(1) Compare Harjo’s racial recall through poetic myth in “Vision,” “Deer Dancer,” and “New Orleans” with novelist Toni Morrison’s “rememory” in Beloved and Louise Erdrich’s recovered myth in Tracks.
(2) Account for the use of horses as a metaphor for warring internal demons in Harjo’s She Had Some Horses.
(3) Contrast Harjo’s faith in re-created history, as demonstrated in the poems “The Real Revolution Is Love,” “Autobiography,” “For Anna Mae Pictou Aquash, Whose Spirit Is Present Here and in the Dappled Star,” or “For Alva Benson, and For Those Who Have Learned to Speak,” with the historic confession in Robert Lowell’s “For the Union Dead” and “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket.”
(4) Apply to Harjo’s ethic the command of Ozark poet C. D. Wright: “Abide, abide and carry on. Give physical, material life to the words of your spirit. Record what you see. Rise, walk and make a day.”
