Women Musicians

"(In the dedication to In Mad Love and War you affirm that "the erotic belongs in the poetry, as in the self." Can you elaborate?) It has taken me years to divest myself of Christian guilt, the Puritan cloud that provides the base for culture in this country... or at least to recognize the twists and turns of that illogic in my own sensibility. In that framework the body is seen as an evil thing and is separate from spirit. The body and spirit are not separate. Nor is that construct any different in the place from which I write poetry. There is no separation. (1993)"

"I'm already tired of hearing about this madman Columbus and discovery. Yet, this quincentenary is important because crucial attention is being paid to the indigenous peoples of this america. I say there never was an "encounter." To have an encounter would be quite a groundbreaking event! That would require Euro-Americans and Europeans to meet native peoples with respect. I don't know that it's ever been done. There was always a hidden agenda, a hierarchy in which the lives of native peoples were counted as worthless, as were the cultures. What a tremendous loss for everyone! (1992)"

"I truly feel there is a new language coming about-look at the work of Meridel LeSueur, Sharon Doubiago, Linda Hogan, Alice Walker - it's coming from the women. Something has to be turned around. (1990)"

"I want to have some effect in the world; I want my poetry to be useful in a native context as it traditionally has been. In a native context art was not just something beautiful to put up on the wall and look at; it was created in the context of its usefulness for the people. (what do you hope your poems do?) JH: I hope that on some level they can transform hatred into love. Maybe that's being too idealistic; but I know that language is alive and living, so I hope that in some small way my poems can transform hatred into love."

"Poetry has given me a voice, a way to speak, and it has certainly enriched my vision so that I can see more clearly."

"Many people assume that all Indian people lived a long time ago in a certain in a certain way and wore certain clothes, so if you don't look like that now, you're not really Indian people; but all cultures change. In our case, the change has certainly been abrupt and shocking, and we have had to a struggle to maintain the heritage within that terrible upheaval...Maybe all artists now must struggle to understand the connections between the world of heritage and the present world. Those worlds certainly do converge and maybe poems are points of convergence or, in some sense, paintings of that convergence. Maybe the artist has always worked to find those connections, but I think the struggle is especially important in these difficult times when the illusion of separation among peoples has become so clear...*For me the illusion is that we're separate. That's the illusion."

"I think the natural movement of love is an opening, a place that makes connections...You have to be open in that way to write a poem that really works, and I think there's always love involved in the act of creation."

"There's an incredible relationship of guilt between native people and white Americans. It's an odd relationship. Many white Americans think native people have special spiritual knowledge or know certain tricks. Certainly there are some people who are more in touch with those things than others, but we all have prayer. Prayer was not just designated to native people, and there are no special spiritual qualities designated for native people. Of course, at one point we were all tribal people. Europeans were tribal people; all around the world the roots of all human beings were tribal."

"In the beginning when I was writing poetry, a poem had definite limits--I started out knowing definitely what I wanted to begin and end with, or one particular image that I wanted to stay with. Now I feel that my poems have become travels into that other space."

"I don't see time as linear. I don't see things as beginning and ending. A lot of people have a hard time understanding native people and native patience-they wonder why we aren't out marching to accomplish something. There is no question that we have had an incredible history, but I think to understand Indian people and the native mind you have to understand that we experience the world very differently. For us, there is not just this world, there's also a layering of others. Time is not divided by minutes and hours, and of everything has presence and meaning within this landscape of timelessness."

"People often forget that everything they say, everything they do, think, feel, dream, has effect, which to me is being Indian, knowing that. That's part of what I call "being Indian" or "tribal consciousness.""

"I realize writing can help change the world. I'm aware of the power of language which isn't meaningless words.... Sound is an extension of all, and sound is spirit, motion...Everything, anything that anybody says, it does go out and makes change in the world."

"The world is not disconnected or separate but whole. All persons are still their own entity but not separate from everything else-something that I don't think is necessarily just Native American, on this particular continent, or only on this planet. All people are originally tribal, but Europeans seem to feel separated from that, or they've forgotten it. If European people look into their own history, their own people were tribal societies to begin with and they got away from it. That's called "civilization."

"It seems es that the Native American experience has often been bitter. Horrible things have happened over and over. I like to think that bitter experience can be used to move the world, and if we can see that and work toward that instead of killing each other and hurting each other through all the ways that we have done it. (The world, not just Indian people, but the world.) JH: Sure, because we're not separate. We're all in this together. It's a realization I came to after dealing with the whole half-breed question. I realized that I'm not separate from myself either, and neither are Indian people separate from the rest of the world."

"It's like this, living is like a diamond or how they cut really fine stones. There are not just two sides but there are so many and they all make up a whole."

"Political means great movers. To me, you can define political in a number of ways. But I would hope it was in the sense that it does help move and change consciousness in terms of how different peoples and cultures are seen, evolve."

"Joy Harjo is one of the more powerful voices among the second generation of the so-called Native American Renaissance, the movement that arose in the late 1960s with N. Scott Momaday, James Welch]], and Leslie Marmon Silko. Through these works, extraordinarily innovative in content but also in form, these Indian writers for the first time bore witness directly to their native world, interpreting it from within and freeing it from the portrayals by white writers that had been at best ambivalent, if not thoroughly distorted. The arduous, agonizing reconstruction of the tribal past, the dramatic confrontation with white civilization, the existential and artistic itinerary through present-day America, the shady liminal area inhabited by mixed-bloods-such are the major themes of a literary corpus that has now grown to considerable proportions, one that within a span of thirty years has been acclaimed by critics and readers alike for its vitality and its prodigious variety of voices and styles."

"Joy Harjo has always been one of my favorite writers."

"The poems of Joy Harjo incorporate the aspects of identity, "children born, half-breed, blue eyes..." with the vision of spiritual life beneath the daily realities which face Indian women. She writes of earth, of change, and of the psychological genocide that is often so subtle we do not realize it exists. And she writes of the strength it takes to escape that destruction which often becomes destruction of the self."

"(Q: Who, other than yourself, are the important Native American writers?) NSM: Jim Welch...Louise Erdrich. Leslie Silko...Simon Ortiz and Joy Harjo are very good poets."

"It is my conviction that currently in the United States, more women than men are writing good and vital poetry, although there are fine male poets. This is our renaissance, our Elizabethan plenty. We have giants like Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Diane di Prima and Maxine Kumin, we have rising powers like Joy Harjo and Celia Gilbert and Sharon Olds, and we have dozens and dozens of individual voices sharply flavored and yet of our time, our flesh, our troubles."

"Joy Harjo is one of the real poets of our mixed, fermenting, end-of-century imagination.""

"She's generous in her poetry, opening her sacred spaces and music to all, yet never naive or forgetful about hostility and hatred, as in "Transformations"... This is not forgiveness, turning the cheek. It's a claiming of power, the power of the poetic act, the courage and grace and knowledge it takes to reach, through "the right words, the right meaning” into that place in the other where "the most precious animals leave." It's about "tough belief," no sentimental gesturing. You hear it in the rhythms of Harjo's music, catching it in the bladed outlines of her images."

"[She] played with drive, aplomb, and sensitivity throughout … this performance will take a place amongst the best performances of my music."

"Triumphed ...the concert was a rare pleasure."

"[She] is a brilliant harpist … communicates marvelously with the audience."

""The talent is passion and intellect" says the famous pianist Heinrich Neuhaus — with this mind we can define the art of the young harpist — Anna-Maria Ravnopolska-Dean."

"Demonstrated mastery of the instrument, deep musical insights and stylistic understanding … extraordinary."

"Anna-Maria Ravnopolska-Dean is flying amazingly headlong to the performance peaks. Overwhelming, incisive images, kaleidoscope of colors, flexible technique."

"Artistic, with high sensitivity and imagination, Anna-Maria managed the difficult program."

"Exhibited a rare combination of emotional involvement and profound calmness on stage."

"Goodman: Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Kael: I hate it. It is very creepy being imitated."

"If you can't make fun of bad movies on serious subjects, what's the point?"

"This is a nature-boy movie, a kid's daydream of being an Indian. When Dunbar has become a Sioux named Dances with Wolves, he writes in his journal that he knows for the first time who he really is. Costner has feathers in his hair and feathers in his head."

"Moviegoers like to believe that those they have made stars are great actors. People used to say that Gary Cooper was a fine actor — probably because when they looked in his face they were ready to give him their power of attorney."

"It's as if Brian de Palma were saying, "What is getting older if it isn't learning more ways that you're vulnerable?""

"If there is any test that can be applied to movies, it's that the good ones never make you feel virtuous."

"Is there something in druggy subjects that encourages directors to make imitation film noir? Film noir itself becomes an addiction."

"What's disgusting about the Dirty Harry movies is that Eastwood plays this angry tension as righteous indignation."

"Since I have an aversion to movies in which people say grace at the dinner table (not to the practice but to how movies use it to establish the moral strength of a household), the opening night montage of Sunday-night supper in one home after another in Waxahachie, Texas in 1935 — a whole community saying grace — made me expect the worst."

"It tackles a wonderful subject without preening, and brings it off unassertively — so unassertively that the movie is in danger of being overlooked. (Variety has already dismissed it as something "for a very limited audience.") We're getting to the point where the press assumes that movie audiences won't be willing to bring anything to a picture, and warns them off."

"If I never saw another fistfight or car chase or Doberman attack, I wouldn't have any feeling of loss. And that goes for Rottweilers, too."

"Unlike storybook heroes and heroines but like many actual heroes and heroines, she was something of a social outcast. (As Simone Weil noted, it was the people with irregular and embarrassing histories who were often the heroes of the Resistance in the Second World War; the proper middle-class people may have felt they had too much to lose.)"

"In the sixties, the recycling of pop culture — turning it into Pop art and camp — had its own satirical zest. Now we're into a different kind of recycling. Moviemakers give movies of the past an authority that those movies didn't have; they inflate images that may never have compelled belief, images that were no more than shorthand gestures — and they use them not as larger-than-life jokes but as altars."

"It would be very convincing to say that there’s no hope for movies — that audiences have been so corrupted by television and have become so jaded that all they want are noisy thrills and dumb jokes and images that move along in an undemanding way, so they can sit and react at the simplest motor level. And there’s plenty of evidence, such as the success of Alien. This was a haunted-house-with-gorilla picture set in outer space. It reached out, grabbed you, and squeezed your stomach; it was more gripping than entertaining, but a lot of people didn’t mind. They thought it was terrific, because at least they’d felt something: they’d been brutalized. It was like an entertainment contrived in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World by the Professor of Feelies in the College of Emotional Engineering."

"People have expected less of movies and have been willing to settle for less. Some have even been willing to settle for Kramer vs. Kramer and other pictures that seem to be made for an audience of over-age flower children. These pictures express the belief that if a man cares about anything besides being at home with the kids, he’s corrupt. Parenting ennobles Dustin Hoffman and makes him a better person in every way, while in The Seduction of Joe Tynan we can see that Alan Alda is a weak, corruptible fellow because he wants to be President of the United States more than he wants to stay at home communing with his daughter about her adolescent miseries. Pictures like these should all end with the fathers and the children sitting at home watching TV together."

"In movies, the balance between art and business has always been precarious, with business outweighing art, but the business was, at least, in the hands of businessmen who loved movies. As popular entertainment, movies need something of what the vulgarian moguls had — zest, a belief in their own instincts, a sentimental dedication to producing pictures that would make their country proud of their contribution, a respect for quality, and the biggest thing: a willingness to take chances. The cool managerial sharks don’t have that; neither do the academics. But the vulgarians also did more than their share of damage, and they’re gone forever anyway. They were part of a different America. They were, more often than not, men who paid only lip service to high ideals, while gouging everyone for profits. The big change in the country is reflected in the fact that people in the movie business no longer feel it necessary to talk about principles at all."

"The conglomerate heads may be business geniuses, but as far as movies are concerned they have virgin instincts; ideas that are new to them and take them by storm may have failed grotesquely dozens of times. But they feel that they are creative people — how else could they have made so much money and be in a position to advise artists what to do? Who is to tell them no?"

"TV executives think that the programs with the highest ratings are what TV viewers want, rather than what they settle for."

"[T]his film offers a nightmare image: the "Black Rebels," an outlaw motorcycle gang — a leather-jacketed pack who resemble storm troopers — terrorize a town. Their emblem is a death's head and crossed pistons and rods, and Marlon Brando, in his magnetic, soft-eyed youth, is their moody leader. The picture seemed to be frightened of its subject — the young nihilists who say "no" to American blandness and conformity — and reduced it as quickly as possible to the trivial meaninglessness of misunderstood boy meets understanding girl (Mary Murphy), but the audience savored the possibilities, and this clumsy, naive film was banned and argued about in so many countries that it developed a near-legendary status."