THE SHAPE OF THE JOURNEY
Jim Harrison
I would especially like to thank Joseph Bednarik
for his efforts and advice on this book. – J.H.
Copper Canyon Press gratefully acknowledges and thanks Russell Chatham for the use of his painting, Snowstorm over Independence Pass, oil on canvas, 36" x 30", 1998. © 1998, 2000 by Jim Harrison.
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
Copper Canyon Press is in residence under the auspices of the Centrum Foundation at Fort Worden State Park in Port Townsend, Washington. Centrum sponsors artist residencies, education workshops for Washington State students and teachers, blues, jazz, and fiddle tunes festivals, classical music performances, and The Port Townsend Writers’ Conference.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Harrison, Jim, 1937-
The shape of the journey: new and collected poems / by Jim Harrison.
p. cm.
Includes indexes.
ISBN 1-55659-149-7 (paperback)
ISBN 1-55659-095-4 (cloth)
ISBN 1-55659-096-2 (deluxe limited edition)
I. Title.
PS3558.A67 S53 1998
811'.54 – DDC21
98-25501
CIP
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
COPPER CANYON PRESS
Post Office Box 271
Port Townsend, Washington 98368
www.coppercanyonpress.org
To Lawrence Sullivan
CONTENTS
Title Page
Introduction
PLAIN SONG (1965)
Poem
Sketch for a Job-Application Blank
David
Exercise
A Sequence of Women
Northern Michigan
Returning at Night
Fair/Boy Christian Takes a Break
Morning
Kinship
February Suite
Traverse City Zoo
Reverie
Fox Farm
Nightmare
Credo, After E.P.
Dusk
Lisle’s River
Three Night Songs
Cardinal
“This is cold salt…,”
John Severin Walgren, 1874–1962
Garden
Horse
Malediction
Word Drunk
Park at Night
Going Back
Hitchhiking
Sound
Dead Deer
Li Ho
Complaint
Return
LOCATIONS (1968)
Walking
Suite to Fathers
Suite to Appleness
The Sign
War Suite
American Girl
Lullaby for a Daughter
Sequence
Cold August
Night in Boston
February Swans
Thin Ice
Natural World
Moving
White
After the Anonymous Swedish
Dawn Whiskey
Legenda
A Year’s Changes
Locations
OUTLYER & GHAZALS (1971)
In Interims: Outlyer
Trader
Hospital
Cowgirl
Drinking Song
Awake
Notes on the Ghazals
Ghazals: I–LXV
LETTERS TO YESENIN (1973)
Letters: 1–30
Postscript
A Last Ghazal
A Domestic Poem for Portia
Missy 1966–1971
Four Matrices
North American Image Cycle
RETURNING TO EARTH (1977)
Returning to Earth
from SELECTED & NEW POEMS (1982)
Not Writing My Name
Frog
Rooster
Epithalamium
A Redolence for Nims
Followers
My First Day As a Painter
Waiting
Noon
Birthday
Clear Water 3
Dōgen’s Dream
Weeping
The Chatham Ghazal
Marriage Ghazal
March Walk
The Woman from Spiritwood
Gathering April
Walter of Battersea
After Reading Takahashi
THE THEORY & PRACTICE OF RIVERS & NEW POEMS (1985, 1989)
The Theory and Practice of Rivers
Kobun
Looking Forward to Age
Homily
Southern Cross
Sullivan Poem
Horse
Cobra
Porpoise
The Brand New Statue of Liberty
The Times Atlas
New Love
What He Said When I Was Eleven
Acting
My Friend the Bear
Cabin Poem
Rich Folks, Poor Folks, and Neither
Dancing
The Idea of Balance Is to Be Found in Herons and Loons
Small Poem
Counting Birds
AFTER IKKYŪ & OTHER POEMS (1996)
Preface
After Ikkyū: 1–57
The Davenport Lunar Eclipse
Coyote No. 1
Time Suite
North
Bear
Twilight
Return to Yesenin
Sonoran Radio
PREVIOUSLY UNCOLLECTED POEMS (1976–1990)
Hello Walls
Scrubbing the Floor the Night a Great Lady Died
The Same Goose Moon
NEW POEMS (1998)
Geo-Bestiary: 1–34
Index of Titles
Index of First Lines
About the Author
THE SHAPE OF THE JOURNEY
Jim Harrison
INTRODUCTION
But then there are no fresh starts at age sixty and this book is the portion of my life that means the most to me. I’ve written a goodly number of novels and novellas but they sometimes strike me as extra, burly flesh on the true bones of my life though a few of them approach some of the conditions of poetry. There is the additional, often shattering notion gotten from reading a great deal in anthropology, that in poetry our motives are utterly similar to those who made cave paintings or petroglyphs, so that studying your own work of the past is to ruminate over artifacts, each one a signal, a remnant of a knot of perceptions that brings back to life who and what you were at the time, the past texture of what has to be termed as your “soul life.”
I fear that somewhat improperly, humility arrived rather late in life. I don’t mean self-doubt which is quite another thing. The Romantic “I” with all of its inherent stormy bombast, its fungoid elevation of the most questionable aspects of personality, its totally self-referential regard of life, has tended to disappear. I recall that Bill Monroe, the bluegrass musician, said that he didn’t write songs but “discovered them in the air.” If you add Wallace Stevens’s contention that “technique is the proof of seriousness,” we come closer to the warm, red heart of the matter. Of course you come to realize that your Romantic “I” never had much to do with your poems in the first place but was mostly a fuel tank for public postures.
Another good source of humility is the dozen or so famous poets I can enumerate whose work has apparently vaporized since I published my first book, Plain Song, back in 1965. It’s been years since I went on one, but a reasonably well-attended reading tour can give you an unjustified sense of permanence. More desirable memories are those of picking potato bugs for a dollar a day at age ten, or living in a windowless seven-dollar-a-week room in Greenwich Village with photos of Rimbaud and Lorca taped to the wall above one’s pillow. A good sidebar on impermanence at the time was the arrival, every few days at the bookstore where I worked, of the eminent anthologist Oscar Williams who would carefully check the racks to make sure his work was well-displayed. In his anthologies Oscar would add an appendix with lists of the twenty-five “Chief Poets of America,” and perhaps fifty “Chief Poets of the World,” featuring photos, which invariably included Oscar and his girlfriend, Gene Derwood. This added a tinge of cynicism about literary life to a nineteen-year-old. But then we have always had our Colley Cibbers, our Oscar Williamses, our Casey Kasems trying to establish an infantile worth with premature canons. By nature a poet is permanently inconsolable, but there is a balm in the idea that in geological terms we all own the same measure of immortality, though our beloved Shakespeare and a few others will live until the planet dies.
Of course any concerns over what has actually happened in American poetry in the last thirty-five years or so are inevitably fragile if you’re not a scholar. There was obviously a healthy diaspora during which there were Pyrrhic wars, the exfoliation into the MFA “creative writing” period, and now apparently lapsing into a new faux-sincere Victorianism. If there is health it is in the biodiversity of the product. I suppose I was too overexposed as a graduate student in comparative literature to both the wretchedness of xenophobia and the repetitive vagaries of literary history, to maintain interest. If after a few days I can’t mentally summon the essence of the work I’ve been reading I simply don’t care who says it’s good and why. The impulse to choose up sides is better abandoned in grade school. I recall how startled I was in my early twenties in Boston when I discovered I was not allowed to like Roethke, the Lowell of Life Studies, and also Duncan, Snyder, and Olson, the latter three whom I came to know. Not that I was above the frays, just that I was unequal to maintaining interest in them. I remember that in my brief time in academia, in our rather shabby rental in Stony Brook, we had gatherings of poets as diverse as Denise Levertov, Louis Simpson, James Wright, and Robert Duncan who all rather effortlessly got along. But then, the poem is the thing and most of the rest are variations on the theme of gossip.
If I attempt to slip rather lightly over my own volumes, distinctly visual images arise with each book, emerging from what job I had at the time to support my family, what studio or kitchen table I used to write the work, where we lived at the time, and my usual obsession with what kind of cheap wine I was drinking. Other images include what dog or dogs were our beloved companions, and what cats tormented or loved the dogs. This is what I meant by cave paintings or petroglyphs: cooking our lives down we don’t really cook away our Pleistocene ingredients. I am reminded that in the splendid history of Icelandic culture everyone is expected to at least try to turn a hand to poetry. I am also reminded of Heidegger’s contention that poetry is not elevated common language but that common language is reduced, banalized poetry.
1. Plain Song. My first book, published through the efforts of Denise Levertov, who had become a consulting editor at W.W. Norton. Nothing equals, of course, the first book, which is at the very least a tenuous justification of what you insisted was your calling. I had been eating the contents of world poetry since I was fifteen and without any idea of what to spit out. I collected Botteghe Oscure, but also Bly’s magazines The Fifties and The Sixties. I was obsessed with Lorca, W.C. Williams, Apollinaire, Rimbaud, and Walt Whitman but none of it much shows in the book, which is mostly poems out of my rural past. It was primarily written in Boston where I was a road man for a book wholesaler; but I had my first real exposure to other poets, most of whom hung out in Gordon Cairnie’s Grolier Book Shop, in Cambridge. I also spent some time with Charles Olson in Gloucester but was too bent on my own obsessions to digest any of his gospel.
2. Locations. Quite a different book. I couldn’t endure the city so we moved back to rural northern Michigan, where I worked as a common construction laborer and studied Pound and Rilke at night, also T’ang Dynasty poets. Rilke can be viewed as some sort of ornate European shaman who devours his imperiled readers who must wonder if they are ever going to emerge. I was also drawn to Stravinsky at the time, whom I endlessly played on our thirty-dollar record player in the living room of our thirty-dollar-a-month house that never got warm. I think this fascination with classical music lead me to the “suite” form.
3. Outlyer & Ghazals. An old professor and friend, Herbert Weisinger, engineered my getting a long-abandoned master’s degree and dragged us out of northern Michigan to Stony Brook, Long Island. This was likely a good thing with an exposure to hundreds of poets and to New York City, where in my late teens I had been a solitary buffoon. I began writing ghazals as a reaction to being terribly overstuffed with culture.
4. Letters to Yesenin. An utterly desperate period with multiple clinical depressions. I was still in high school when I discovered a Yarmolinsky anthology of Russian poetry and became fascinated with it, aided later by the splendor of the New York Public Library. I was temperamentally unfit for academic life and we had moved back to northern Michigan, aided by two deceptive grants from the National Endowment, and the Guggenheim Foundation; “deceptive” because I did not see the day of reckoning when I’d somehow have to make a living again. I went to Russia with Dan Gerber in 1972 and followed the tracks of Yesenin, Dostoyevsky, Voznesensky and Akhmatova, poets we loved. I tried everything to make a living, including journalism and novel-writing, neither of which quite supported us. For nearly a decade we averaged ten grand a year. The Letters to Yesenin were an act of desperation and survival.
5. Returning to Earth. More from this occasionally grim period, leavened by the fact that we lived in a relatively poor area and our condition was scarcely unique. This long poem was, I suspect, both a conscious and unconscious attempt to internalize the natural world I had been so strongly drawn to after a childhood injury that had blinded my left eye.
6. Selected and New Poems. Probably premature but then I had finally had a financial success with a book of novellas, Legends of the Fall, and my publisher was quite willing to collect my poetry.
7. The Theory and Practice of Rivers. Written at a remote cabin nestled by a river in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and at our farm in Leelanau County. It was an attempt to render what could keep one alive in a progressively more unpleasant world with some of the difficulties of my own doing in the world of script writing in New York and Hollywood. It is certainly not my métier but it was a well-paid option to teaching, at which I was a failure. I used to think it was virtuous to stay distant from academia but gradually I realized that any way a “serious writer” can get a living is fine. The problem with both town and gown is the temptation to write for one’s peers rather than from the heart. The same is true of the multifoliate forms of regionalism.
8. After Ikkyū. A largely misunderstood book. Dan Wakefield has noted that in our haute culture books thought to have any religious content are largely ignored. I have practiced a profoundly inept sort of Zen for twenty-five years and this book is an attempt to return to the more elemental facts of life, unsuffocated by habituation, conditioning, or learning.
9. “Geo-Bestiary.” The new work included in these New and Collected Poems. A rather wild-eyed effort to resume contact with reality after writing a long novel that had drawn me far from the world I like to call home.
– Jim Harrison
Grand Marais, Michigan
May 7, 1998
PLAIN SONG
to Linda
1965
POEM
Form is the woods: the beast,
a bobcat padding through red sumac,
the pheasant in brake or goldenrod
that he stalks – both rise to the flush,
the brief low flutter and catch in air;
and trees, rich green, the moving of boughs
and the separate leaf, yield
to conclusions they do not care about
or watch – the dead, frayed bird,
the beautiful plumage,
the spoor of feathers
and slight, pink bones.
SKETCH FOR A JOB–APPLICATION BLANK
My left eye is blind and jogs like
a milky sparrow in its socket;
my nose is large and never flares
in anger, the front teeth, bucked,
but not in lechery – I sucked
my thumb until the age of twelve.
O my youth was happy and I was never lonely
though my friends called me “pig eye”
and the teachers thought me loony.
(When I bruised, my psyche kept intact:
I fell from horses, and once a cow but never
pigs – a neighbor lost a hand to a sow.)
But I had some fears:
the salesman of eyes,
his case was full of fishy baubles,
against black velvet, jeweled gore,
the great cocked hoof of a Belgian mare,
a nest of milk snakes by the water trough,
electric fences,
my uncle’s hounds,