In the text just preceding the poem “We Were There When Jazz Was Invented” from the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlisted collection Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings, Joy Harjo declares “All the stories in the earth’s mind are connected.” In the opening two stanzas, Harjo weaves subtle connections illustrating this contention.
The full text of…
In the text just preceding the poem “We Were There When Jazz Was Invented” from the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlisted collection Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings, Joy Harjo declares “All the stories in the earth’s mind are connected.” In the opening two stanzas, Harjo weaves subtle connections illustrating this contention.
The full text of that piece that perhaps introduces “We Were There When Jazz Was Invented”, or perhaps is a thoughtful interlude between this and the previous poem in the collection, reads:
Each human is a complex, contradictory story. Some stories within us have been unfolding for years, others are trembling with fresh life as they peek above the horizon. Each is a zigzag of emotional design and ancestral architecture. All the stories in the earth’s mind are connected.
Bearing in mind that
“Some stories within us have been unfolding for years”
it’s interesting that the narrator of this poem measures out her life so far as “19,404 midnights” instead of 53 years. Even using such a granular unit of measurement, it’s usually “days”, not the intriguing “midnights” … That echoes and connects to the reference in the second stanza …
“All night,
beyond midnight, back
Up into the sky, holy.”
Some of the narrator’s living, however you mark it off, has been spent
“in the quaver of
fish dreams”
… connected hauntingly in the second stanza to
“If I dream
It all back then I reconstruct that song buried in the muscle
of urgency.”
The “fish dreams” also reverberate again in the image of bears catching “salmon in their teeth”. “What a bear” – what kind is she referring to in the first stanza? – connects to the fishing bears in the second stanza.
The connections continue to flow – fascinatingly, musically, enigmatically – throughout the rest of the poem, which you can enjoy in either Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings or the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize anthology.
