Joy Harjo, USA Poet Laureate (2019): In published interviews, she describes features of multiple personality trait in her creative process

“Joy Harjo…is a poet, musician, and author. She is also the first Native American United States Poet Laureate…She…earned an M.F.A. at the University of Iowa in its Creative Writing Program…” (1).

In published interviews from 1989 and 1990, she describes her subjective experience of a “muse” or “presence”; alternate “very alive worlds”; and how she came to write her poem, “The Woman Hanging from the Thirteenth Floor Window”:

“You said today that when you write an old Creek Indian enters the room and stands over you.”

“Yes, that does happen sometimes. I think my muse takes different forms, but I have often felt this presence. Sometimes it seems to be a singular presence and other times it seems to be multiple…

“Do you ever feel the presence of ancestors? Of grandparents or greatgrandparents?”

“Oh, sure I do. You might think I’m crazy, but I do feel the presence of such a world…I have a sense of all those worlds as being very, very alive…I feel that my poems have become travels into that other space…

“…there is not just this world, there’s also a layering of others” (1, pp. 37-39).

“ ‘The Woman Hanging from the Thirteenth Floor [Window]’ is written around an imaginary woman. You could call her imaginary. But within that space she is real, also. I made a trip to Chicago, oh, about eight years ago, and one of the places I went to while I was there was the Chicago Indian Center…in one room I noticed a rocking chair…the image stayed with me…So, a few years after that trip, the image stayed with me, and I would see this woman, rocking and rocking, for her life, and she compelled me to write the poem. And I felt her standing behind me, urging me on as I wrote…” (1, p. 67).

1. Wikipedia. “Joy Harjo.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joy_Harjo

2. Joy Harjo. The Spiral of Memory: Interviews. Edited by Laura Coltelli. Ann Arbor, The University of Michigan Press, 1996.