Inspired Lines: Reading Joy Harjo's Prose Poems

Abstract

Featuring work in verse lines as well as poems printed in block paragraphs, Joy Harjo's In Mad Love and War marks an important turn in the development of Harjo's poetic voice. Explaining her composing the group, Harjo notes the power of narration here weighs heavily against the demands of poetics. [S]tory, she judges, started to take precedent (Smith 26). Moving away from what one critic refers to as the cumulative power of parallel catalogue found in the vertical listing of lines of her earlier poems (Wiget 191), significant portions of Harjo's work in this collection arrive printed in prose-like arrays that reinforce for the reader's eye their narrative spirit. Harjo, critic Dan Bellm observes, edges out from her earlier traditional song-like forms. [O]n the surface, he adds, her new poems, as a result, may appear less 'Indian' (78). Directly related to this shift in format, critics found in the Mad Love poems a growing sense of what Leslie Ullman calls urgency. Harjo, she writes, is a storyteller whose tales resurrect memory, myth, and private struggles that have been overlooked, and who thus restores vitality to the [Indian] culture at large (180). These new, narrative-leaning poems capture moments when the speaker's mind seems especially alive with connections. Time and again, Ullman notes, Harjo's language enacts quicksilver darts and leaps of association (181). Margaret Randall can judge, in like spirit, that there is more wildness in construction and imagery to be found in the new work than in, for example, Harjo's She Had Some Horses (18). A primary source of the new group's energetic tone is, I believe, Harjo's increased use of prose-like poetic forms.