Jim Harrison: An Appreciation

Feb. 27, 2002

I‘ve started this more than once. The first memory I have of reading
Harrison in the Crawford County Library in 1971 is that it seemed like I was
looking through a telescope into another section of the universe, a place
where the landscape was animated and imbued with magic for the first time
in my young writer‘s life. I had poems of my own, some of which in my
arrogant way, I thought were pretty good. After I read Harrison‘s poems for
the first time, I went home and wept. I wasn‘t weeping for myself, or my own
inadequacies. It seemed I was weeping for the possibilities he
represented -- that wildness. I was stunned and have been for all these years.
I will admit here I have no critical distance from his work. I read his
poems on a daily basis, and consider “Drinking Song“ a certain anthem for my
own, end-of-the-dirt-road life. When “The Shape of the Journey,“ his collected
poems showed up, I bought two. One, the signed, slip-cased version only
comes out on full moons and during certain periods of mortal anguish. I
would build an altar; but that would be foolish, I know. But if I did, I
would have my own totems, my own versions of grizzly turds and feathers,
body tags from long-dead Indian warriors.
I have a version of my own “power objects“ bag I keep on my desk. One stone,
from Lake Superior, Jim declared to me in the Dunes Saloon, as mightily
powerful. “Keep it for two weeks,“ he croaked, “if something good happens,
keep it for the rest of your life. If it‘s bad, get as far away from it as
you can.“ Almost two weeks to the day, I had my first book taken by Wayne
State University Press. That was years back -- books and articles of Jim‘s
which have piled up in me like so much strata -- the evidence of how much his
writing life has enriched and guided my own.
The first time I read “Letters from Yesenin“ without a break, I couldn‘t stand
up for hours. After I read “Legends of the Fall“ I wandered around stunned for
days, confusing my own dark territory for Tristan‘s, but then again, who
didn‘t. When I went to see “Legends“ on the screen I had tears in my eyes
before it even started -- all that wonderful grief rolling out into the huge
Montana sky.
So there I was 30 years ago in a back-water town library reading his
poems, feeling as if I had been transformed to a far place where someone
spoke a language only I could understand. And here I am tonight, snow
threatening, and I‘m thinking about wandering down to the lake, building a
fire and just reading his poems into the flames. Thirty years and I always
heard the same clear message: get out of your own skin, but know where you
set it down when you come back looking.
It all adds up for me: the poems, the non-fiction, the great novels, and all
that food and wine he has consumed and written of so eloquently. If I were
him I‘d be moving to Montana too. All those lovely children and
grandchildren and a place big enough to hold them.
His work is one of the most real things in my life. And it‘s Gary Snyder who
tells us: “The real work is to see the world as real as it is and to make
ourselves as real as we are in it.“ Most of the time I do a pretty lousy job
of realizing where my skin stops and the world begins, but reading Jim‘s
work always reminds me, “It is this. It is this. It is this.“
What sticks in my head: “One day standing in a river with my flyrod, I‘ll
have the courage to admit my life.“ “I want to die in the saddle an enemy
of civilization.“ “We are more than dying flies in a shithouse, though we are
that too.“ “To write a poem you must create a pen that will write what you
want to say.“
I think about making that pen every day.
So Jim, the fire on the beach I read into tonight is like that fire those
aborigines made when John Glenn passed over Australia and headed for his
first orbit -- or maybe it was like one of those panicked signals a man
concocts in the dark terror of night calling in a napalm strike on his own
position, I don‘t know. Whatever it is, I offer it as a wish for God‘s
speed. Some message sent up from a grateful heart.

Poet Michael Delp teaches writing at the Interlochen Arts Academy.