Response to Jim Harrison

When I first started reading Jim Harrison’s The Theory & Practice of Rivers and New Poems, I was not sure how I felt. I think my initial dilemma is the fact that I am resistant to long poems with no plot. It is probably more of a mental block than anything else, but it always seems as though I am supposed to find the one basic meaning that runs throughout and I can’t always seem to find it. (I also do not think that the subject matter of water in the first poem helped since I am writing a paper in the other class on oceans.) So while reading the poem “The Theory & Practice of Rivers,” I focused more on some brilliant wording that stuck me. Here are some lines that I really liked:

• On page 5, “The inside of the eye, vitreous humor, is the same pulp found inside the squid.” - This was just a neat image/analogy.


• On page 7, “I will never wake up and be able to play the piano.” – I think we have all had thoughts like this about something we want to be able to do but do not want to put all the time in that would be necessary. Secretly, I think we all hope that we would be able to just do something we have always wanted to do.


• On page 11, “My throat a knot of everything I no longer understand.” - This just gave me such a clear image of the feeling when you are just about to cry.


• On page 20, “The river pulls me out, draws me elsewhere an down to blue water, green water, black water.” - Since I have water on the brain, this stuck out to me. It really gets the idea across about water sucking you down, which is usually tied in with rivers opposed to placid lakes.


• On page 21, “One is a carpenter who doesn’t become Jesus, one is a girl who went to heaven sixty years early. Gods die, and not always out of choice, like near-sighted cats jumping between building seven stories up.”

I was able to get a more firm grasp on some of Harrison’s shorter poems; however, it was still a few lines in poems that really stuck out to me. Here are some more lines that I enjoyed:

• In Kobun on page 31, “The head’s a cloud anchor that the feet must follow.” – This is probably my favorite line out of this book. It is just such a neat idea that has never occurred to me before. It quite literally flips the notion of gravity on its head.


• I really enjoyed “The Brand New Statue of Liberty to Lea Iococca (another Michigan boy)” as a whole. The image of the necklace of bones around the statue of liberty was quite striking.


• In “What He Said When I was Eleven” on page 57, “The fly-strip above the table idled in the window’s breeze, a new fly in its death buzz. Grandpa said, ‘We are all flies.’ That’s what he said forty years ago.” – This part just really portrays the idea of being trapped. Grandpa feels like a fly in his old age, but it is obviously not because of his age that he feels this way. He felt trapped forty years ago and apparently continued to do so.


• “My Friend the Bear” on page 61 as a whole but especially the lines: “There’s a tunnel to the outside on the far wall that emerges in the lilac grove in the backyard but she rarely uses it, knowing there’s no room around here for a freewheeling bear.” And “Privately she likes religion – from the bedroom I hear her incantatory moans and howls below me.”


• In “Rich Folks, Poor Folks, and Neither” on page 67, “I shot the copy machine with my rifle. No more copies, I thought, everything original!” – because haven’t we all wanted to cry out against technology at some point in our lives?

Overall, I am still trying to “figure it all out.” His style seems to be pretty comfortable and accessible but not in the same way as Billy Collins. I am not too sure what it is, but I do think I would have a hard time replicating his style. Either way, I am looking forward to see what my classmates have made of it and hopefully Jimmy will be able to enlighten us since he has been able to study Harrison extensively.