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Letters to Yesenin
"The way Harrison has embedded his entire vision of our predicament implicitly in the particulars of two poetic lives, his own and Yesenin's, is what makes the poem not only his best but one of the best in the past twenty-five years of American writing."-Hayden Carruth, Sulfur
"Harrison inhabits the problems of our age as if they were beasts into which he had crawled, and Letters to Yesenin is a kind of imaginative taxidermy that refuses to stay in place up on the trophy room wall, but insists on walking into the dining room."-The American Poetry Review
Jim Harrison's gorgeous, desperate, and harrowing "correspondence" with Sergei Yesenin-a Russian poet who committed suicide after writing his final poem in his own blood-is considered an American masterwork.
In the early 1970s, Harrison was living in poverty on a hardscrabble farm, suffering from depression and suicidal tendencies. In response he began to write daily prose-poem letters to Yesenin. Through this one-sided correspondence, Harrison unloads to this unlikely hero, ranting and raving about politics, drinking problems, family concerns, farm life, and a full range of daily occurrences. The rope remains ever present.
Yet sometime through these letters there is a significant shift. Rather than feeling inextricably linked to Yesenin's inevitable path, Harrison becomes furious, arguing about their imagined relationship: "I'm beginning to doubt whether we ever would have been friends."
In the end, Harrison listened to his own poems: "My year-old daughter's red robe hangs from the doorknob shouting Stop."
- GenresPoetryLiterature
62 pages, ebook
First published January 1, 1973
12 people are currently reading
294 people want to read
About the author
Jim Harrison
184 books1,493 followersJim Harrison was born in Grayling, Michigan, to Winfield Sprague Harrison, a county agricultural agent, and Norma Olivia (Wahlgren) Harrison, both avid readers. He married Linda King in 1959 with whom he has two daughters.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
His awards include National Academy of Arts grants (1967, 68, 69), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1969-70), the Spirit of the West Award from the Mountain & Plains Booksellers Association, and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2007).
Much of Harrison's writing depicts sparsely populated regions of North America with many stories set in places such as Nebraska's Sand Hills, Michigan's Upper Peninsula, Montana's mountains, and along the Arizona-Mexico border.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
His awards include National Academy of Arts grants (1967, 68, 69), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1969-70), the Spirit of the West Award from the Mountain & Plains Booksellers Association, and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2007).
Much of Harrison's writing depicts sparsely populated regions of North America with many stories set in places such as Nebraska's Sand Hills, Michigan's Upper Peninsula, Montana's mountains, and along the Arizona-Mexico border.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 36 reviews
December 11, 2009
I won't apologize for liking Jim Harrison. Anyone who doesn't like how much I like him can go for a stroll in an industrial metal compactor. This poetry, which addresses in mostly Northern Michigan colloquial dialect a minor Russian Symbolist and Slavophile poet who killed himself, is as skilled a piece of thinking as anything I've encountered. What I like about poetry that prose doesn't do, or doesn't always, is that it can (not to say should) mirror thought more closely without all the formal scaffolding, without footnotes. Harrison's poetry sometimes reads a bit stilted (I'm still not a huge fan of After Ikkyu), but Letters boils the hyperliterate gripes of a horny rural poet down to a sequence of memorable prose poems, complete with all the unexpected dilatations that make it impossible to get through an actual thought without - well, fuck it. You get rueful poems here about toothaches, taxes and wanting to bring "all the dead back to life." If I were the phone book publisher of a small municipality, I would hire Jim Harrison to work it into something funny and sad. The guy is priceless. Plus it's his birthday today.
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May 7, 2016Here's a quick draught: Jim Harrison writes 30 letter-poems to a Russian poet named Yesenin who committed suicide at age 30 in 1925. Jim is at the beginning of his writing career, doing a lot of poetry writing himself, is a new father, and toys with the idea of suicide while writing a suicide. (Well, at least he's on topic.)
This might get morbid ipso fasto, but Harrison keeps it light with his constant self-deprecating (and often dark) humor. For instance, let's look at letter-poem #2 (note: they are all the same length):
I don't have any medals. I feel their lack
of weight on my chest. Years ago I was ambitious.
But now it is clear that nothing will happen.
All those poems that made me soar along a foot
from the ground are not so much forgotten as never
read in the first place. They rolled like moons
of lights into a puddle and were drowned. Not even
the puddle can be located now. Yet I am encouraged
by the way you hung yourself, telling me that such
thing don't matter. You, the fabulous poet of
Mother Russia. But still, even now, school girls
hold your dead heart, your poems, in their laps
on hot August afternoons by the river while they wait
for their boyfriends to get out of work or their
lovers to return from the army, their dead pets to
return to life again. To be called to supper. You
have a new life on their laps and can scent their
lavender scent, the cloud of hair that falls
over you, feel their feet trailing in the river,
or hidden in a purse walk the Neva again. Best of all
you are used badly like a bouquet of flowers to make
them shed their dresses in apartments. See those
steam pipes running along the ceiling. The rope.
You see how discursive he is. Very much a "letter" approach (or what we called "epistolary" back when people wrote letters and didn't worry about 130 characters or whatever the hell Pirandello searches for on Twitter). Other lines randomly liked from the letters:
"These past weeks I have been organizing myself into my separate pieces."
"Fruit and butter. She smelled like the skin of an apple. The sun was hot and I felt an unbounded sickness with earth."
"All my books are remaindered and out of print. My face in the mirror asks me who I am and says I don't know. But stop the whining. I am alive and a hundred thousand acres of birches around my house wave in the wind. They are women standing on their heads. Their leaves on the ground today are small saucers of snow from which I drink with endless thirst."
"I was proud at four that my father called me Little Turd of Misery."
"The endless bondage of words."
"Imagine being a dog and never knowing what you're doing. You're simply doing: eating garbage, fawning, mounting in public with terrible energy. But let's not be romantic."
"She has green eyes and is recent from the bath. If you were close enough which you'll never be you could catch her scent of lemon and the clear softness of her nape where it meets her hair. She'll probably die of flu next year or marry an engineer. The same things really as far as you're concerned."
"Pleasure gives. And takes."
"A good poet is only a sorcerer bored with magic who has turned his attention elsewhere."
"But maybe even Robert Frost or Charles Olson don't know they are dead. That would include you of course. It is no quantity, absolute zero, the air in a hole minus its airiness, the vacuum from the passing bird or bullet, the end of the stem where the peach was, the place above the ground where the barn burned with such energy we plugged our ears."
You get the idea. A glimpse in the mind of a young and restless poet paying homage to a young and resting suicide. Organized stream of consciousness. Of a sort. And worth the warm half hour against the radiator to read.
This might get morbid ipso fasto, but Harrison keeps it light with his constant self-deprecating (and often dark) humor. For instance, let's look at letter-poem #2 (note: they are all the same length):
I don't have any medals. I feel their lack
of weight on my chest. Years ago I was ambitious.
But now it is clear that nothing will happen.
All those poems that made me soar along a foot
from the ground are not so much forgotten as never
read in the first place. They rolled like moons
of lights into a puddle and were drowned. Not even
the puddle can be located now. Yet I am encouraged
by the way you hung yourself, telling me that such
thing don't matter. You, the fabulous poet of
Mother Russia. But still, even now, school girls
hold your dead heart, your poems, in their laps
on hot August afternoons by the river while they wait
for their boyfriends to get out of work or their
lovers to return from the army, their dead pets to
return to life again. To be called to supper. You
have a new life on their laps and can scent their
lavender scent, the cloud of hair that falls
over you, feel their feet trailing in the river,
or hidden in a purse walk the Neva again. Best of all
you are used badly like a bouquet of flowers to make
them shed their dresses in apartments. See those
steam pipes running along the ceiling. The rope.
You see how discursive he is. Very much a "letter" approach (or what we called "epistolary" back when people wrote letters and didn't worry about 130 characters or whatever the hell Pirandello searches for on Twitter). Other lines randomly liked from the letters:
"These past weeks I have been organizing myself into my separate pieces."
"Fruit and butter. She smelled like the skin of an apple. The sun was hot and I felt an unbounded sickness with earth."
"All my books are remaindered and out of print. My face in the mirror asks me who I am and says I don't know. But stop the whining. I am alive and a hundred thousand acres of birches around my house wave in the wind. They are women standing on their heads. Their leaves on the ground today are small saucers of snow from which I drink with endless thirst."
"I was proud at four that my father called me Little Turd of Misery."
"The endless bondage of words."
"Imagine being a dog and never knowing what you're doing. You're simply doing: eating garbage, fawning, mounting in public with terrible energy. But let's not be romantic."
"She has green eyes and is recent from the bath. If you were close enough which you'll never be you could catch her scent of lemon and the clear softness of her nape where it meets her hair. She'll probably die of flu next year or marry an engineer. The same things really as far as you're concerned."
"Pleasure gives. And takes."
"A good poet is only a sorcerer bored with magic who has turned his attention elsewhere."
"But maybe even Robert Frost or Charles Olson don't know they are dead. That would include you of course. It is no quantity, absolute zero, the air in a hole minus its airiness, the vacuum from the passing bird or bullet, the end of the stem where the peach was, the place above the ground where the barn burned with such energy we plugged our ears."
You get the idea. A glimpse in the mind of a young and restless poet paying homage to a young and resting suicide. Organized stream of consciousness. Of a sort. And worth the warm half hour against the radiator to read.
June 17, 2015
Horrifying and beautiful and, occasionally, easy to pass over without much feeling -- to be quick about it. Upon multiple readings, I'm convinced that some of the poems just require a little investment of horror and drunkenness from the reader to really shine (and these are truly [like, aaagghh!!] affecting in that state) while most of the others are sufficiently drilling to breach the average contentment or, if experiencing some serious fucking joy, still enough to make you remember and appreciate the enticement to and struggle against oblivion many of these poems offer. A couple of the best prose poems written are in here. A couple others are good (which is to say, disappointing -- due to the company they keep).
January 19, 2018
One of the best and most beautiful books of poetry I’ve ever read.
March 17, 2018
Blazin'
January 6, 2024
“But what grand songs you made out of an awful life though you had no faith that less was more…”
January 17, 2021
Easily the best book I’ve read in the last five years. Harrison does not write a single pedestrian line in this entire masterpiece. I’m floored. Absolutely stunned by beauty.
February 1, 2011
3.
I wanted to feel exalted so I picked up
Doctor Zhivago again. But the newspaper was there
with the horrors of the Olympics, those dead and
perpetually martyred sons of David. I want to present
all Israelis with .357 magnums so that they are
never to be martyred again. I wanted to be exalted
so I picked up Doctor Zhivago again but the TV was on
with a movie about the sufferings of convicts in
the early history of Australia. But then the movie
was over and the level of the bourbon bottle was dropping
and I still wanted to be exalted lying there with
the book on my chest. I recalled Moscow but I could
not place dear Yuri, only you Yesenin, seeing the Kremlin
glitter and ripple like Asia. And when drunk you appeared
as some Bakst stage drawing, a slain Tartar. But that is
all ballet. And what a dance you had kicking your legs from
the rope–We all change our minds, Berryman said in Minnesota
halfway down the river. Villon said of the rope that my neck
will feel the weight of my ass. But I wanted to feel exalted
again and read the poems at the end of Doctor Zhivago and
just barely made it. Suicide. Beauty takes my courage
away this cold autumn evening. My year-old daughter's red
robe hangs from the doorknob shouting Stop.
October 6, 2023
3.5 stars.
jimmy boy you talk about women in such a weird way and you need to stop whinnying!!! however. ur a fantastic poet.
here is my class discussion post for this book:
I am tempted to apply the adjective whiny to Jim Harrison in Letters to Yesenin, but I don’t think this is completely fair. Initially, I felt that he was just complaining and looking for reasons to be upset without ever seeking solutions or solace from his unhappiness. This is something that tends to turn me off in poetry, as I understand poetry to be a way to find beauty in a world that can very often be uncomfortable or distressing. This does not mean that I think that poetry cannot grapple with difficult topics or feelings, but that it should be about working through those things and creating rich meaning from them. Although I was often frustrated by the tone he chose to take, Harrison is pretty self-aware that these letters may come across as negative and complaining. In the fifth letter, he writes “My face in / in the mirror asks me who I am and says I don’t know. But stop / this whining. I am alive and a hundred thousand acres of birches / around my house wave in the wind” (9-10). I think some more accurate adjectives to describe the first person narrator who emerges in the collection of poems/letters would be disoriented, troubled, and— at times— surprisingly hopeful. I understood this collection to be a sort of therapy for Harrison. He is clearly a very troubled man, as evidenced by the ongoing presence of the “rope” in all the poems (a reference to the way in which Yesenin took his own life). He is clearly writing about his sense of depression. He finds the world to be cruel. In choosing to write to Yesenin, another poet who is long dead, I felt that he was looking for a passive audience with whom he could work through his feelings of isolation and pain. He seems to compare his life to Yesenin’s life, trying to reorient his lived experience within the context of what a successful poet/writer looks like. He is feeling lost and uses Yesenin (and his death) as a way to conceptualize what his life/death might look like if he fails to pull himself from this disoriented state. In doing so, he seems to be able to locate little pockets of hope and joy within his life, despite his inability to measure up to Yesenin’s success. These moments when he did manage to pull beauty from the world and be a bit hopeful were the moments that captured my attention the most and when I felt his poetry was at its strongest and most touching.
That being said, I am going to focus specifically on “Postscript,” one of the final poems in the book. He starts the poem off with the image of all the watches in the world being wound at the same moment at the beginning of a new day. “At 8:12 AM all of the watches in the world are being wound. / Which is not quite the same thing as all of the guitars on earth / being tuned at midnight. / Or that all suicides come after the mail- /man when all hope is gone. Before the mailman, watches are wound, / windows looked through, shoes precisely tied, tooth care, the / attenuations of the hangover noted… / The world is so necessary” (61). While suicide still has it’s place in the poem, he refers to it as a rather abstract concept related to the lack of hope and connects it to the world at large (rather than just himself and Yesenin). He sees the world as working in unison (refreshing all at the same time) and calls it necessary rather than confusing and threatening. It is not so much that he loves the world that he is in, but understands it and recognizes the order of things. “Someone must execute the stray dogs and / free the space they are taking up… / that mystical space that was somewhere / occupied by a stray dog or a girl in an asylum on her hands / and knees. A hanged face turns slowly from a plum to a lump of / coal” (61). The rope remains present and Harrison’s pessimism remains, but he seems to find a bit of comfort in the idea that everyone, even dogs and a mentally ill girl, have their place. He also describes the face of a hanged man turning from something inviting and sweet to something dark and unpleasant, indicating that he is finding the concept of leaving the world in the way Yesenin did less and less appealing. He then moves on to the image of a cat running around in a yard, preparing herself against threat and “eventualities,” which I understood to be death. He then writes “But we aren’t the cats / we once were thousands of years ago. You didn’t die with the / dignity of an animal” (61). Harrison makes the claim that we are different from cats (and animals in general) in that we aren’t always thinking and living in absolutes— our lives are fraught with the complexity that comes with understanding that we are alive. He directly addresses Yesenin using the pronoun “you” and asserts that he died with all of those complexities in his heart. The fact that life became unbearable for Yesenin (in a way it never could for a cat) and therefore Yesenin killed himself is what sets him apart. The final lines of the poem read “Today you make me want to tie myself to / a tree, stake my feet into earth herself so I can’t get away. It didn’t / come as a burning bush or a pillar of light but I have decided to stay” (61). On a personal note, I adored these lines. They hit me so hard when I read them. Throughout the rest of the book, Harrison seemed to be in search of some definite proof that life is worth living, some miracle. In these final lines he reveals that though he never got his miracle, he has decided not to take his own life due to all the little things. He compares himself again to Yesenin, stating that Yesenin’s death makes him want to do the opposite of hang himself (tether himself to the ground) in an effort to stay. Little details (the beauty of the earth, poetry, his loved ones, the workings of the world, and maybe even curiosity) make him want to be alive. He will face all of the complexity that Yesenin was unable to.
jimmy boy you talk about women in such a weird way and you need to stop whinnying!!! however. ur a fantastic poet.
here is my class discussion post for this book:
I am tempted to apply the adjective whiny to Jim Harrison in Letters to Yesenin, but I don’t think this is completely fair. Initially, I felt that he was just complaining and looking for reasons to be upset without ever seeking solutions or solace from his unhappiness. This is something that tends to turn me off in poetry, as I understand poetry to be a way to find beauty in a world that can very often be uncomfortable or distressing. This does not mean that I think that poetry cannot grapple with difficult topics or feelings, but that it should be about working through those things and creating rich meaning from them. Although I was often frustrated by the tone he chose to take, Harrison is pretty self-aware that these letters may come across as negative and complaining. In the fifth letter, he writes “My face in / in the mirror asks me who I am and says I don’t know. But stop / this whining. I am alive and a hundred thousand acres of birches / around my house wave in the wind” (9-10). I think some more accurate adjectives to describe the first person narrator who emerges in the collection of poems/letters would be disoriented, troubled, and— at times— surprisingly hopeful. I understood this collection to be a sort of therapy for Harrison. He is clearly a very troubled man, as evidenced by the ongoing presence of the “rope” in all the poems (a reference to the way in which Yesenin took his own life). He is clearly writing about his sense of depression. He finds the world to be cruel. In choosing to write to Yesenin, another poet who is long dead, I felt that he was looking for a passive audience with whom he could work through his feelings of isolation and pain. He seems to compare his life to Yesenin’s life, trying to reorient his lived experience within the context of what a successful poet/writer looks like. He is feeling lost and uses Yesenin (and his death) as a way to conceptualize what his life/death might look like if he fails to pull himself from this disoriented state. In doing so, he seems to be able to locate little pockets of hope and joy within his life, despite his inability to measure up to Yesenin’s success. These moments when he did manage to pull beauty from the world and be a bit hopeful were the moments that captured my attention the most and when I felt his poetry was at its strongest and most touching.
That being said, I am going to focus specifically on “Postscript,” one of the final poems in the book. He starts the poem off with the image of all the watches in the world being wound at the same moment at the beginning of a new day. “At 8:12 AM all of the watches in the world are being wound. / Which is not quite the same thing as all of the guitars on earth / being tuned at midnight. / Or that all suicides come after the mail- /man when all hope is gone. Before the mailman, watches are wound, / windows looked through, shoes precisely tied, tooth care, the / attenuations of the hangover noted… / The world is so necessary” (61). While suicide still has it’s place in the poem, he refers to it as a rather abstract concept related to the lack of hope and connects it to the world at large (rather than just himself and Yesenin). He sees the world as working in unison (refreshing all at the same time) and calls it necessary rather than confusing and threatening. It is not so much that he loves the world that he is in, but understands it and recognizes the order of things. “Someone must execute the stray dogs and / free the space they are taking up… / that mystical space that was somewhere / occupied by a stray dog or a girl in an asylum on her hands / and knees. A hanged face turns slowly from a plum to a lump of / coal” (61). The rope remains present and Harrison’s pessimism remains, but he seems to find a bit of comfort in the idea that everyone, even dogs and a mentally ill girl, have their place. He also describes the face of a hanged man turning from something inviting and sweet to something dark and unpleasant, indicating that he is finding the concept of leaving the world in the way Yesenin did less and less appealing. He then moves on to the image of a cat running around in a yard, preparing herself against threat and “eventualities,” which I understood to be death. He then writes “But we aren’t the cats / we once were thousands of years ago. You didn’t die with the / dignity of an animal” (61). Harrison makes the claim that we are different from cats (and animals in general) in that we aren’t always thinking and living in absolutes— our lives are fraught with the complexity that comes with understanding that we are alive. He directly addresses Yesenin using the pronoun “you” and asserts that he died with all of those complexities in his heart. The fact that life became unbearable for Yesenin (in a way it never could for a cat) and therefore Yesenin killed himself is what sets him apart. The final lines of the poem read “Today you make me want to tie myself to / a tree, stake my feet into earth herself so I can’t get away. It didn’t / come as a burning bush or a pillar of light but I have decided to stay” (61). On a personal note, I adored these lines. They hit me so hard when I read them. Throughout the rest of the book, Harrison seemed to be in search of some definite proof that life is worth living, some miracle. In these final lines he reveals that though he never got his miracle, he has decided not to take his own life due to all the little things. He compares himself again to Yesenin, stating that Yesenin’s death makes him want to do the opposite of hang himself (tether himself to the ground) in an effort to stay. Little details (the beauty of the earth, poetry, his loved ones, the workings of the world, and maybe even curiosity) make him want to be alive. He will face all of the complexity that Yesenin was unable to.
July 22, 2011
Knowing next to nothing about Harrison before reading this collection, I found the poems wonderfully revealing. The format of poem-as-correspondence with the dead (suicide) Yesenin was a remarkably effective vehicle for autobiography. Seeming to flirt with suicide himself (biography tells us this was a difficult time with too much alcohol), he rejects it (the wonderful third poem, quoted in its entirety here on Goodreads by Peycho: "My year-old daughter's red/ robe hangs from the doorknob shouting 'Stop'.") without condemning Yesenin:
"...But I've no right to bring you back to life. We must/ respect your affection for the rope. You knew the exact juncture/ in your life when the act of dangling could be made a dance."
"...But I've no right to bring you back to life. We must/ respect your affection for the rope. You knew the exact juncture/ in your life when the act of dangling could be made a dance."
September 23, 2008
I'd just like to point out that my five-star review doesn't say much.
I love this book beyond all rationality. I don't care much for Harrison's other poems, except occasionally, but this is the real thing.
I love this book beyond all rationality. I don't care much for Harrison's other poems, except occasionally, but this is the real thing.
October 16, 2024
I'm just discovering Harrison's poetry, and this is a solid collection full of lyrical zingers. I don't think it has the same emotional depth as his later work, but this is in some ways predictable. The writing in this book merits five stars, but Harrison's chauvinism was so distracting that it impacted my enjoyment of the collection. This was written in a different time, and it shows. This is still a valuable collection and deserves a read.
November 19, 2016
A compelling one sided dialogue with the Russian poet. Moving from darkness to light it is a weave of immediate reports, remembered experience, meditations on death and a summoning of the spirit of the Yesenin. It's as moving as it is entertaining. My first Jim Harrison and I can't wait to read more.
October 17, 2019
A wonderfully arced collection of poems. Harrison writes poetry to Yesenin, ruminating on suicide and death in a way that is at times darkly funny and other times beautifully somber. Some poems I liked better than others but overall thought it was wonderful.
December 30, 2020
In the midst of a deep depression amid poverty and a struggling career, Harrison wrote thirty prose poems to Yesenin, a well-regarded Russian poet who took his own life. It is a beautiful book, heartbreaking yet ever searching for hope and guidance and finding it in his own way. Highly recommended.
May 8, 2019
Probably biased because this book found me at just the right time in my life. Has lost some of its luster to me with age, but still a decent read.
April 25, 2020
Grim when you learn about Yesenin. I like how Harrison keeps things rooted in the physical world.
February 24, 2021
'Just a man and his horse against everything else on earth and horses are so dumb they run all day from flies never learning that flies are everywhere.'
April 29, 2023
Depressing....what do you expect for a poetry collection that doubles as a suicide note?
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October 22, 2023Letter 19>>>
April 1, 2011
Letters to Yesenin is a collection of poems written by Jim Harrison and published by the Fremont Company in Sumac, Michigan in 1973. Each of the poems are nearly exactly the same length, only changing by a few words length each time, excluding two of the thirty poems. Although sometimes you will feel a sense of detachment from the poetry, because many of the poems reference foreign entities or people, they more than often need to be looked up for a better understanding of the poetry and its subject. Once you understand Yesenin’s life though, you understand the poetry flawlessly.
The majority of the poetry forms the story of Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin, who killed himself at age thirty, on the 27th of December, 1925. Yesenin first attempted to commit suicide by slitting his wrists and he wrote a farewell poem in his own blood shortly before passing out. He later awoke the next day in a pool of his blood, and continued with his suicidal attempts, and successfully hung himself minutes later. First time reading this collection of poetry without that information was fairly confusing, but after reading up on Yesenin, the poetry pieces form a congruent whole. Although sometimes the poetry does continue from one piece to the next, each poem is usually a singularity in the life of Yesenin, or it is a description to Yesenin about what has happened since his death. Several of the poems are also heavily figurative of the nature of what once was and what has happened, but each is filled with a straight forward meaning to explain parts of Yesenin’s life. It is brilliantly written to help bring light to his life while relating to things that have happened in the present. Much of the book will transform to be almost confession to Yesenin about how Harrison admires that he just didn’t care about the social implications of committing suicide, that it was something that so many were claiming to do or threatened, but only few do, and usually it’s without direct warning.
Each poem is extremely meaningful in many ways, and the form it is written in is perfect for the pieces. The main backbone of the story is Yesenin’s suicide, so none of the poetry really gets you in an up and going mood, but the way it is done can get you to ravel your mind about it and never forget it. About the structure of the book as a whole, is that it is almost too structured. Each poem is almost the same length as the last, and the way each is written is identical. It starts with a warm-up, brings more light to the situation, then evaluates, and finally concludes almost in a condensed essay form. This can cause a bit of boredom in reading each in succession, but reading it spanned out will help immensely. If you do read consecutively though, the stories almost become predictable, excluding the figurative meaning in each piece. The entire book boils down to an indirect apology that Harrison wants to deliver, but then justifies by relating it to the actions of Yesenin.
Harrison’s creation, Letters to Yesenin, is a beautifully created collection of poetry, that will astound you with the level of metaphorical detail and attention to history to bring the poems to life. As long as a new reader is fine with researching a touch of history before reading, this book a wonderful and new take on poetry that suites nearly anyone.
The majority of the poetry forms the story of Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin, who killed himself at age thirty, on the 27th of December, 1925. Yesenin first attempted to commit suicide by slitting his wrists and he wrote a farewell poem in his own blood shortly before passing out. He later awoke the next day in a pool of his blood, and continued with his suicidal attempts, and successfully hung himself minutes later. First time reading this collection of poetry without that information was fairly confusing, but after reading up on Yesenin, the poetry pieces form a congruent whole. Although sometimes the poetry does continue from one piece to the next, each poem is usually a singularity in the life of Yesenin, or it is a description to Yesenin about what has happened since his death. Several of the poems are also heavily figurative of the nature of what once was and what has happened, but each is filled with a straight forward meaning to explain parts of Yesenin’s life. It is brilliantly written to help bring light to his life while relating to things that have happened in the present. Much of the book will transform to be almost confession to Yesenin about how Harrison admires that he just didn’t care about the social implications of committing suicide, that it was something that so many were claiming to do or threatened, but only few do, and usually it’s without direct warning.
Each poem is extremely meaningful in many ways, and the form it is written in is perfect for the pieces. The main backbone of the story is Yesenin’s suicide, so none of the poetry really gets you in an up and going mood, but the way it is done can get you to ravel your mind about it and never forget it. About the structure of the book as a whole, is that it is almost too structured. Each poem is almost the same length as the last, and the way each is written is identical. It starts with a warm-up, brings more light to the situation, then evaluates, and finally concludes almost in a condensed essay form. This can cause a bit of boredom in reading each in succession, but reading it spanned out will help immensely. If you do read consecutively though, the stories almost become predictable, excluding the figurative meaning in each piece. The entire book boils down to an indirect apology that Harrison wants to deliver, but then justifies by relating it to the actions of Yesenin.
Harrison’s creation, Letters to Yesenin, is a beautifully created collection of poetry, that will astound you with the level of metaphorical detail and attention to history to bring the poems to life. As long as a new reader is fine with researching a touch of history before reading, this book a wonderful and new take on poetry that suites nearly anyone.
February 20, 2015
jim harrison's letters/poems to suicided russian poet yesenin, written in 1973, contemplating and trying to talk himself out of doing the same thing. women, food, booze, fish, trees, insects, mud, dogs n cats, birds, weather, desks, windows, snakes, art, travel, history, elephants... all conspired to 'talk' harrison out of roping himself to a tree limb, neck first. instead, his 'cat'....[Y]ou make me want to tie myself to a tree, stake my feet to earth herself so I can't get away. It didn't come as a burning bush or pillar of light but I've decided to stay."
i think, but not sure, author revisited these thoughts of suicide, and why nots?, again in 2007 for a short postscript poem too.
i think, but not sure, author revisited these thoughts of suicide, and why nots?, again in 2007 for a short postscript poem too.
June 8, 2016
In format, this is exceptional: Harrison, still early in his career and full of the uncertainties of the enterprise, writes 30 prose poems to Yesenin, a Russian poet whose suicide is fifty years in the past. Harrison returns again and again to that noose, always with a novel approach to the imagery and significance of the deed. Imagery is plentiful, but nothing recurs like that noose, which awaits the end of many of the poems. Harrison is a vivid writer who can succinctly capture mood and crisis, and he writes around that noose until he finds all the ways to avoid it. There is a nice post-script written later in life which looks back on the whole enterprise with a different perspective.
July 15, 2008
Probably one of the best books of poetry I have read in a while. It was so heart breaking and accessable. These poems are letters to the Russian poet Yesenin who committed suicide after composing his final poem in blood. You see the phantom of suicide throughout these letters as he tries to deal with drug addiction and depression. Brilliant read! I am becoming more of a fan of his work each time.
July 26, 2016
This volume of poems was first published in 1973 and later republished
by Copper Canyon Press in 2007. It is an homage to the Russian poet
Yesenin who hanged himself in 1925. He was a distant relative to Harrison,
who in the early 70s wrote daily prose-poem letters confiding with the
ghost of his depression, drunkenness, family, etc. Powerful, scalding
words about both of their lives in these "letters" that startle the reader
awake with their sorrows.
by Copper Canyon Press in 2007. It is an homage to the Russian poet
Yesenin who hanged himself in 1925. He was a distant relative to Harrison,
who in the early 70s wrote daily prose-poem letters confiding with the
ghost of his depression, drunkenness, family, etc. Powerful, scalding
words about both of their lives in these "letters" that startle the reader
awake with their sorrows.
April 7, 2009
Would like to read this again and then again. Read it on my birthday and found myself propelled through it. Pulled by the rope that Yesenin dangled from and that finds its way in many of the poems as well as on the splendid cover of the book--a tether between Harrison and Yesenin and the reader, and a tether we each, perhaps, feel alone. Who has not contemplated suicide? But who actually does it?
August 4, 2008
I am halfway through this book and enjoying it, although Harrison's hardscrabble, Hemingway-esque persona can be a little trying from time to time. I like the leit motif of Russian authors he has woven through it a lot, though, and it's super readable.
July 10, 2016
Some of the letters, deeply poetic and beautiful, some beyond me. An interesting concept, framing the death of a stranger that shares a craft, against a lived in another age halfway across the world.
Continue to enjoy all things Harrison and will delving deeper into his work.
Continue to enjoy all things Harrison and will delving deeper into his work.
February 13, 2008
tragic beautiful poems.
February 20, 2008
An astonishing powerful sequence of poems - of which my favorite is "27": "Thus my life draws fuel ineluctably from triumph."
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