Arizona has been without an official state poet laureate for seven years. But Gov. Katie Hobbs recently appointed Arizona State University professor emerita Laura Tohe to the role. She’s an award-winning writer and member of the Navajo Nation. It makes Arizona the 10th state to have an Indigenous poet laureate. Tohe spoke with KNAU’s Richard Davis.
Her most recent publication is “Code Talker Stories,” an oral history of Navajo Code Talkers.
This interview was edited for clarity and length.
Richard Davis: How do you envision your role as the state’s poet laureate?
Laura Tohe: Being the second poet laureate is a thrill. It’s an honor. I think of myself as a kind of a word warrior, you might say, or poetry warrior to support, to advocate and to celebrate the literary arts here in Arizona.
Bring poetry to rural communities, sharing my work, sharing other Arizona poets’ work, doing workshops and interacting in a way that poetry can be demystified.
Really celebrating the heritage and the languages, the traditions that are here, whether they’re written or oral and I want to include populations that might be feeling like they’re kind of left out.
RAD: Describe the importance and power of poetry in reclaiming our collective moral compass, let alone indigenous language preservation and revitalization.
LT: It’s an important question because saving our languages is a part of reclaiming who we are and things that we had to endure in boarding schools, and I’m from that generation that lived through this.
Poetry can be used to reclaim Indigenous language.
Poetry has always been with Native tribes. The early poets were the medicine people, the ones that gave ceremonies or sang songs of prayer towards healing. Indigenous poetry stands on its own, just like sonnets or poems that were written by western poets.
Indigenous poets are saying, “This is how we express ourselves through language.” Poetry is a way to reclaim our form and what that form is.
RAD: What role does poetry play in creating awareness of MMIW (missing and murdered Indigenous people)?
LT: Poetry is a way to call attention, to alert us what’s happening now in this country that is under distress, reminding us of communities that have murdered Indigenous peoples.
Now, what’s happening recently in Minneapolis, poets are going to be writing about that, that say, “Hey, this is what’s happening. This is how it’s affecting us. This is how it’s affecting the earth or community or people or me.”
It can be healing as well when we acknowledge some of the things that we are doing, and maybe it changes our way of thinking, or maybe it changes our behavior.
This is the literature that is part of a people, the art of a people.
It’s telling us about who we are, and it’s telling us about our choices that we make in life.
We just want to be heard.
RAD: One of the through lines I see in your poetry is music. What role does music play in your writing process?
LT: Well, I’m glad you asked that question because for many years, I didn’t realize that in my own writing, poetry is like writing music.
It has a rhythm. It has line length. It has a form.
It has a story or visuals in it. When I wrote librettos—the words for an opera—I became more aware of that.
You have to listen to it, and you have to hear it, and it has to come inside you.
You know, when I write now I’m aware of that. I always have to read my work aloud to myself to see if the words sound good, to see if a line sounds good, just like a musician has to listen to their music and cut out or edit or add new things in there.
