The Shape of the Journey: New & Collected Poems Read online

  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

  Young Bull

  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

  It is a laborious and brain-peeling process to edit one’s collected poems. You drift and jerk back and forth between wanting to keep it all intact, and the possibility of pitching out the whole work in favor of a fresh start.

  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.
r />   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,