Podcast Episode: Poet Laureate Joy Harjo on How Poems Transcend Words
“What I love about poetry is … how the words take you to wordlessness." That was one of the many insights former U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo offered during her appearance at Duke Chapel's 2026 Pluralism Lecture. The event, "Poetry and Spirituality," began with a poetry reading by Harjo, and then she sat down for an extended conversation with Duke Chapel Dean Luke Powery. The discussion, presented in this episode of our Sounds of Faith podcast, covered the role of poetry in enduring hardships, awaking to spiritual realities, living in harmony with other people and the natural world—and much more.
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Transcript
>> JAMES TODD: Welcome to Sounds of Faith, a podcast exploring traditions of faith, sacred music, and spoken word here at Duke University Chapel.
>> JOY HARJO: Poetry is the most concise language, and what I love about poetry is … how the words take you to wordlessness.
>> JAMES TODD: That was former US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo speaking at Duke Chapel on March 3. She was at Duke for the Chapel’s 2026 Pluralism Lecture on “Poetry and Spirituality.” Writing about the event, the Duke student newspaper, The Chronicle, said her appearance at the Chapel “Celebrated[d] unity and humanity”. “A sense of awe and significance was palpable in the chapel as Harjo approached the podium,” the article said. Harjo shared a selection of her poems and then sat down for a discussion with Duke Chapel Dean Luke Powery. What follows is their conversation.
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>> DEAN POWERY: Isn't it great to have Joy Harjo with us?
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Thank you for being here all day with us, actually. This is really a season for the poets in my mind, and in the biblical traditions, prophets are poets, and you offered us wonderful images from trees the Earth, time, the government, birds, lullabies, poetry of ceremony, calling your spirit back, rabbit story, clay man with no ears, and even words of prayer. I am a prayer. Before we really go deeper into the theme, poetry and spirituality, you say something in your memoir, "Poet Warrior," you say it is men to be experienced. You feel it breathe, and you experience how it travels out dynamically to be part of the wind skirting the Earth even as we inhale and take the words into our bloodstream to speak, you say, is to bring into being. So, I am just wondering in this moment that just happened, what were you imagining or hoping or what was coming into being through your poems that you just read?
>> JOY HARJO: Just now?
>> DEAN POWERY: Just now?
>> JOY HARJO: What was your question?
>> DEAN POWERY: What was your hope as you read those particular poems?
>> JOY HARJO: As a human being, we all have our ways to meet with our souls. I mean, poetry is one, music, concerts, art, architecture, and so on, but I've come to understand that maybe part of my role, even if I'm doing -- playing saxophone or painting or whatever, it's like my friends Esperanza, when I center my latest painting, she says, I see your poetry. This is your poetry also. I said, thank you, Esperanza, it made me put it all together. What is poetry? Poetry is performance and it is a way to bring us together, I mean to bring people together. I mean we're different here. We come from different places and so on, yet, we may feel differently about things, but here we are together. Ultimately, that is what we will learn out of all of this. That is what we will all learn, as we are very much our singular and incredible selves, we are also each other. It is breath and, I guess, I'm always surprised by quotes from "Crazy Brave" because I don't always remember writing everything, but it is, to take on breath, it is what we do. At least the mammals that we are, we take on breath and that is our promise to carry the story that we were given, and do the best we can with it, and we will make mistakes. That is how we learn things and to keep breathing and taking in and if you think about breath, it is taking in, but it is also giving back. That's a very important part of life or breathing; you take in and you give back. It's got -- that is important. That's important to remember.
>> DEAN POWERY: And thinking about breath, breath is spirit, and thinking about poetry and spirit, obviously, you just had a specific poem on calling your spirit back but thinking about this broad topic on poetry and spiritually and there are many religious traditions represented out here. I'm wondering, reflect a little bit on the words of poems and the life of the spirit. So, even from your poem "Remember," where there seems to be so much connection between, you know, the Earth and sky and clouds, the interconnectivity, and you just mentioned that as well. Our connection as humans is that a particular theme in your poetry that you see emerging that is critical, this interconnection between all of us and all of the Earth. How do you see that being important to this topic of spirituality?
>> JOY HARJO: I think that is what poetry has taught me or teaching me. I had no plans to become a poet. You don't have poetry at career day. My mother wrote song lyrics, and we had swing lyrics but that wasn't my plan. I think it was, you know, I came to it, one, because I didn't speak. I wasn't -- I think it was given that it was a tool that was given to me. I always say somebody was gambling and said, okay, she doesn't know how to listen, so I bet you can't make her a poet, and somebody said, I bet I can. So, they had a bet, and that's how I wound up being a poet. I didn't know this was going on and there I was writing poetry, especially out of native rights movement. For natives, reconciling history and finding our voice in American history, because we had been disappeared from it. We still are. Now, there are laws in Oklahoma to prevent always from telling history, to including ourselves in the American story, as all over the country. Now, we know it has come down from Federal Government. We are not supposed to -- there is a story, an American story in which most of us aren't included. A lot of our relatives are not included. I mean, how has it come to this? That will not stay because that is not the truth of the story. It's just not -- that won't hold. That won't hold. It is like a plant, you know, there are no roots to it. It's not -- it's not -- it's unnatural. Diversity is, you know, I mean look at all of these different plants and trees and so on. You can't make a law that there is only one kind of tree. I mean, you could, but how ridiculous.
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>> DEAN POWERY: That's how you are here for the pluralism lecture. It is perfect. Thinking about truth. You mentioned truth, even truth telling and telling the histories and human story, I believe you have said that you have a particular love of the Psalms in one of your writing, and maybe Psalms23, maybe another, but they were psalms, they ask questions even of God. I am wondering if you can say something about truth telling and poetry and spirituality and psalms.
>> JOY HARJO: I will just riff off of that. That is what they are doing, they cry out, I sure love this person, and they don't love me back. Like John Coltrane and his horn riffing off. He was singing poetry. The psalms, I always like those, because they were, like these compact poems that you can hold -- what I loved about poetry and, you know, the Psalms in particular, you can memorize them, you can carry them. We used to have to memorize Bible verses for awards, so I got a lot of them. It is like memorizing poem, which I have had students do, and they hate it until they do it and it is like magic. You've got something you can carry around with you. It is like memorizing songs. That is one way, if you have to memorize something, put a melody to it, you know, and that is why we have iambic pentameter, so you can hold it to memory. We all need that. I mean, we need those kinds of -- I mean poetry is the most concise language, and what I love about poetry is where the words -- how the words take you to wordlessness. That's what intrigues me. How the words take you to wordlessness and there you are in just a few lines.
>> DEAN POWERY: Yeah, let's stay with wordlessness. You say in one of your poems about the importance of being friends of silence. And I am wondering with -- what's the role of silence in poetry and spiritualty, how does that all fit together?
>> JOY HARJO: I keep thinking of Simon and Garfunkel, "hello silence, my old friend, I came to talk with you again." Yeah, it is important to make friends with silence, I think. I mean, if you think about it, it is what we see here and what we don't see is much larger. I think of silence like that. It's so full. It's so full of wisdom and knowledge and beauty and intensity. It's like what you don't know, the realm of what you don't know. And we're in a place, I think, culturally, with social media and so on, AI and so on, we're being kind of, sort of cattled, being put into these arenas, because when we listen to silence, if we listen long enough, we know who we are. We know what a lie is. We know what truth is. We know where we belong, and we're being herded into places where we no longer know who we are, know that we're connected. The strange contradiction is that, you know, we can be in touch with anybody in the world, which we're in touch with nobody. Yet, it is in silence that those connections that everything opens up.
As a kid, that is my favorite place to go. I didn't understand it, but I found it in my dream. I would get up early and be outside before anybody. I craved, I still do, crave those kinds of places. And yet, I get taken in by Netflix and so on like everybody else. It is difficult. It is an addiction that is probably just as bad as sugar or morphine or anything else. It really is. And it's not all bad. Nothing is all bad, certainly it is really cool to be able to connect I mean, during COVID, Zoom and so on, those are useful tools. Again, it is like tobacco. Tobacco was a gift given to the people. I have one of the poems about it. There was a story about how the plant came to be helpful, and it became colonized. How plants become colonized and what happens, you know, again, is useful. It is a gift that is useful, like social media, it can be useful, but you have to be -- it is like anything, anything can be, you know, you have to exercise self-control and take care of your silence. Take care of your spirit.
>> DEAN POWERY: Thank you. I have one or two more questions for Joy, but I know you probably have some, too. We'll have some, I think staff and students, there were instructions given to you to write your questions on note cards, legible questions for the reader, and so staff and students will be going around just to collect your cards. So, if you would just -- I don't know if there is a basket or should they lift their hands? Okay, lust it up and they will be collecting those now. So, thank you. So, just to say something, a move towards, you were talking about sort of AI technology. You say something near the end of your memoir "Poet Warrior" that really compels me, this idea of what I call, "becoming human." What you say attends, "maybe by the time you read this, we will have learned how to be human." And so, the question is, how can we learn how to be human?
>> JOY HARJO: We are learning it. Maybe because of plurality or duality, we learn it by inhumanity, I hate to say. We seem to be learning inhumanity and cruelty to others, in our communities, in the world community.
>> DEAN POWERY: Do you -- so, just to stay there, in terms of what is the place of poetry at times of war? Some would say that is a waste of time, right, what is a poem going to do? What's your sense of the importance of poetry, the place of poetry today?
>> JOY HARJO: I think of poems, and I think of art, too, like Picasso, is they become these pieces of artistic expression are like transformer stations. It is how I think of them as transformer stations, like a chant or a song can be a transformer station that gathers -- that might make a connection between the stars and the Earth or a particular story, and I think poems are like that. They can open up a space of conjecture, of consciousness, ethical consciousness even as some of them might -- they are different. Some might alert, some pieces can be very alarming or shocking because that's what's needed to open that place. Poems, too. A poem can't shoot, you know, or disable -- maybe it can disable in some way, but they become this collection. It is what poets do. Poets are called to speak. I think that's -- a poet is a truth teller is called to speak and speak the truth in a way that is not -- what's the word, but people can hear with fresh ear, maybe it cleans the ears out to hear in a fresh way.
>> DEAN POWERY: What would you say, before we get the questions from the audience to those aspiring poets or people who are writing poetry? What would be words of encouragement?
>> JOY HARJO: You always do it because you love it, because nobody -- that is not a way to make a living. Generally. You do it because it is something that you love, and it's how you pay attention. It's a way of listening and paying attention and it might help others, and maybe just for yourself. It might be just for your family. It could be just for your community group, or it could be for the world, but it's a way of paying attention and listening. I think maybe listening is the most important thing, whether you are a researcher, academic, car mechanic, all of it, poet. It is about listening, which goes back to the silence. It's about -- I admire those mechanics, you listen to the engine, and you know what is out and where it is. Poetry is listening to the soul. Poets listening to the soul to see what is working and what's out.
>> DEAN POWERY: Thank you. We have some questions here from the audience, and we will make our way through them as we have time, and I pray fully will be able to read them. Here's the first one. If poetry is song, does the melody impact the message?
>> JOY HARJO: Well, does all poetry have a melody and I don't know that every poem does. But in a song, melody, of course, would impact the message. I would think it can create ear worms. You know ear worms are something that the message carries. A melody certainly carries the meaning of the words. I don't know if that answers it though.
>> DEAN POWERY: In one of your poems, you chanted in a particular --
>> JOY HARJO: I started to sing it, but I didn't. Sometimes I will sing it.
>> DEAN POWERY: Here's another. Did your ancestors help you write your poems and heal from loss?
>> JOY HARJO: I think we all have ancestors around us. Some of us are more sensitive to them than others, some people block it out, but yeah, I think so. We're not -- I think as I -- I was a teenage mother and my daughter did the same, so I've been a grandmother since I was in my 30s, and the thing is, I learned it's been -- to have grandchildren and now great grandchildren is what it has helped me see or of understand is we are a field. A field of relationship, so then you start and experiencing in a way that you can almost see the connections, sort of like a quantum field. A field, I was thinking about the diagrams for electric stuff, and you start seeing how the connections are with ancestors and how important sevens are culturally and math. I mean, math figures into it all, too. So, yes, of course, I have a great grandfather who’s always been close to me. When I paint, I hear my daughter sometimes. One time, she says, mom, you're being too literal. That was her. It's like that. And we're not supposed to say those things or acknowledge it, because in time, sometimes this could go into it, people killed women or anybody for being able to see or feel or know those things that they are not supposed to know. I think artists will tell you know a lot of people don't speak about those things. What are you working with? All of us, in our dream, and this is an incredible realm. Think of our family, think about the plants that belong or connected to that family or a place. It's all interactive. It's not -- stable is not the word I'm looking for. It's not -- you know, this field is so interactive with ancestors, with descendants and folds into time and time is essentially not linear and space and so on. But that is another -- you know, that is something else. Yes, our ancestors, some of them are with us and it makes me nervous when I hear someone say, pray for all of our ancestors. I think I don't want all of my ancestors around me. They are troublemakers, and they can -- then you watch them come up in somebody. They are influencing somebody they need to stay away from and so on.
>> DEAN POWERY: Let me just ask off of that, why are people afraid, you mentioned, of knowing or afraid of this memory of those who have come before and continue to be? Is it their sense of fear?
>> JOY HARJO: I think their sense of fear is -- we look at ourselves and we can see our failures and our failures, and I don't know. I thought about this country and why this need to get rid of -- to tell a story and it is fear. It is fear based. It is fear based, shame based. A lot of it is fear based, and shame based. What do you do with a story and maybe I'm a culprit, what do you do with that? This happened a long time ago and it is all here. It happened a long time ago, but when I realized seven generations, you can have seven generations in one light and how that is, wow, it wasn't that long ago. But if you have ever been part of -- you know, any healing modality, what's crucial to healing whether it is other healing modalities is bringing everybody together and telling the story that is the essential part of healing. That is why, you know, this multicultural and diversity that is what it is about. It is not putting one person over the other. We need to come together and tell everybody's story, so we can heal together. It's not native history. It's American history.
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>> DEAN POWERY: Right.
>> JOY HARJO: It's black history. It's all of our history. It is LGBTQ, you know, it is all of us because that is -- it is our history. We're all here together and whatever, again, I think there is a trickster God involved in how we wound up together. A larger trickster story, maybe that will be my next book, but how we wound up here. Yeah, I think that's, you know, that's important.
>> DEAN POWERY: Thinking about people and place, and there's a question here about support, community of support for you. What can you tell us about your community of support in Tulsa and in Oklahoma?
>> JOY HARJO: I ran from Oklahoma for a long time. I went -- I was born in Tulsa and left there when I was 16 to go to the institute of American Indian arts school, eighth grade to 12th and two years postgraduate and it saved my life because we were all artists. I submitted art and got accepted and ended up in one all native drama and dance troops. I was pregnant, nobody knew. I graduated a year earlier because I had enough credits and had my son and went back to New Mexico and went to the -- I decided -- I wounds up -- I wanted to go into pre-med and went to -- they had the eight northern pueblo talent search, Joe Abeta and he helped me get into the University of New Mexico. I wonder, how do you go to the university? Where is the front door? I didn't know, but it was programs like that helped me. What was the question again?
>> DEAN POWERY: Community of support in Tulsa.
>> JOY HARJO: I wound up in the University of New Mexico and went to the writers ‘workshop, back to New Mexico and to the southwest, lived in Hawaii for a few years and came back to New Mexico. When my mother passed, I moved back to Oklahoma just to face -- at some point, we all go home. Of course, I always went back and forth, very involved with my people. I'm a member of the Hickory Ground Ceremonial Ground. I'm a member of my tribal nation and so on, so I'm back and what's been good, because I found family. I found family in Oahu; I found family in New Mexico. I found family all over the world. But to be there in my community, you know, that's been -- I realize how important that I'm part of them, I'm part of that root. I just help start a program for girls becoming a mentoring group for young Muscogee women and artists, and I just got a grant. I can't announce it because they haven't announced them, but we have started to interview artists culture bears for -- bearers for interviews that will become curriculum for a school we want to start. So, that community, that's my support system there, and so on and the Tulsa artist fellowship. I'm the Bob Dylan Center artist and resident. I had to learn a lot of Bob Dylan songs.
>> DEAN POWERY: That's great. Staying with the sense of community and where you have come from, where you're going, home and there's a question here, what was your favorite poem as a child?
>> JOY HARJO: I love "tiger, tiger burning bright in the forest of the night"
>> DEAN POWERY: Do you have a favorite poem today?
>> JOY HARJO: Oh, my gosh. I hate when people -- I don't hate but I do. People ask me, “Who are you reading?” And I go blank because I am always reading. I have a stack of stuff I'm reading, and some incredible young poets coming up. There's a lot of them.
>> DEAN POWERY: Here's one.
>> JOY HARJO: Jake Skeets has a new one coming out called "horses." I will mention that one. He is a young poet.
>> DEAN POWERY: Thank you. Here is a question, what did it mean or what does it mean to you -- what did it mean to be a Poet Laureate? How has holding that role changed you?
>> JOY HARJO: Yes, that is something you don't really -- yeah, I was the 23rd U.S. Poet Laureate and COVID happened. I still was, but what is interesting is that it was at a time that the poetry organizations were overwhelmed -- almost overwhelmed with people coming for poetry. So, my time, my three years was around a lot of interesting poetry because what poetry does in times, you can walk out the door and die the next day or like right now. We can be in a full-scale war that none of us wants. It just started by billionaires, or you go to poetry because that's where we can hear our soul. We know the soul is eternal. Maybe that's, you know, because what happens when I'm up here, it is like being in the creative space with all of you guys, and I never thought of poetry, because it is soul talk that the soul is eternal and that might be one reason that we turn to it, because we feel that the soul is eternal when we read poetry. Sometimes what I am saying is not me. I have had a lot of teachers. I have had a lot of incredible teachers in places, especially in Oahu and New Mexico. Teachers, a lot of what you hear is from them, and the ancestors. It took me a while to get me into shape.
>> DEAN POWERY: Part of that question also was, not only how has the role changed you, but how did you change it? Did you, in some way change that role?
>> JOY HARJO: Yes, I had a dance party. We did my closing event ,and I had a young Muscogee poet come up and did a wonderful job and Portland Harjo, not relation, there is a lot of Harjos. The last night, we had a dance party on the steps of the Library of Congress with a deejay. They had it, and that closed out, so that is one thing I did. I also did a project of -- I decided, I thought, well, there is more than one native poet, so I did a project called "living nations, living words" that showed poets from Hawaii to all over the country, and they would put their, you know, their poems. I had them send in poems about place and we had them put themselves on a map.
>> DEAN POWERY: Here is a good closing question, I would say, and I will turn it to you if there's a final word for us. But this question is any advice, is there any advice that you have for daily spiritual practice in horrific times?
>> JOY HARJO: Maybe read a poem. Read a poem, write a poem, sing. You make a song. You can -- the thing is, most of the songs we hear are love songs, but in our communities, we have songs for everything. You can write a song for getting up when you're terrified there might be a war, write your song. Write your poem, write a song. Write a song for anxiety, you know. Write a song for this plant that you love. Write a song, you know, that would be -- that is helpful or to go help somebody. Go out there and go help somebody.
>> DEAN POWERY: Thank you all for being here. But most of all, thank you.
>> JOY HARJO: Thank you.
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>> JAMES TODD: This has been Sounds of Faith from Duke University Chapel. Learn more about the chapel's mission, ministry, events, and programs at chapel.duke.edu.