words just melt me. It's beyond control; you lose your capacity for control when the words are really pure and well written. You're kind of like, "All right, let's go for the ride. I'm no longer in control."
[37:19] Patriotic Songs and Emotional Release
Ada Limón:
We spend so much time in our lives with language as a utilitarian tool.
David Perell:
Yes, exactly.
Ada Limón:
And it becomes a blunt object.
And to reimagine it as an ecstatic, ethereal, transitory thing that occurs in a moment more like spell or magic.
Joy Harjo:
You can't do that in texting, though. I've heard there are texting novels and this and that, and people are going to do whatever, but usually, texting doesn't lend itself naturally or easily to metaphor.
David Perell:
Why metaphor? Why do you focus on that word? Why does it hold so much gravity for you?
Joy Harjo:
Poetry is essentially metaphor. If you think about poetry as a whole, well, this is not as what it seems, not as it seems, or it's like.
It could be like assimilating. Poetry is like the real world, but it's this, or it's this, and it's also this.
And here's one contradiction, and here's one, and yet we can hold it all right here.
Usually, text messages are abbreviated. I've noticed several of the younger generation who are very well educated who still don't punctuate, or they don't always capitalize.
I noticed that with people of my daughter's age too, and it's because they've been texting. They text or even email.
When email was more like a lot of people are more cryptic in that or pared down when they send emails. They don't write regular sentences.
Ada Limón:
It's that sense of, again, that idea of, "I'm just trying to get something across."
Joy Harjo:
Instead of thinking about the meaning, it's just literal. It's clock-time writing.
Ada Limón:
Exactly.
Joy Harjo:
Yeah, it's clock-time writing. It's like, "Okay, I just want to tell you to meet me here, and let's do this," and it's focused on what we're going to do, what we need to buy, where are you going, just those like you said, the ordinary everyday.
Ada Limón:
That's what's so interesting about hearing a poem: it is the language we use sometimes. It doesn't even have to have any advanced vocabulary. Poets have exceptional vocabularies, but it could just be using the words that we use all the time.
And yet, because of its syntax, because of its rhythm, because of its cadence, because of the images it's building, because of its extreme clarity or its mystery, it shifts, and it's a beautiful reminder that language can be used for good.
David Perell:
I was on a walk with a friend. It was a tense conversation. I was really stressed out and anxious. We'd been on a walk for like 35 minutes in this park, a beautiful park.
We were getting to the very end, and this poem from William Blake just popped into my head. It goes, "To see the world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wildflower, to hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour."
I swear my eyes had been closed, my brain had been off, and all of a sudden the colors became like a Monet painting. And the world just became alive for me. To your point, all of those words are normal words that everyone knows, but they've been rearranged in a fashion. Infinity, eternity, palm of your hand, wildflower, just perfectly arranged where now it's like an awakening, once it pops.
Joy Harjo:
Into your mind, which is metaphor.
Ada Limón:
And we need that so much: those moments where we can recommit to language in a way that feels life-giving, as opposed to soul-deadening.
Joy Harjo:
I won't even go into chat, AI, and all that. That's another hole.
David Perell:
The words that have been popping through my head have been lushness and mystery. How do you create language that's lush? I think of a garden or a spring or an oasis, but also mystery that once you read a poem, memorize a poem, that's actually the beginning. It's an invitation to a deeper relationship that lives inside of you, that grows with you. A good poem often has both of those things.
Ada Limón:
I think that there's so much that it's not always about creating an abundance, but it is, at least for me, recognizing the strangeness of reality or being in wonderment at the world. I'm curious. That's how we live, how we move.
Joy Harjo:
That's the trick: to remain curious.
Joy Harjo:
And also to know where you've been and where you're going. I was thinking today, and I was reading that new poem, Shapeshifter, and I thought I owe so much of this to Galway Canal, because the Doubt Flowers, I think that came out of his book, the Book of Nightmares. I was thinking that's where I got that from after I read it. I was thinking about his poem The Bear, which was a kind of shape-shifting poem.
Ada Limón:
And tracking.
Joy Harjo:
Yeah, and tracking. Thank you.
Ada Limón:
That's so interesting, because when we were talking earlier, I started thinking about Galway Kinnell's poem Prayer. "Whatever happens, whatever what is, is is what I want. Only that, but that."
I was thinking of all the words when I was thinking of all that's all language that we know. He's even using three "is"es. "Whatever happens, whatever what is, is is what I want." It's a different way of looking at that phrasing.
David Perell:
I love that example because I'm drawn to that.
David Perell:
I'm like, wait, say that again. Say that again. And also I'm like, what does that mean? It's like a dog on a leash. I'm pulled towards that.
Joy Harjo:
And yet an editor would tell you, no, you can't do that, because the shapeshifter is going to be in the New Yorker at some point. And then they had a question about the way I had phrased something, and they said, shouldn't this word go here?
Ada Limón:
Yes. Thank you.
Joy Harjo:
I said, no, this is sound sense, because it flattens the sentence out. I can't remember, there were two words. Grammatically, usually you would have it the other way, but it has a sound sense that works with the perception of the deer.
Joy Harjo:
And they were fine. Okay, we get it.
Ada Limón:
It's very true.
Ada Limón:
Often the poetry editors and the editors of any magazine, they're copy editors and they're wonderful, and they do great work, but poetry sometimes resists the same kind of copy editing.
Joy Harjo:
That goes against that.
David Perell:
Part of what being a writer is, and probably especially a poet, is the sense of being willing to fall into an emotion. It's like a trust fall into an emotion, and to just keep falling and falling and falling and to experience it at its depth, and then try to, at some capacity, put that into words so that other people can experience the depth of emotion.
Joy Harjo:
I just got a sense of. You know, they have those retreats they take people on so they learn how to trust, where they have to drop. You could do that for poets. You learn how to trust and how to drop into eternity.
Ada Limón:
I feel like it's not always just a trust fall. You're not just falling into it, but sometimes it's just realizing you are in it.
Joy Harjo:
That's true. We're all in it right now.
Ada Limón:
There's a way in which we move through the world and someone says, "How are you?" And we say, "Fine." That's the contract.
Ada Limón:
Then there's a way that when you are alone, whether you have a meditation practice or whether it's walking in the woods or whether it's just in silence on the subway car or in an office, where you will think, "What is happening to me?" You will recognize what you are grieving, that it is there, and that it is part of you, and that you've been carrying it. So it's not about necessarily turning it on and letting it go, but recognizing that it's there.
[47:12] Acknowledging Grief in Everyday Life
David Perell:
Awareness, that was wonderful.
Joy Harjo:
That's a good way to end.
David Perell:
It was great to meet you both. Thank you.
