In her foreword of three-time U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo’s latest collection, Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light: 50 Poems for 50 Years, Iowa Writer’s Workshop classmate and fellow writer Sandra Cisneros underscores the racial and cultural identity of her longtime Indian friend, an identity that made Harjo vulnerable to dismissal and otherness in the early graduate school years. It is a position assigned to indigenous community members on both sides of the U.S./Mexican border, as indicated by Harjo’s opening remark, “We’re sitting in the back of the room. Just like Indians!” Only when she began to receive well-deserved attention and acclaim for her writing was Harjo finally invited into the in-circles, but Cisneros reports she was still nonplussed and amused by the news of her poet laureateship. As Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light encompasses a five-decade span of her writing career, Harjo’s poems reveal the integral nature of her cultural identity from the onset, as she pays close attention and loyalty to her relationship with nature, Mvskoke community, and folk tales. Her poetry draws from the cadence of oral tradition, which she also integrates in the musical instrumentation of her works. Harjo’s lifeblood as a poet and as an Indian are inextricably linked in this carefully curated collection whose notes that accompany each of the fifty poems serve as a master class for writing and as an intimate portrait of the poet herself.
Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light opens with one of her earliest works, “The Last Song,” which already showcases some of Harjo’s lifelong themes. Oklahoma summers, the land and the air, have bred the speaker as much as the woman who birthed her. In the opening lines the land is met with disdain by an outside speaker. Harjo promises in the last couplet, “oklahoma will be the last song / i’ll ever sing.” In her notes, she ties this poem to an awakening of sorts when poetry became her chosen voice and her position as an indigenous student in colonizing academic circles necessitated a response of resistance to erasure. What began her career and this collection is a profound declaration that the last song of the self will not be the last song of the people.
The 28 pages of endnotes alone demand Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light’s presence on every poet and reader’s bookshelf. Harjo offers insight to her writing approaches, such as the methodical use of syllables to mimic the “seven against eleven” in gambling as an indictment against colonial greed in “Tobacco Origin Story.” She documents the editorial evolution of some poems. We may be surprised to learn that “The Dawn Appears with Butterflies” originally spanned three pages, yet only one stanza of the original version remains; or that her more recent poem “Without” was originally dedicated to a beloved family member who had died of COVID, until the current shape the poem took “had a different place to live.” She writes how she found words to combat systemic racism, such as a colleague who dichotomized poets into “refined” and “uncivilized” categories, assigning her the latter, in her notes on “For Calling the Spirit Back from Wandering the Earth in Its Human Feet”; how she brought to light the erasure of murdered or missing women, the overthrow of the Hawaiian government, George Floyd’s murder, and the ways the pandemic affected the Mvskoke community. She cites the inspiration of family or community histories, as well as specific anecdotal tributes to fellow indigenous women, for many of her poems; and she offers commentaries on how her writing influenced her music and vice versa, as her notes for her celebrated poem “A Postcolonial Tale” details.
For instance, for one of her most memorable poems, “She Had Some Horses,” Harjo describes the writing process, the slant of sunlight that appeared on her desk after her children had left for school, the remembrance of Navajo horse songs which inspired the repetitive structure of the poem. “Rhythm is patterning and design,” she states. “It gives shape and makes a path for intention to ride, even on horseback. It is often rhythm that captures me.” The following poem, “I Give You Back,” echoes the repetitive structure as the speaker rejects the fear that held her captive, fear she likens to colonizers. Interestingly, in her notes, she shares that the inspiration for this poem stemmed from a place far more personal: the struggle of single motherhood and the fight against both an abusive ex and suicidal thoughts. Harjo cites her literary influences and writes, “I wanted to fulfill the promise of this gift of life. I had fought hard for my life at birth, even as I was dying, and I was fighting again. This poem gave me an anchor. It called out fear. Eventually I was free.”
For most collections of a poet’s career, one would expect a trajectory of maturation in writing, how the succession of the curation showcases the author’s growing prowess. Remarkably with Joy Harjo, each of the fifty poems bestow an unflinching command of words, incisive ideas, haunting and dynamic images, thoughtful attention to language and cadence, and declarative statements revealing our nation’s damaging past as well as its present culpable actions. One interesting light that Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light sheds in its expansive overview of her career is Harjo as a romantic. Her notes on several poems nod to “yet another love poem,” a fact that Harjo treats with less mild embarrassment insomuch as a statement of fact. “Maybe there are too many love poems,” she comments, having celebrated in her poems her husband, her mother, her children, cardinals, relatives, friends, and kindred souls, “however, there will be love poems as long as there are two-legged humans ….” Each breathtaking poem showcases a voice critically and introspectively engaged in her surroundings, constant in its deliberate devotion to rhythm and sound, and honest in its compassionate handling of subject and theme—in other words, pure Harjo.
Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light, by Joy Harjo. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, November 2022. 160 pages. $25.00, hardcover.
Shannon Nakai is a poet and reviewer whose work appears in The Cincinnati Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Cortland Review, The Atlanta Review, and elsewhere. She works with the immigration services team of the International Rescue Committee, empowering migrants and asylum seekers in the United States. Find her on shannonnakai.com.
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