Jim Harrison: The Essential Poems

by Jim Harrison, Joseph Bednarik (Editor)

"An untrammeled renegade genius... Here is a poet talking to you instead of around himself, while doing absolutely brilliant and outrageous things with language."--Publishers Weekly

Starred Review in Booklist "[C]hoices of poems from each of Harrison's books are passionate and sharp... Of special note is a section from Letters to Yesenin, a book-length poem, and the title poem from The Theory and Practice of Rivers , which contains these echoing lines, 'I forgot where I heard that poems / are designed to waken sleeping gods.' Reading this essential volume, one might imagine that the gods are, indeed, staying up late, reading lights on, turning the pages."

Jim Harrison: The Essential Poems is distilled from fourteen volumes--from visionary lyrics and meditative suites to shape-shifting ghazals and prose-poem letters. Teeming throughout these pages are Harrison's legendary passions and appetites, his meditations, rages, and love-songs to the natural world.

The New York Times concluded a review from early in Harrison's career with a provocative quote: "This is poetry worth loving, hating, and fighting over, a subjective mirror of our American days and needs." That sentiment still holds true, as Jim Harrison's essential poems continue to call for our fiercest attention.

Also included are full-color images of poem drafts--both typescripts and holographs--as well as the letter Denise Levertov sent to publisher W.W. Norton in the early 1960s, advocating for Harrison's debut collection.

In his essay "Poetry as Survival," Jim Harrison wrote, "Poetry, at its best, is the language your soul would speak if you could teach your soul to speak." The Essential Poems is proof positive that Jim Harrison taught his soul to speak.

"In this unforgiving literary moment, we must deal honestly with [Harrison's] life and work, as they are inextricable in a way that is not true of other poets...These poems bear-crawl gorgeously after a genuine connection to being, thrashing in giant leaps through the underbrush to find consolation, purpose, and redemption. In his raw, original keening he ambushes moments of unimaginable beauty, one after another, line after line...The Essential Poems demonstrates perfectly why we should turn to Harrison again. He lived and breathed an American confrontation with the physical earth, married himself to a universe of bodies and stumps and birds, did not try to shuck his grotesque masculinity and stared hard with his one good eye (the left was blinded when he was seven) at the inescapable, beckoning finger of death." --Dean Kuipers, LitHub

"The Essential Poems provides a good introduction--or reintroduction--to the work of this singular writer... these pieces illustrate Harrison's range and his ease with various formats, from lyric poems to meditative suites to prose poems. They also spotlight his deep, rugged kinship with rural landscapes and the natural world, where 'the cost of flight is landing.'" --The Washington Post

"Jim Harrison's latest collection, The Essential Poems, contains...engaging and enlightening poems [that] should be taught, learned, and loved. Remember this."--New York Journal of Books

"Had he been a chef, all the other foodies would have talked about how Jim Harrison dealt with big flavors. In his poems, they're all there -- love and death, remorse and longing, the rocket contrails of living. There's not a lot of small talk in The Essential Poems... this book grabs you by the collar and tells you in eleven hundred ways to wake up."--John Freeman, Executive Editor, "Recommended Reading from Lit Hub Staff"

"Jim Harrison had an appetite. He devoured the natural world with gusto and wrote about it with wild energy and sweetly caustic wit...Harrison was also a prodigious poet, and this thoughtfully curated collection [The Essential Poems] showcases him at his best. Like his fiction, the poems observe the collision between civilization and the wildness outside our cities; they act like geocaches both harrowing and beautiful... Organized chronologically, the material here becomes a time line distilling Harrison's signature concerns."--Alta

"It is hard-boiled poetry, some of the best of its kind, and one is not surprised to know that Harrison has written very tough novels... His poetic vision is at the heart of it all."--Harper's

Genres: Poetry

229 pages, Paperback

Published May 28, 2019

About the author

Jim 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.

Reviews

[Ken · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful, but with this caveat: "greatest hits" from a long career can come across as piecemeal, even it the pieces are mostly delicious. The other problem lies in the editor. Who's to say which are "essential" and which are not? No one and everyone, of course. Thus this book and others like it.

One thing's sure, however. I like Harrison's poetry and will follow these bread crumbs back to the actual collections. That would make Hansel and Gretel (and Jim, if he were still with us enjoying his wine and cigarettes and dogs and mostly the natural world far away from what we read in the news) happy, anyway.

Perfect escapist literature.

[M. Sarki · Rating 3 out of 5]

https://rogueliterarysociety.com/f/ji...

What makes reading the poetry of Jim Harrison worthwhile is the occasional line that can enlist a smile. The grizzled persona of that lofty outdoorsman belies his enlightened soul. But if you take a quick look at my noted “Best Lines”lifted from the first half of this book you may not want to finish reading what I have to say. Though somewhat entertaining, the few good and serious poets still out there would not consider these following snippets “high art”.

...All these push-ups are making me a muscular fatman. Love would make me lean and burning…

...I’m walleyed and wear used capes…

...A good poet is only a sorcerer bored with magic who has turned his attention elsewhere…

...We must respect your aection for the rope. You knew the exact juncture in your life when the act of dangling could be made a dance…

...Not much will happen if you don’t like to drink champagne out of shoes…

...Today I couldn’t understand words so I scythed ragweed and goldenrod before it could go to seed and multiply…

...Study the shadow of the horse turd in the grass…

...The days are stacked against what we think we are…

...Who among us whites, child or adult, will sing while we die?...

...Sometimes the obvious is true: the full moon on her bare bottom by the river! For the gay, the full moon on the lover’s prick…

I freely confess I have never considered Jim Harrison to be the great and essential poet he has won awards for being. Even the bulk of his fiction leaves me wanting. But his engaging essays are what brought me back time and time again to keep reading Jim Harrison. Hardly anyone better than Harrison in providing strong anecdotes to daily living. But, given my prior poetic criticism, the final half of this poetry collection provided a few gems in which to consider that perhaps he was a better poet than I had previously accredited.

...A nephew rubs the sore feet of his aunt, and the rope that lifts us all toward grace creaks in the pulley…

...If you can awaken inside the familiar and discover it strange you need never leave home…

...The moose down the road wears the black cloak of a god and the dead bird lifts from a bed of moss in a shape totally unknown to us…

Jim Harrison can obviously write well and he lifts his words from a reservoir of life he drank of fully. There is sadness always present in his work. And his tears make his truth ever the more clearer.

...but then the memory has always been more vivid than the life…

…...Now that I’m old the work goes slowly...

[Kurt · Rating 5 out of 5]

If I could give it six stars, if I could give it a galaxy, I would!

[Keith Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Copper Canyon Press has made the decision to do everything they can to keep the legacies of W.S.Merwin and Jim Harrison active and alive. This book is part of that project.

Joseph Bednarik, Harrison's editor at Copper Canyon, says in his intro that he knows every reader of Harrison will notice something missing in this collection. And Harrison has passionate readers, myself included, so, yes, Bednarik's right. I wish there was more of "Letters to Yesenin" in here -- since it is my favorite book, and it is also one of the best, maybe THE best, meditation on suicide by an American writer. The all of it would have made this book far too long, I fear. And I wouldn't have wanted to sacrifice "Returning to Earth," which is partly the answer to that question of suicide, or "Theory and Practice of Rivers." So recognizing the limitations the press and Bednarik had to work with, I think, ultimately, this is a very good selection.

Bednarik also has this interesting sentence in his short editorial note -- "It is quite likely that some readers will take issue--perhaps passionate issue--with certain and specific poems and lines and words ..." Harrison still gets passionate responses, including more than his share of hate, and that mostly because of what some readers think is his attitude toward women. He is equally passionately defended. The passion of this engagement is the measure of the poems, I think, not the attitudes within the poems, particularly when they are forced on to the poems.

It is worth noting that there are large parts of the poetry reading public (not itself a gigantic audience) who don't know Harrison's work at all.

Included in this book is a holograph of the letter Denise Levertov wrote to her publisher to introduce Harrison to them back in the early 60s. She says many things interesting in this letter, but I am most intrigued today with this sentence -- she puts Harrison in a lyric tradition of "non-didactic, non-philosophizing poetry in which 'form follows function' and symbols are not applied but are deeply inherent in the image itself." I'm not sure later Harrison is "non-philosophizing," but that part about the symbols arising from image is very important, I think, and applies to a lot more literature than Harrison. Symbol seems so much more visceral to me than metaphor, although metaphor is so much more easily comprehended. It is lovely to be reminded how absolutely perceptive Levertov was.

These poems come back like wise old friends who can still make me laugh and occasionally weep.

[London Baker · Rating 4 out of 5]

(4/5)
Harrison liked birds.

These poems were great. Some better than others, some phenomenal, some not so good. I liked the collection though.

It’s hard to rate poetry (as any viewer of Dead Poets Society would know) so I’ll just give it 4 stars and move on. You can’t do justice to poetry by rating it.

Just go read it yourself. That’s all I can offer in terms of a rating.

[E.M. Welcher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow.

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

A powerful, yes, essential collection of Harrison's poems, sensitively curated by editor Joseph Bednarik.

I am admittedly biased as I come to this book already a devoted reader of Jim Harrison. I’ve read it all, his novels and novellas, his wide-ranging essays – sport and fishing and food and wine – but I am especially fond of his poetry. My introduction to Harrison was via another collection, Just Before Dark, his collected non-fiction. A friend had noticed that I liked MFK Fisher (who’s work I’d described as literature disguised as food writing) and though it might be in a decidedly different direction, he suggested I’d enjoy Harrison’s food essays. I did. No matter the subject, Harrison’s was a strikingly individual voice, in that way not unlike Fisher. Starting with those essays, I ricocheted through his existing works of fiction and poetry and essays, in no particular order, and then read each new work as it came out. I found his writing workmanlike in the very best sense. I felt like I was constantly discovering a writer that was constantly discovering himself. Sometimes you do the work that is in front of you. Harrison wrote in his introduction to Just Before Dark, “To earn a living for my family I began an essentially quadra-schizoid existence, continuing to write the poems I had begun with and adding all matter of journalism, novels, and screenplays.”

But to pore over the length and breadth of a poet’s life work in one volume is kind of staggering and putting it together must have been daunting. Jim Harrison: The Essential Poems “is distilled from fourteen volumes and includes visionary lyrics and meditative suites, shape-shifting ghazals and epistolary prose poems.” I chose to read this book much like my original entry into Harrison's work, from the middle, and then back, then forward, then back again. Like getting lost in the woods. What’s fun about this book is that it's sending me back to my shelves for more, grabbing The Theory and Practice of Rivers, then Plain Song, then Letters to Yesenin, grabbing context, reading the poem before and the poem after, visiting old friends that a new friend reminded me of. The book itself, as an object, is beautiful. That’s something I’ve gotten used to with books from Copper Canyon Press. The cover art is a photo of an ancient tree that somehow evokes Harrison in his later days. I enjoyed the creative endpapers, with images of poems in manuscript with handwritten edits, the cover of a notebook, and Denise Levertov’s typewritten recommendation for the manuscript of Plain Song.

If you’re unfamiliar with Harrison’s poetry this is a great place to start. If you’re familiar with his poetry you may want to give this book to your friends and family that were curious about your obsession with his work. Fair warning, you’ll find something to love, and you’ll be left wanting more.

[Benjamin · Rating 5 out of 5]

These essential poems read like the perfect obituary. Friends or family put this compilation together and the essence of Harrison appeared through his own poems. I saw a glimpse of his life through his own telling, his own poetry. And then the book ended.

[Caroline Petruzzi McHale · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh, this is some delicious poetry.
Favorite images - the woman on Boulevard Raspail who has a smile a thousand years old; kissing the cold river's August lips; tracing his noble ancestry back to the first cell that emerged from the world; deciding "to stay".

[Stephen Lindow · Rating 5 out of 5]

Endlessly fascinating poems,

[John Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Poetry at its best is the language your soul would speak if you could teach your soul to speak."

Some poets are microscopic: they can spend an entire poem discussing a single moment or object in great detail, unfolding and unfolding layer upon layer. And other poets are macroscopic: their poems aren't anchored by time or space and free-flow between images and emotions, discovering different connections between them. Although I appreciate the talent of the former, I prefer the latter, and Jim Harrison has both feet firmly rooted in the macroscopic like the great old withered pine that he is.

I love his poems. I love the feel of them, their melancholy and humor. I love how connected with the world his poems are, not in a pseudo-New Age-y sort of way, but an incredibly unique and natural way. I love how his poems are profound but not self-congratulatory or pretentious. You get the sense of a life lived. If I were a poet, I'd hope that my poems had same qualities. Here's one of my favorites:

Let's not get romantic or dismal about death.
Indeed it's one of our most unique acts along with birth.
We must think of it as cooking breakfast,
it's that ordinary. Break two eggs into a bowl
or break a bowl into two eggs. Slip into a coffin
after the fluids have been drained, or better yet,
slide into the fire. Of course it's a little hard
to accept your last kiss, your last drink,
your last meal about which the condemned
can be quite particular as if there could be
a cheeseburger sent by God. A few lovers
sweep by the inner eye, but it's mostly a placid
lake at dawn, mist rising, a solitary loon
call, and staring in the still, opaque water.
We'll know as children again all that we are
destined to know, that the water is cold
and deep, and the sun penetrates only so far.

Gorgeous. How many poets would come up with a line like "a cheeseburger sent by God," especially in a poem they could sense was going to be a homerun? Probably not many. Most are too intoxicated with their own poetness and too impatient and would go all in on the death-is-a-placid-lake metaphor. But Jim always has his hands on the wheel. The placid lake is the payoff, but all that comes before it is equally as important. He knows that death is at once frustrating, funny, banal, meaningless, meaningful, sad, transcendent, and something else indescribable. This poem, and so many others, capture those emotions and life in all its ordinariness and complexity.

Also, the cover of this book is perfect. If the Methuselah tree were human it would probably look and talk like Jim. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if someone snapped off one of its branches eighty years ago and planted it in a field in Michigan and out popped Jim Harrison with his blind left eye and his cigarettes and all his dogs.

[J Earl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jim Harrison: The Essential Poems is a wonderful collection for both readers familiar with his poetry as well as anyone new to it.

I have always considered his poetry to be, over the course of his life, uneven. Part of that is the typical element of time changing both the poet and his approaches. That said, there is far more here of interest, even when some are taken out of the context of the larger initial collections of which they were a part of a larger work. Don't be fooled by blustery "reviewers" and, here is the joke, "critics" who seem to judge entire poems, if not entire oeuvres, on the pithiness of solitary lines taken out of context and form. But in their minds they know best, though those are mighty small minds. Methinks jealousy creeps in on these wannabes, but they have opinions like the rest of us, they just happen to smell a bit more.

If you're more familiar with Harrison's prose work you will find a great deal of similarity between the two. Flow and subject matter are fairly consistent between both, even in his essays to a smaller degree.

I am hesitant to recommend poetry as sweepingly as I do fiction or nonfiction. People read poetry for so many different reasons. I would recommend finding a few of Harrison's poems and reading them. If they sound like a mindset you'd like to explore, this book would be an excellent next step. Some of his collections really need to be read in their entirety to appreciate, so the next step might be to find those volumes after reading this broader, career-spanning collection.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via Edelweiss.

[Ziggy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wish this guy were my uncle. A poet who doesn’t look like a poet or talk like a poet. “The journalist said I looked like a bricklayer or beer salesman.”
Alone in the woods is where he prefers to be, but he is not cynical or misanthropic. “You told me you couldn’t see a better day coming, so I gave you my eyes.”
Like a wild animal, cramped cities and cacophonous civilization were not for him. He needed open spaces to roam, to watch, to listen. “The moon put her hand over my mouth and told me to shut up and watch.”
“What is it to actually go outside the nest we have built for ourselves, and earlier our father’s nest: to go into a forest alone with our eyes open? It’s different when you don’t know what’s over the hill.”
His presence and awareness are more animal than human. “Each time I go outside the world is different.”
“If you can awaken inside the familiar and discover it strange you need never leave home.”
This man understood the ingredients of a good life. He lived well.
“All those years I had in my pocket. I spent them, nickel-and-dime.”
A sage who knew how to expand time. In his poem “Advice”, he describes an Ojibwe who claimed that time lasts seven-times longer for Native Americans than for white people. I think this was true for Harrison too. Free of the common distractions, alone and silent in the great outdoors, fully experiencing and relishing each moment, he thereby slowed down time.

[David Guy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I came late to Harrison’s poetry, after I’d read many of the novels. I’m not much of a poetry reader in general, and wasn’t sure what I’d think. But the poetry is at the same high level as the fiction, in some odd way is very much like the fiction. It’s Harrison’s mind that is remarkable—he speaks in a number of places about Lawrence’s idea of an aristocracy of consciousness—and it seems just as available in a poem, a work of fiction, a column on food (which he wrote for a couple of publications) or any page of these interviews. He opens himself up on every occasion.

Joseph Bednarik is to Harrison’s poetry what DeMott is to his interviews, and he has combed through the volumes to pick what he sees as best. I’m sure people will argue with his omissions and inclusions (the only answer is to get all the books and read all the poems), but it’s a beautiful volume, and includes a number of my favorites. Harrison as a poet seemed to get simpler and more plainspoken as he got older, and I tend to like the later poems better. They don’t always seem like poems, but they’re very much Jim Harrison.

www.davidguy.org

[Daniel Klawitter · Rating 3 out of 5]

"I envied the dead their sleep of rot.
I was a fable to myself,
a speech to become meat."


Harrison is an important American writer and this is a worthwhile collection. However, I think his best poetry is from Braided Creek, the small volume he co-wrote with Ted Kooser. Known primarily as a novelist and novella writer, Harrison's poems often veer toward a more prose style and tone of voice than I typically want from the poets I read. He certainly has some good lines, but I like poetry that has more of a fidelity to "heightened speech" and/or musicality.

[John Brewer · Rating 5 out of 5]

I become more convinced with everything I read of Jim Harrison that he is one of America's most significant writing talents. The depth, breadth, and quality of his work is simply breathtaking. Few have mastered prose, poetry, and non-fiction so wholly.

Jim Harrison: The Essential Poems is an excellent primer for his poetry. His work is, at times, disorienting, heartbreaking, exhilarating, and lush. His love of nature (birds and bears in particular), Spanish poets, and food and wine are threads that run through much of his work.

[Joe Pags]

how do you "rate" poetry? Or "review it?" This was my first book of poetry, and it felt like nothing so much as the here and now most often found reading zen koans. Perhaps I have much to learn with how to read poems. Is the order of the word important? The way it looks on paper? Counting syllables? Certainly, it seems the experience is not limited to attempting to understand the narrative like story.

Onward.

[Leslie]

"Lit Hub Daily," June 3, 2019

[Leonard · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great collection of poetry by one of the great observers of our world. There is a lot in these poems so I will probably be reading this one again very soon.

[Rebecca Reddell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Review to come.

[Nathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title of the book is correct...
and I was overdue on getting up
on Jim Harrison's poetry.

This one will stay on the shelf.
(Which means... another
will now have to go.)

[Simon Sweetman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cherry-picked from 14 volumes, great sampler from a masterful writer.

[Sacha]

Just didn't connect. Perhaps in a few years.

[Mick Parsons · Rating 5 out of 5]

Harrison is a writer whose work I continually revisit. He was a poet, a sage, and a student of the human condition.

[Tim Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the greatest books of poetry ever

[Ruth Martinez · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are some beautiful lines I enjoyed but for some reason I didn't engage with his writing.

[Mayah DeMartino · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jim seems to always get me. Sex and lust and depression and despondency and reverence natural spaces and joy and love and despair. All the good stuff.

[Forrest McCurren · Rating 5 out of 5]

The perfect companion for morning coffee

[Hector Camposano · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite poetry collections as of late. I suppose this is just a very small taste of Harrison, too. It made me want to look for more, and I know I’ll want to re-read this one too. His familiarity with nature and with the “word” made this collection a fully enjoyable ride.

[Eric Shaffer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jim Harrison is one of my favorite poets. In my own work, Jim has been a guide, a model, and a teacher. Thanks, Jim. (Try not to be too offended that I call Jim Jim; in my estimation, once I've read ten-thousand words of any writer, we are on a first-name basis for perpetuity.)

This volume of essential poems does actually live up to that label, so congratulations are in order for Joseph Bednarik, who assembled the text. Sure, I think some excellent poems are left out, and sure, I wonder why some of those included were included, but nobody asked me to compile this volume. Anyone who reads this book, however, will have a very good idea of Harrison and his work, and I think that those readers will be interested in taking a more thorough look at all of the other poems, fiction, and non-fiction Jim produced in his long writing career.

The volume itself is charming, too. Let's start with the back cover. There are three photos of Harrison, one as a very young man, one as the accomplished writer, and a third as the grizzled veteran of years, tobacco, wine, lavish dinners, sunshine, composition, and bush-whacking that he became. Also, keeping in mind that third portrait, I defy anyone turning the book to Fred Mertz's cover photograph of Bristlecone Pine & the Milky Way to deny the definitive and biological resemblance of the poet and the pine: definitely related.

Harrison has written some of my favorite heartlines: "What will I do with seven million cubic feet of clouds/ in my head?" and "The baby is sleeping/ and I have no one to talk my language" and "A good poet is only a sorcerer bored with magic who has turned his attention elsewhere" and "When she first saw the Atlantic/ she said near Key Largo, 'I thought it would be bigger'" (yup, that's what she said) and the entire poem containing "My left eye is nearly blind./ No words have ever been read with it. . . . Once a year I open/ it to the full moon out in the pasture and yell,/ white light, white light" and "We are here/ to be curious not consoled" (the best, briefest, and most final refutation of religion I've ever read) and last, but nowhere near least, "We'll know as children again all that we are/ destined to know, that the water is cold/ and deep, and the sun penetrates only so far."

As endpapers, the volume also contains reproductions of an actually type-written commendatory letter from Denise Levertov and of holograph drafts of some of Harrison's poems. I do not want to discourage myself or anyone else, but I hope these are final drafts re-copied from multiple and messier earlier drafts because if these are first drafts, Harrison is a god as well as a poet. Whole verses appear in what appears to be the final and polished form, and no one I know who composes poems (especially me) can do that or even hope to do that. I'm glad that no one will ever know that about me, though, because I destroy or delete all early drafts of my work in order to deter any crazy bastards who might actually be interested in what a mess I made of composition. My favorite shiny page is a yellow legal-pad sheet along the right-hand side of which are listed the rivers Harrison had met.

Okay, so if you are trying to write poems and you need some good examples, read Harrison. If you ain't a writer but you appreciate some good writing, read Harrison. May the wild in him grow in you.