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Each of us is descended from poetry ancestors. It’s the same for any art, any occupation. There is a lineage of style, knowledge and culture passed from generation to generation, one artist to another. Ultimately all poetry is related in the family tree of poetry…

— Joy Harjo An Interview with Joy Harjo, U.S. Poet Laureate” in Poets.org (2019)

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Poetry

More quotes by Joy Harjo

To find ourselves spoken for in art gives dignity to our pain, our anger, our losses.

We are story gatherers. That's what we humans do.

The most powerful poetry is birthed through cracks in history, through what is broken and unseen.

Catching the Light (2022)

America has always been multicultural, before the term became ubiquitous, before colonization, and it will be after.

An Interview with Joy Harjo, U.S. Poet Laureate” in Poets.org (2019)

When she broke on Earth, the light in her was not broken. We cannot break light, nor can we destroy it.

Catching the Light (2022)

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There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet.

Ralph Waldo Emerson Nature (1836)

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.

T. S. Eliot Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)

Poetry, unlike oratory, should not aim at clarity...but be dense with meaning, 'something to be chewed and digested'.

George Chapman Ovid's Banquet of Sense (1595)

I am no poet, but if you think for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your minds.

Michael Faraday

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Joy Harjo (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.