{"id":155425,"date":"2021-10-21T12:10:36","date_gmt":"2021-10-21T16:10:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=155425"},"modified":"2021-11-18T07:36:21","modified_gmt":"2021-11-18T12:36:21","slug":"a-holy-terror-dancing-with-light-on-jim-harrison","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2021\/10\/21\/a-holy-terror-dancing-with-light-on-jim-harrison\/","title":{"rendered":"A Holy Terror Dancing with Light: On Jim Harrison"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Jim Harrison named one of his hunting dogs Joy Williams or perhaps it was just Joy. She was named after me in any case. Jim was perhaps having a bit of fun, knowing my horror of the hunt. She might well have been a gay and avid associate, reveling in the tristesse<\/em> of falling birds, but I prefer to think of her as reluctant, anguished about such an enterprise, failing to thrill to it. I prefer to think of her questioning the rightness of it, finding the whole bewildering activity loathsome. She adored Jim, of course, but saw the world differently, like Ahab\u2019s whale who sees a different ocean from each side of its massive head. I prefer to think of Jim taking the hunting dog Joy\u2019s feelings into account, for he thought highly of dogs as well as ravens, loons, horses, bears, dolphins (\u201ccertainly as dear as people to themselves\u201d), and all manner of creatures, and would dismiss any philosophy that found them unworthy of grace or our concern.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t until the sixth century that the Christians
\ndecided animals weren\u2019t part of the kingdom of heaven.
\nHoof, wing, and paw can\u2019t put money in the collection plate.
\nThese lunatic shit-brained fools excluded our beloved creatures.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Who could possibly aspire to a heaven so bereft?<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve always loved Jim Harrison\u2019s poetry\u2014so full of itself, so direct and hungry and angered and awed. I think of him as a religious poet in many ways and was surprised that he was excluded from Harold Bloom\u2019s anthology American Religious Poems.<\/em> It seemed quite the oversight.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the work was considered a bit too randy? There were too many mentions of women\u2019s lovely bottoms? Too many rivers and wolves? And shit and whiskey and flies and questioning Our Maker about ancillary matters?<\/p>\n

Talked to the God of Hosts about the Native American
\nsituation and he said everything\u2019s a matter of time,
\nthat though it\u2019s small comfort the ghosts have already
\nnearly destroyed us with the ugliness we\u2019ve become.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Too much about our American way of carnage? In a dream the poet pictures a seven-tiered necklace of seven thousand skulls adorning the Statue of Liberty,<\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 basically
\nan indigenous cast except skulls from tribes
\nof blacks who got a free ride over from Africa,
\nrepresentative skulls from all the Indian
\ntribes, an assortment of grizzly, wolf,
\ncoyote and buffalo skulls<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

and imagines<\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 her great
\niron lips quivering in a smile, almost a smirk
\nso that she\u2019ll drop the torch to fondle the jewels.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Or perhaps the poem\u2019s reflections fell prey to poesy\u2019s prejudice against poets who write novels, successful lusty singular novels and lots of them. He was a writer<\/em> and thus could not be considered a genuine member of poetry\u2019s more constrained and anxious tribe.<\/p>\n

I can think of dozens of Jim\u2019s poems that would have fit beautifully in Mr.\u00a0Bloom\u2019s fearsome canon, but I don\u2019t think the rebuff bothered him overmuch, if at all. Poetry was his soul\u2019s refreshment and true bearing, a way of looking \u201cat the World \/ and into your heart at the same time.\u201d The poems were a necessity.<\/p>\n

His early poems had a dignity and clarity to them, a sense of shy restraint. He described himself then as \u201ca solitary buffoon\u201d who \u201chad been eating the contents of world poetry \u2026 without any idea of what to spit out.\u201d He wanted<\/p>\n

to be a child who wakes beautifully,
\na man always in the state of waking
\nto a new room, or at night, waking
\nto a strange room with snow outside.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Years\u2014the years, the years!\u2014brought fame, even riches, not from his poetry but from his novellas, a form at which he excelled, his novels and his screenplays. He wrote well and prodigiously and when asked by one interviewer how, exactly, he replied, \u201cStart at page 1 and write like hell.\u201d Or something to that effect. Blinded in his left eye when a child by a playmate wielding a broken bottle (one would think he\u2019d have an aversion to females after such a wounding), he trained the right to devour the world. (\u201cNo words have ever been read with\u201d the left eye, he wrote. \u201cStrangely enough, this eye can see underwater.\u201d)<\/p>\n

This was the eye that saw the world as it was\u2014a holy terror dancing with light. The eye that saw the crow with his silver harness, sister bear with her huge head on his shoulder (\u201cPrivately she likes religion \u2026 I hear her incantatory moans\u201d), tarpon leaping covered with oil flames in an oil refinery\u2019s burning lagoon. The eye that once presented to him the \u201cwhole picture,\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 magnificently detailed,
\na child\u2019s diorama of what life appears to be:
\nstaring at the picture I became drowsy
\nwith relief when I noticed a yellow
\ndot of light in the lower right-hand corner.
\nI unhooked the machines and tubes and crawled
\nto the picture, with an eyeball to the dot
\nof light, which turned out to be a miniature
\ntunnel at the end of which I could see
\nmountains and stars whirling and tumbling,
\nsheets of emotions, vertical rivers, upside-
\ndown lakes, herds of unknown mammals, birds
\nshedding feathers and regrowing them instantly,
\nsnakes with feathered heads eating their own
\nshed skins, fish swimming straight up,
\nthe bottom of Isaiah\u2019s robe, live whales
\non dry ground, lions drinking from a golden
\nbowl of milk, the rush of night,
\nand somewhere in this the murmur of gods\u2014
\na tree-rubbing-tree music, a sweet howl
\nof water and rock-grating-rock, fire
\nhissing from fissures, the moon settled
\ncomfortably on the ground, beginning to roll.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This eye, the poor one, the bad one that rolled in its milky socket like a moon, was accomplice to his visions of commanding dreams as well as the dreams he dreamed awake. It\u2019s a good eye to have for a poet. Necessary in fact, though many don\u2019t have it and can\u2019t perceive the loss.<\/p>\n

Jim described his poems as \u201cflowers for the void,\u201d writing them made him \u201csoar along a foot \/ from the ground.\u201d The super-masculine tough-guy selves, the reckless gourmands and intellectual wild men of the woods and prairies who populated his famous fictions were only a feather\u2019s breadth remove from the genuinely bold, larger-than-life article. So it is that there is still amazement among his readers that he wrote poetry, that he felt that only in poetry had he found \u201cthe right pen\u201d to write what he wanted to say.<\/p>\n

Jim spent his fifth and sixth decades in determined excess. He wrote eagerly\u2014in the eighties alone he published three novels\u2014and was well rewarded, yet he was still, even increasingly, aware of the \u201cscythe awake \/ moving through the dark\u201d that he had pictured as a young man. He feared losing the correction and calm of nature. In \u201cThe Theory & Practice of Rivers,\u201d he wrote:<\/p>\n

Drowning in the bourgeois trough,
\na bourride<\/em> or gruel of money, drugs
\nwhiskey, hotels, the dream coasts,
\nass in the air at the trough, drowning
\nin a river of pus, pus of civilization,
\npus of cities, unholy river of shit,
\nof filth, shit of nightmares, shit
\nof skewed dreams and swallowed years.
\nThe river pulls me out,
\ndraws me elsewhere
\nand down to blue water,
\ngreen water,
\nblack water.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

His next collection, After Ikky\u016b<\/em>, was written in a self-described dark period from which he knew he was emerging. He had studied Zen for years but admitted it had been \u201cin a state of rapacious and self-congratulatory spiritual greed.\u201d Now he was dedicatedly reading masters such as Yunmen and Tung-shan. Yunmen disliked people, particularly the pilgrims who sought him out, and was said to have a strong aversion to vulgarity. Jim probably found this quite remarkable. Yunmen wrote, \u201cA true person of the Way can speak fire without burning his mouth.\u201d Having some success with speaking fire, Jim wrote:<\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0I was writing a poem
\nabout paying attention and microwaved a hot dog
\nso hot it burned a beet-red hole in the roof of my mouth.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Ikky\u016b he professed to follow was even more of an oddball roshi<\/em>\u2014overly amorous, irreverent\u2014who apparently looked quite unseemly.<\/p>\n

Jim was more contemplative in this period closing in on the millennium, in \u201cGeo-Bestiary\u201d closer to finding the humble song in praise of life, getting down to the serious business of becoming \u201calert enough to live.\u201d Yet still never too serious, still agile enough to avoid the more ponderous steps of the dance. In writing the beginning epitaphs of thirty-three friends he forgoes all lofty sentiments in his exaltations:<\/p>\n

O you river with too many dams
\nO you lichen without tree or stone
\nO you always loved long naps
\nO you orphaned vulture with no meat<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

even, at times, commencing with asking their forgiveness:<\/p>\n

Forgive me for naming a bird after you
\nForgive me for not knowing where you\u2019re buried
\nPardon me for burning your last book
\nPardon me for fishing during your funeral.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Truth is, he was a good friend, the best sort of friend. And so fortunate for Poetry that she had always been his practice. He served her and she offered him the means for paying attention. Poetry was<\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 this other,
\nthe secret sharer,
\nwho directs the hand
\nthat twists the heart,
\nthe voice calling out to me<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Pay attention.<\/em> One of his mantras. As was: \u201cThe days are stacked against \/ what we think we are.\u201d The modest little book Braided Creek<\/em>, compiled with his friend Ted Kooser, were the epigrammatic poems included in the letters of their months of correspondence when Ted was ill with cancer. One of the book\u2019s charms is that the individual shards are unattributed, showing that the shape of words that break and heal our hearts need not be owned.<\/p>\n

To have reverence for life
\nyou must have reverence for death.
\nThe dogs we love are not taken from us
\nbut leave when summoned by the gods.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Still, I suspect that this was one of Jim\u2019s offerings.<\/p>\n

There is a piece in this volume not collected before, \u201cScrubbing the Floor the Night a Great Lady Died,\u201d about the racehorse Ruffian who, in a match race against the Derby winner Foolish Pleasure, shattered the bones in a foreleg while continuing to run and finish the race. She endured a twelve-hour surgery as vets tried to save her, but when she emerged from anesthesia she thrashed about on the floor of a padded stall as if still running, spinning in circles, her heavy cast smashing bones in her other legs, and she had to be euthanized. It was a tragedy and because the extraordinary filly was the victim of greed and incompetence, it was the purest of tragedies. Jim and his wife and daughter bawled at the news as, thousands of miles away, I bawled with my daughter.<\/p>\n

\u201cHow could she wake so frantic, as if from a terrible dream?\u201d the poet asked. It was the awareness of immense loss, surely, the theft of her very being.<\/p>\n

For she was so surely of earth, in earth; once so animate, sprung in some final, perfect form, running, running, saying, \u201cLook at me, look at me, what could be more wonderful than the way I move, tell me if there\u2019s something more wonderful.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This was in 1975. So long ago. Reading now for the first time \u201cScrubbing the Floor the Night a Great Lady Died,\u201d I hear the somber cry that moves across the years, the cry so much like the call of the loon (\u201clost or doomed angels imprisoned \/ within their breasts\u201d) and the hawk\u2019s keening wail (\u201cthe precise weight of death\u201d).<\/p>\n

Nineteen seventy-five. The years, the years \u2026 Jim would die forty-one years later at his casita in Patagonia, Arizona. He had at times pictured his death and his death song (or rather the circumstances surrounding his deathbed and his death song), counting again the beautiful birds of his life\u2014the great flocks of snow geese and sandhill cranes at Bosque del Apache, the frigate birds of the Pacific and the seabirds of the Sea of Cortez as well as, of course, the aforementioned birds of the soul and the night. He would count and count, and on<\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 my deathbed I\u2019ll write this secret
\nnumber on a slip of paper and pass
\nit to my wife and two daughters.
\nIt will be a hot evening in late June
\nand they might be glancing out the window
\nat the thunderstorm\u2019s approach from the west.
\nLooking past their eyes and a dead fly
\non the window screen I\u2019ll wonder
\nif there\u2019s a bird waiting for me in the onrushing clouds.
\nO birds<\/em>, I\u2019ll sing to myself, you\u2019ve carried
\n<\/em>me along on this bloody voyage,
\n<\/em>carry me now into that cloud,
\n<\/em>into the marvel of this final night.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So he had imagined, though his wife, Linda, would die the year before him and his own passing would arrive in the cool and volatile month of March.<\/p>\n

This poet, this bawdy, generous, uncommonly devotional man was no Saint Cuthbert\u2014he killed a thousand birds, by his own account, throwing the tiny meats of woodcock and snipe into the vast presentations of many elaborate meals\u2014but for those of us so grateful for his heart\u2019s work, his poems, it\u2019s impossible not to hope that his last vision, as we might pray to be our own, was of birds in untrammeled flight.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Joy Williams<\/span> is the author of five novels, five story collections, a guidebook to the Florida Keys, and the essay collection\u00a0<\/em>Ill Nature. Her work has been nominated for the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2021, she received the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. Williams<\/span> lives in Tucson, Arizona.<\/em><\/p>\n

Jim Harrison: Complete Poems<\/a> will appear in December 2021, published by Copper Canyon.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Joy Williams on the poetry of Jim Harrison. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":540,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2157],"tags":[24555,1054,7285],"class_list":["post-155425","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-poetry","tag-about-poetry","tag-jim-harrison","tag-joy-williams"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nA Holy Terror Dancing with Light: On Jim Harrison by Joy Williams<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"October 21, 2021 \u2013 Joy Williams on the poetry of Jim Harrison.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2021\/10\/21\/a-holy-terror-dancing-with-light-on-jim-harrison\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta 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