Arts Learning Grant

The goal of the Bringing Joy Poetry Project is to increase participants' understanding and appreciation for poetry's power in transmitting human knowledge and values by inviting local poets to create and share their own poetic responses to Harjo's imagery, language, lexical context, and subject matter. Participants will report increased understanding and appreciation of: 1) Harjo's belief that poems are carriers of dreams, knowledge and wisdom that connect us to the earth and the spiritual world. 2) Poetry's power in expressing identity and place. 3) Poetry's effectiveness at defining the space between our country's promises of equality, freedom, and liberty and our long history of political injustice, systemic racism, oppression, and ethnic strife. 4) Poetry's ability to help us bear witness, challenge assumptions, and give substance to our ideals of justice. 5) Poetry's capacity to create shared vision of a healthy, hopeful, and shared equitable future. Our success will be measured in the number of people engaged in the Bringing Joy Poetry Project and Joy Harjo's readings in our region. We will consider our project a success if participants respond favorably to the measures identified above in their evaluations. We will also measure the number of impressions in social and mainstream news media created by the project. The Bringing Joy Committee will also gather qualitative impressions on improvements in community pride and hopefulness, appreciation for arts and culture, and strengthened ties between Native and Non-Native participants. The Bringing Joy Committee is already feeling some success through our relationship with MN Center for the Book and the Library of Congress. They are discussing building out the Bringing Joy Poetry Project in the metro area as part of the Twin Cities convening of Native poets hosted by Joy Harjo and Layli Long Soldier. The Library of Congress sees our work as a model for community engagement.