Jim Harrison: Complete Poems (The Heart's Work; Jim Harrison's Poetic Legacy) - Hardcover

Harrison, Jim

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 155659593X ISBN 13: 9781556595936

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press, 2021

Synopsis

Editors' Choice Selection, The New York Times Book Review

** Starred Reviews ** in Library Journal and Booklist

"This robust volume is a testament to the fortitude of a great American poet’s work... [a] landmark collection."―Raul Niño, Booklist, starred review

"[E]ven the readers who know him may not know that Harrison began as a poet and remained one for the rest of his life…. [Jim Harrison: Complete Poems is] a massive and bounteous body of work that would have made Harrison a significant American writer even if he had never published in any other genre."―The New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice

"In a collection that spans decades of living and writing, there are poems of every character, many of them superb."―Library Journal, starred review

“This densely rich book...places Harrison among the pantheon of our best American poets.” ―New York Journal of Books

"I've always loved Jim Harrison's poetry―so full of itself, so direct and hungry and angered and awed. I think of him in many ways as a religious poet and was surprised that he was excluded from Harold Bloom's anthology American Religious Poems. It seemed quite the oversight."―Joy Williams, The Paris Review

"That’s what makes his poetry so intimate: the sense that it comes to us without filter, without the expectations or necessity of narrative. It is why I will always think of Harrison, most of all, as a poet."―David Ulin, Alta

“When [Jim Harrison: Complete Poems] arrives in the mail I stare at it for a time a little dumbfounded. It is gorgeous and it is massive…. The next day I carried it north with me to the Flathead Indian Reservation. I am teaching poetry to fourth- and fifth graders there. At the beginning of each of four classes I held the book up for everyone to see. We passed it around so everyone could feel its heft, see the photo on the back cover of the grizzled poet, his eyes turned down, drawing on the ubiquitous cigarette. I described it as a physical representation of a life devoted to poetry and how wonderful that is. I was asked how long it will take me to read the whole thing. ‘A lifetime,’ I answer.”―Chris La Tray, The Missoulian

"Harrison described his own work as ‘(c)rude, holy, natural, political, sexual,’ and page after page here he hits those notes time and again."―Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"The publication of the Jim Harrison: Complete Poems will be the major poetic event of the season."― Paul Yamazaki, City Lights Booksellers

“Jim Harrison’s poems have a vitality, range, and revelation equal in importance to the more widely known fiction. A pitch-perfect field guide, Harrison scouts with full sense of kinship and acrobatic powers of both language and imagination his life’s landscapes, events, and fellow creatures. His direct, chiselled statements of thought, feeling, and invention make the world bigger in every dimension.”― Jane Hirshfield, Ploughshares

"Some of the poems are funny, some are serious, and many are bawdy, but none will disappoint a reader." ―Bill Castanier, Lansing City Pulse

"To say that Harrison’s Complete Poems is Shakespearian in scope is probably an exaggeration, but only a little. Harrison certainly had far more time than the Bard to devote to his literary endeavors. . . . There is no denying the power and influence of his ghazals of the early 1970s, and if his voracious appetite for experience offends some readers, it’s clear he was one of the major poets of the last six decades, someone who believed “'in the Resurrection mostly / because he was never taught how not to.'"―California Review of Books

From the Introduction by Terry Tempest Williams: "Jim Harrison...was among the great ones―an elevated soul in all his unruliness who favored his senses and courted the wild on the page and in the world. His was a storied life that loomed large, and we are the beneficiaries. 'Such a powerful wounded poet―wrote as if he had to sing with a cut throat . . . and he did have to sing,' said Jorie Graham."

Jim Harrison: Complete Poems is the definitive collection from one of America’s iconic writers. Introduced by activist and naturalist writer Terry Tempest Williams, this tour de force contains every poem Harrison published over his fifty-year career, as well as a section of previously unpublished "Last Poems." Here are the nature-based lyrics of his early work, the high-velocity ghazals, a harrowing prose-poem “correspondence” with a Russian suicide, the riverine suites, fearless meditations inspired by the Zen monk Crazy Cloud, and a joyous conversation in haiku-like gems with friend and fellow poet Ted Kooser.

Weaving throughout nearly 1000 pages are Harrison’s legendary passions and appetites, his love songs and lamentations, and a clarion call to pay attention to the life you are actually living. Jim Harrison: Complete Poems confirms that Jim Harrison is a talented storyteller with a penetrating eye for details, or as Publishers Weekly called him, “an untrammeled renegade genius… a poet talking to you instead of around himself, while doing absolutely brilliant and outrageous things with language.”

The Heart's Work: Jim Harrison's Poetic Legacy: The Heart's Work is a multi-book, multi-year publishing project by Copper Canyon Press to secure and advance Jim Harrison's poetic legacy. To date, books published as part of the The Heart's Work include The Essential Poems, Collected Ghazals (with afterword by Denver Butson), Jim Harrison: Complete Poems (produced as both a single volume and a three-volume box set, with introductions by Terry Tempest Williams, Colum McCann, Joy Williams, and John Freeman), and the paperback printing of Dead Man's Float. New projects forthcoming!

Limited Edition Box Set: Jim Harrison: Complete Poems also appears as a three-volume box set. (The ISBN for the box set is 9781556596414.) Print run was limited to 750 copies. Each volume is introduced by a different writer: Colum McCann, Joy Williams, and John Freeman. As of March 2022, the box set is sold out and has been listed out-of-print. Copies may be available from the publisher.

First Edition Points: Please note that there is no indication of first edition on the copyright page of the single volume of Jim Harrison: Complete Poems . To confirm a first edition, check the attribution on the poem "She" (page 886): First editions have only a single attribution, Alta, 2021, and all subsequent printings also include the attribution Bozeman Daily Chronicle, 2016.

About this title

About the Authors

Jim Harrison (1937–2016) was the author of over three dozen books, including Legends of the Fall and Dalva, and served as the food columnist for the magazines Brick and Esquire. He published fourteen volumes of poetry, the final being Dead Man’s Float (2016), which appeared a few months before his death. His work has been translated into two dozen languages and produced as four feature-length films. As a young poet he co-edited Sumac magazine with fellow poet Dan Gerber, and earned fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 2007, he was elected into the Academy of American Arts and Letters. Regarding his most beloved art form, he wrote: “Poetry, at its best, is the language your soul would speak if you could teach your soul to speak.” Jim Harrison certainly spoke the language.

Terry Tempest Williams, writer-in-residence at the Harvard Divinity School, is known for her impassioned and lyrical prose and her advocacy in defense of wild spaces. She is the author of numerous books, including the environmental literature classic, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Orion Magazine,and numerous anthologies worldwide as a crucial voice for ecological consciousness and social change.

Joseph Bednarik is the Co-Publisher at Copper Canyon Press. He is the editor of Jim Harrison: The Essential Poems, The Sumac Reader, and co-editor of One-Man Boat: The George Hitchcock Reader.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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,
the pump arm of an oil well,
the chop and whir of a combine in the sun.

From my ancestors, the Swedes,
I suppose I inherit the love of rainy woods,
kegs of herring and neat whiskey –
I remember long nights of pinochle,
the bulge of Redman in my grandpa’s cheek;
the rug smelled of manure and kerosene.
They laughed loudly and didn’t speak for days.

(But on the other side, from the German Mennonites,
their rag-smoke prayers and porky daughters
I got intolerance, and aimless diligence.)

In ’51 during a revival I was saved:
I prayed on a cold register for hours
and woke up lame. I was baptized
by immersion in the tank at Williamston –
the rusty water stung my eyes.
I left off the old things of the flesh
but not for long – one night beside a pond
she dried my feet with her yellow hair.
O actual event dead quotient
cross become green
I still love Jubal but pity Hagar.

(Now self is the first sacrament
who loves not the misery and taint
of the present tense is lost.
I strain for a lunar arrogance.

Light macerates
the lamp infects

warmth, more warmth, I cry.


Drinking Song


I want to die in the saddle. An enemy of civilization
I want to walk around in the woods, fish and drink.

I’m going to be a child about it and I can’t help it, I was
born this way and it makes me very happy to fish and drink.

I left when it was still dark and walked on the path to the
river, the Yellow Dog, where I spent the day fishing and drinking.

After she left me and I quit my job and wept for a year and
all my poems were born dead, I decided I would only fish and drink.

Water will never leave earth and whiskey is good for the brain.
What else am I supposed to do in these last days but fish and drink?

In the river was a trout, and I was on the bank, my heart in my
chest, clouds above, she was in NY forever and I, fishing and drinking.


Letters to Yesenin
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.

Followers


Driving east on buddha’s birthday,
April 9, 1978, past my own birthplace
Grayling, Michigan, south 300 miles to Toledo,
then east again to New York for no reason –
belled heart swinging in grief for months
until I wanted to take my life in my hands;
three crows from home followed above
the car until the Delaware River where
they turned back: one stood all black
and lordly on a fresh pheasant killed
by a car: all this time
counting the mind, counting crows,
each day’s ingredients
the same, barring rare
bad luck
good luck
dumb luck
all set in marble by the habitual,
locked as the day passes moment by moment:
say on the tracks the train can’t
turn 90 degrees to the right because it’s not
the nature of a train,
but we think a man can dive
in a pond, swim across it,
and climb a tree though few of us do.


Geo-Bestiary
16

My favorite stump straddles a gully a dozen
miles from any human habitation.
My eschatology includes scats, animal poop,
scatology so that when I nestle under this stump
out of the rain I see the scats of bear, bobcat,
coyote. I won’t say that I feel at home
under this vast white pine stump, the roots
spread around me, so large in places no arms
can encircle them, as if you were under the body
of a mythic spider, the thunder ratcheting
the sky so that the earth hums beneath you.
Here is a place to think about nothing,
which is what I do. If the rain beats down
hard enough tiny creeks form beside my shit-strewn
pile of sand. The coyote has been eating mice,
the bear berries, the bobcat a rabbit. It’s dry
enough so it doesn’t smell except for ancient
wet wood and gravel, pine pitch, needles. Luckily
a sandhill crane nests nearby so that in June
if I doze I’m awakened by her cracked
and prehistoric cry, waking startled, feeling
the two million years I actually am.

Edition details

• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 155659593X
• ISBN 13: 9781556595936
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 944
• Editor: Bednarik Joseph