Hardy Laurel

     Pop quiz, poetry fans: Who is the current Poet Laureate of the United States?
     It's this lady:

Give yourself 10 points if you knew that.

      

     Joy Harjo is the first Native American to hold the post of U.S. Poet Laureate. She has for decades written poetry as "a voice of the indigenous people" while advocating for social justice and the equality of women. 

     In case you're wondering how such a person got the job under the current administration: the Poet Laureate is chosen by the Librarian of Congress, not anyone in the White House.

     Poets laureate are all over the place these days. Connecticut has one; so do many towns in the state, including Westport and Norwalk. They are all generally expected to promote the love of poetry and not, as such versifiers were back in the days of Tennyson and Wordsworth, to mark occasions of national importance with verse. 

     So, why are they called "laureate," anyway? It all goes back to these two. 

"Dude, I said I'm not interested"

     Greek/Roman myth says that Apollo, perhaps deranged by a wound from Cupid's arrow, went crazy in love with a water nymph called Daphne. She just wasn't that into him, but Apollo was a god and not used to taking no for an answer. He chased her, Daphne appealed to her father the river-god for help, and the river-god transformed her into a laurel tree. (Gee, thanks, Dad.) Apollo still wouldn't take a hint. He embraced the tree and declared that it would be his forevermore. 

     Somehow this tale of males behaving badly struck the ancients as romantic, and when scholars of the Renaissance went crazy for all things Greek/Roman, they decided that a wreath of laurel was just the crown great poets (like Petrarch) deserved.

Positively regal, isn't he?

  
     And that's how Joy Harjo, a member of the Muscogee Nation from Tulsa, came to have a title derived from a tree supposedly conjured in order to foil an extra-thirsty Olympian. Here endeth the lesson.