Joy Harjo

It took me 14 years to write 'Crazy Brave' because I kept changing the form and I also kept running away from the story. I said I don't really want to write about myself. But it's about writing about memory.

When explorers first encountered my people, they called us heathens, sun worshippers. They didn't understand that the sun is a relative and illuminates our path on this earth.

You just go where poetry is, whether it's in your heart or your mind or in books or in places where there's live poetry or recordings.

I've been present at birth, and death is just as present and in equal balance. And I've been present at death, and birth is just as present, again in equal balance.

I am a member of the Muskogee people. I'm a poet, a musician, a dreamer of sorts, a questioner. Like everyone else, I'm looking for answers of some sort or the other.

Bottom line, I have to follow what my soul says, or my spirit. And my spirit said that poetry and the arts should be without borders, should be without political borders.

Someone accompanies every soul from the other side when it enters this place. Usually it is an ancestor with whom that child shares traits and gifts.

I love the sound of the saxophone. It became my singing voice, and it sounds so human. The saxophone could carry the words past the border of words. It can carry it a little bit farther.

When I began to listen to poetry, it's when I began to listen to the stones, and I began to listen to what the clouds had to say, and I began to listen to others. And I think, most importantly for all of us, then you begin to learn to listen to the soul, the soul of yourself in here, which is also the soul of everyone else.

You can't look for love, or it will run away from you. But, you know, don't look for it. Don't look for it. Just go where it is and appreciate it, and, you know, it will find you.

Sometimes, I think, in order to get to something that we really want or we really love or something that needs to be realized, that we're tested.

I started writing to save my life.