Jim Harrison and Me

This is my first blog entry. I ask myself why I’m committing to writing to you, dear reader, as regularly as if you were the ideal mother back when I should have written home and didn’t.  I imagine you as my ideal reader, glad to get a letter from me.  This arrogance is what keeps most of us writing, either that, or the fear that we only exist if we keep bringing attention to ourselves. In my case, I’d add that I’m inclined toward dreaminess, and I’m more apt to locate myself on this mortal plane if I hammer it down with my words.  Besides, my mind and my fingertips have such a long marriage that they’re not even sure which is which.I won’t be smart every time, or wise, or even write well every time. You can skip those entries. You can skip anything.  I’ll continue to pretend you’re reading.I’ve sometimes told my students when they’re writing a poem they might imagine that they’re speaking directly and quietly into the ear of the listener. The idea is to come close, get intimacy into the language, say what we don’t say when we’re speaking in public. Now that so much of our language is being blogged and emailed and posted, that feeling of intimacy comes easier. No printer, no external editor, no cover, no binding, comes between us and the reader. What my brain invents flies to you as if I had just spoken into your ear.I’m  67. I wrote my dissertation on a Selectric typewriter, whiting out mistakes, retyping page after page, stripping in corrected sentences. I shakily unloaded my first computer and dot matrix printer from their boxes when I was, what? about 40. I paced the floor, alternately in tears and in a rage, unable keep the words on the screen where they belonged, unable to save them properly and find them again. Thank god for my son.A lot of people have written about what we’ve lost and gained in the great changeover. Interesting, but useless, finally, since change is already the fact.What I’m committing to here feels no different in intent from, say, what the far-more-hermetic  Jim Harrison does, and has done, in his Montana and Patagonia hideouts, furiously writing novels and poems: they come so steadily that the mind almost has to drop into a deeper awareness.    Speaking of Harrison, I’ll be at Interlochen Public Radio station this afternoon to record—as I do monthly—my review of a recent poetry book. This month is Harrison’s new book, Songs of Unreason, just out from Copper Canyon Press. Here’s a little of my review, plus a poem of Harrison’s:I’d say nothing has changed in the new book except that the light of awareness that’s infused all of Harrison’s work is brighter, here. I mean that the poems—as the title implies---are “Songs of Unreason”—they’re singing more than they’re telling stories, and they have taken an even more deliberate step off the cliff of reason. That doesn’t for a second mean that he’s not holding us in mind as readers. He’s too authentic to play with language that leaves us behind.  “The world is too grand to reshape with babble,” he says in one poem. I’ll give you a poem to show you what I mean by the singing, by the step off the cliff. Here’s the first poem in the book:BroomTo remember you’re alivevisit the cemetery of your fatherat noon after you’ve made loveand are still wrapped in a mammalianodor that you are forced to cherish.Under each stone is someone’s inevitablesurprise, the unexpected deathof their biology that struggled hard, as it must.Now to home without looking back,enough is enough.En route buy the best wineyou can afford and a dozen stiff brooms.Have a few swallows then throw the furnitureout the window and begin sweeping.Sweep until the walls arebare of paint and at your feet sweepuntil the floor disappears. Finish the winein this field of air, and return to the cemeteryin evening and wind through the stonesa slow dance of your name visible only to birds.Okay, that’s the blank slate, or swept-out space, that he starts with. The long sequence that immediately follows is called “Suite of Unreason.” which is printed in a different type-face on the unnumbered verso of the pages and goes on for the rest of the book, except for the final poem.  So you have named poems on the octavo pages and these short little poems on the verso, little bits of unreason breaking in on the other. But I don’t think we want to take these poems and the ones on the numbered pages opposite as counterpoint to each other. And here’s where I want to talk about the flavor of this book as a whole: this book is an evaluation. It evaluates the issue of death, the way we see death, not death itself.  It does not wish to solve the problem of death and it doesn’t mean to provide a guide for those coming along. The poems just look at death with Harrison’s clear, compassionate eye.You can get the broadcast at  http://ipr.interlochen.org/michiganwriters . Aaron Stander will be interviewing Harrison first—one of only five interviews Harrison has granted concerning this book.  By the way, I think Aaron http://www.aaronstander.com/Site_2/Home_Page.html  is one of the best interviewers of writers in the country.  He’s written four mystery novels himself—huge sellers in our part of the country—and he knows how to ask intelligent, writerly questions.