Apparently Saul Bellow really took to the forms of the novella and the short story rather than the longer novel later in his life, as expressed when he quoted Checkhov in an essay in 1991, “Odd, I have now a mania for shortness. Whatever I read my own or other people's works it all seems to me not short enough.” To which Bellow provided a followup, 'I find myself emphatically agreeing with this.' The two other books he published in the 1990's also being novellas.

In the novella The Actual, Harry Trellman is around 60 and has spent his life secretly in love with an old High School flame, Amy Wustrin. After meeting a retired and slightly bored trillionaire (what to do with one’s life when money is no longer an issue?), Sigmund Adletsky, with Harry interesting Mr. Adletsky because of his keen insight and awareness towards the social interactions at a dinner party where they initially met, Harry becomes Mr. Adletsky’s “brain trust”, a relationship which eventually leads to Mr. Adletsky calling Harry on his unrequited love and providing him with the nudge to fetch Amy Wustrin, a woman who has had a series of wearing misfires in her romantic life, both in contrast and complimentary to Harry’s solitary longing.

This all sounds like standard fare to provide the framework for a Bellow story. And once the reader gets into The Actual, they’ll find Bellow's typical display of the infringements our contemporary lifestyles impose on our ability to manifest love– materialism, money, status, cultural constructions, misdirected sexuality, etc. The writing though is much more pared down and largely void of the side expositions that allowed Bellow to wax philosophical in his longer works of fiction. Although the ideas are still incorporated, only their presentations are limited to one or two sentences, or even only a phrase, and allows, to me at least, The Actual to be as multi-layered as any other Bellow book that I’ve read (Seize the Day, Mr. Sammler’s Planet, More Die of Hearbreak and about half of Herzog).

What perplexes me with The Actual is the handling of Harry’s adolescent love. Bellow treats the notion in the story with great reverence, as opposed to another facet of a not uncommon occurrence in the modern world and in need of ironic examination. Not that I ever thought that Bellow was not in praise of the mysterious qualities of love, instead, my thinking being in this instance, “a too direct concept to obtain Bellow’s sincerity?” The answer to this question requires my reading more of Bellow’s works, and specifically how he frames love within his stories. But even then, I suspect that there will be more openings than answers. However, an August 17, 1997 Guardian review of The Actual, 'Don't call him mellow Bellow', may provide the lynchpin to it all:

While you love, that which is innate in you becomes malleable; so love shapes you. In Something to Remember Me By and By the St Lawrence this shaping goes all the way back to moments of youthful awakening, qualified by a complementary accession to death. The con-girl seductress, the child in the coffin, the wait outside the bordello, the body on the railtrack: Bellow makes me feel the mortal hold of these raw configurations.

The procession passed and I looked in it for my body
All these turned up and were not myself
Brought one by one the pieces of myself
They built me little by little as a tower is raised
The people heaped themselves up and I appeared myself
Who was formed of all bodies and all human things

The past the Dead The gods who created me
I live to move on as you yourselves have lived
And turning from the future's emptiness
I watch within me all the past arise

Nothing is dead but what has never been
The colored past outshines tomorrow's grey
Besides whose formlessness it can display
The sequence of the effort and effect

--from "Cortege", Guillaume Apollinaire (translated by Roger Shattuck)

A traditional New Orleans Jazz Funeral for the late tuba player Kerwin James. The last two minutes are incredible, and not to go without mentioning how loud the players must have been blowing into their horns during the whole procession, "it blatted and mewed and wept".

I stick to my pronouncement that culture means first of all the enjoyment of life, leisure and a sense of leisure. It means time for a play of imagination over the facts of life, it means time and vitality to be serious about really serious things and a background of joy in life in which to refresh the tired spirits.

In a civilization where the fact becomes dominant, submerging the imaginative life, you will have what is dominant in the cities of Pittsburgh and Chicago today.

When the fact is made secondary to the desire to live, to love, and to understand life, it may be that we will have in more American cities a charm of place such as one finds in the older parts of New Orleans.

--Sherwood Anderson, 1922

Sherwood Anderson was an American short story writer from Ohio and became influential upon many subsequent writers, including Hemingway and Faulkner. The last chapter within New Orleans Sketches is an essay about Anderson that was written by Faulkner for the Dallas, Morning News in 1925 and demonstrates the concepts and standards which Faulkner wanted to include within his own work:

Here are the green shoots, battling with earth for sustenance, threatened by the crows of starvation; and here was Mr. Anderson, helping around livery stables and race tracks, striping bicycles in a factory until the impulse to tell his story became too strong to be longer resisted.

[... ...]

These people live and breathe: they are beautiful. There is the man who organized a baseball club, the man with the "speaking" hands, Elizabeth Willard, middle-aged, and the oldish doctor, between whom was a love that Cardinal Bembo might have dreamed. There is a Greek word for a love like theirs which Mr. Anderson probably had never heard. And behind all of them a ground of fecund earth and corn in the green spring and the slow, full hot summer and the rigorous masculine winter that hurts it not, but makes it stronger.

That last paragraph refer's to Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio: a group of tales of Ohio small town life, and which can be found at the Gutenberg Project.

There are some good stories within New Orleans Sketches, however I would say even those are still too constrained to ever open up adequately for the reader. And possibly the reason for this was Faulkner always attempting to conclude the stories with some piece of final wit, or an unexpected surprise, or, worse of all, a lesson to be learned. In that, they reminded me of stories that would more likely be written by O. Henry rather than William Faulkner.

However, a reader can still find here and there the gestures which Faulkner's later writing would become known for. Some random examples:

"He looked up and his entrails became briefly cold-- not with fear, but with passionate knowledge of what was some day to be." (from The Kid Learns)

"After the fiddles were silent and the sun had dropped beyond the dreaming purple hills and the bells chimed across the dusk like the last golden ray of the sun broken and fallen echoed across the rocks, we often walked." (from The Cobbler)

"And convicted of both truthfulness and stupidity, he turned his face bitterly to the wall, knowing that his veracity as a liar was gone forever." (from The Liar)

"The west was like blood: it was his own blood painted onto a wall. Supper in the pot, and night where there were no fires and people moving around them, and then all stopping as though they were waiting for something to happen." (from Sunset)

"The tune seemed to be nothing, the tune seemed to be two tunes played at the same time: it blatted and mewed and wept, filling the morning and spilling the dusty sparrows tumultuously from the eaves." (from The Rosary)

Almost every story in the collection contains a few wonderful sentences such as these, but more often than not, the stories are without the context to allow the full impact they deserve.

If William Faulkner was around these days, he would probably be actively seeking out every copy of New Orleans Sketches that he could find in order to have them removed from their shelves and replaced with extra copies of his subsequent works. Written in 1925 while living in the French Quarter and when Faulkner was in his late 20's, this collection of short stories demonstrates Faulkner’s initial attempts at writing serious fiction. The stories are not much more that three or five pages and the majority of which being of the same quality as an advanced undergrad creative writing portfolio.

They are indeed ‘sketches’ and not much more, reading like initial starting points for what would become more concentrated efforts– examples being characters that are presented with dry factual accounts rather than through Faulkner's developed techniques of revealing dialogue, voice, complex family lineages and social placement, or stories that don’t go much of anywhere and with only scant traces of the palpable Southern atmosphere readers expect from a Faulkner book. And the language style is also askew, with Faulkner utilizing both realistic dialects that would naturally be found in his characters (which he was initially critized for), but then, at times, interjected with a narrative based upon classical diction, which makes it confusing for the reader to determine exactly from where the stories are being told.

The collection though is interesting for readers that are fans of Faulkner’s known works, as they demonstrate the initial entry for what would become developed into Faulkner’s themes and settings, such as the social structures in the South and how they were affected by the Civil War, the relationships between black and white Americans, the parallels with Christian theology, etc. And while the language can be disjointed, there are sections that show where Faulkner was ready to rein in his creative muscle and blow the words off the page through a writing style which the wold had not yet seen. One has to wonder if Faulkner would have been born ten years later than he did if would have become a modernist poet rather than an author of fiction.

The collection is also interesting for Cormac McCarthy fans. I had known that McCarthy was influenced by Faulkner, but not until I read this collection did I understand just how close McCarthy initially was to Faulkner, as the earliest stories written by McCarthy (also his weakest) would be in comfortable company if slipped into this Faulkner collection. Especially when bootleggers are involved.

New Orleans Sketches could also give hope to writers that are in the beginning stages of their writing life. When Jonathan Franzen asks, “Why bother?”, as something that a new writer might say when looking at the great works of literature and comparing them to one’s own efforts, William Faulkner would be a name that is as equally, devastatingly, crushing as any other. Yet, he too had to begin from somewhere (but then wrote The Sound and the Fury only two years later. Yikes!).

from the Chinese Book of Songs
--Alisa Valles

i

Saved from my own desires, I keep those of others
with me. Guests whose houses burned down have
nowhere to go. It would be cruel to send them off
to visit ruins. There are parts of my mind I haven't
visited for a long time and do not care to visit now.
Let's open this bottle of wine and spit at the moon.

Yes in a circle the imagined train
word after recent word
you make them up to come to mean
light to shadow day
pond as music's mirror
trees cut from yarrow stalks
would be real in order to seem
a reasonably green place
a reasonable number of roads
some straight, some curved and narrow
beside rails whose perfect parallels
are nowhere else to be seen
but in a sealed and measured space
called here and now for now

--Yes in a circle; Michael Palmer

If Not, Not
--Michael Palmer

They tell each other stories,
lies composed as dreams and
always in the colors of
dreams: rust, chrome yellow, coral,
chemical green. Of the dying
figures, loosely assembled, by a
riverbank. The gatehouse. A journey
by train through beautiful countryside,
indescribable countryside. I was there
cut in half, only to
survive. A young dancer, standing
at the third-floor window. Cobalt
blue, argentine, bone white. What
we called that hour in
those days. He means to
say that on that same
hill Goethe and Eckermann would
sometimes walk. "Always the old
story, always the old bed
of the sea!" He means
to say, The music of
moths, the small lamps. She
stares from the window on
the third floor, toward the
square below. He says, These
are yellow-hammers and sparrows, but
there are no larks. Come
Whitsuntide, the mockingbird and the
yellow thrush will arrive. Here
at the heart, a small
pond, stagnant in the shadow
of smoke. The late flowers.

From a 2004 keynote speech provided by Michael Palmer at the 3rd Annual Sustainable Living Conference at Evergreen State College:

....everything I do seems a form of collaboration, across time, with the voices of poets and others that pass through me as I work. Suffice to say that another, an other, becomes present in a way that is both like and unlike the dialogic work of the poem. My ideal of pure collaboration, never fully realized, produces a work that belongs neither to one maker nor to the other or others. It escapes or surpasses the kind of intentionality we associate with the product of an individual. It is a work, in the words of one of my poems, " that is neither you nor I." If we consider the topic of this conference then, " working with" is a means of overcoming what the poet George Oppen referred to as " the shipwreck of the singular," in an attempt to arrive at the experience (in Oppen's words again) " of being numerous."


...a shared cultural ecology that conserves as well as innovates, that resists habits of thought and action when necessary and builds a non-nostalgic vision of pasts and possible futures, and of a less predatory present. When George W. Bush claims that he doesn't think about his place in the future "because we'll all be dead," the remark provides singular insight into a certain mode of thought (if it can be called thought) that has no presence, since the future is not some vague abstraction but fact and consequence of present action. It inheres and defines us as we are. As present, it articulates notions of community and exchange, of making and unmaking........


....the poem is less an isolate cultural artifact than a diachronic and synchronic cultural echo chamber. As for the stage and the curtain, when the reader closes the book, the poem is no more. Will the book ever be reopened? It is impossible to tell, but In most instances not. It exists though, only when it comes to light, by the grace of another or others.


A happy result of collaboration: to take you out of yourself, your accumulated habits of making, into a place that is not your own. The various participants become " communicating vessels," opening a space for making that is neither that of one nor the other.

Prelude
--Michael Palmer

The limit of the song is this
prelude to a journey to
the outer islands, the generative
sentence, waltz project, forms,
qualities, suns, moons, rings,
an inside-outside then
an outside-inside shaped
with her colored days. The days
yet propose themselves
as self-evident, everything there
everything here
as you are reading
in a way natural to theatre
a set of instructions
that alters itself automatically
as you proceed west
from death to friendliness, the two
topics upon which you are allowed
to meditate
under the first broad drops
of rain. The planes
will be piloted by ancestors
who have come back to life.
Why the delay.

Someone out there must really like Michael Palmer. When I first pickup a new author or book, I often obtain an introduction on wikipedia and then use the links cited to extend from there. And when I clicked on Michael Palmer’s page, I found more information than what’s usually on wiki for major poets, let alone a minor poet who’s writing is generally classified as avant-garde. Meaning, you won’t find him on the shelves of your local bookstore. And not just the quantity of the wiki page, but the quality of what’s included as well. Very helpful, only it makes it more difficult for me to add further on this blog!

Michael Palmer was heavily influenced by Robert Duncan, who’s writing is noticeable for its adherence to sound from the classical influences of prior centuries, but modernistic and free through its assembly of associative images and ideas. As his wiki page notes, “blindly making its way into language like salmon running upstream.” Its for this same reason I found myself drawn to Palmer’s writing and where the influence can be seen. The content is abstract, at times maddening if you think about the disjointed juxtapositions too long, but unlike other post-modern poets, reading his poetry at one level is almost effortless, which entirely has to do with the lyrical components he derived from Duncan, holding the poem together when the thoughts will not. Palmer, however, was able to combine Duncan’s theories and carry them over to the language oriented poetics initially developed by William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky, which makes his poetry simultaneously fluid and crystalline, like an icicle in the sun dripping off words, images, ideas, notions, side thoughts, anything that can be embodied within words.

If there is a central subject to Palmer’s poetry, I would say it is ‘presence’; for the poet to be present within the poem during its construction, for the reader to be present within the poem when it is being read. Both one of the same. Being attentive to the field of our awareness and what enters, possibly lingers for a while, and then drifts off back into the dark of the woods. Which is generally what I suggest to anyone that wants to understand modern, abstract poetry– enjoy each word and line on its own rather than trying to place them into a greater whole or meaning. From what I’ve been able to pick up with Palmer’s more recent writing, there is a move towards an increasing incorporation of how the personal is situated within the historical, political and economic. For further clarification and to sum things up, I’ll rely upon the words of Brighde Mullins:

Palmer's dialectic, with its underpinning of phenomenological panic, with its awareness of the psychotic matrix of the political and the personal, is evinced in somatic terms, is realized through semantic sustenance.

His poetic is situated yet active, and it affords a range of pleasure due to his wonderful ear, his intellection, his breadth. In this century of the Eye over the Ear, Palmer's insistence on Sound evokes a subtextual joy.

Samples of Palmer's The Lion Bridge: Selected Poems 1972-1995 are available at Google Books.

"This Mighty Mudball of a world spews out breath, and the breath is called wind. Everything is fine so long as it's still. But when it blows, the ten thousand holes cry and moan. Haven't you heard them wailing on and on? In the awesome beauty of mountain forests, it's all huge trees a hundred feet around, and they're full of wailing hollows and holes-- like noses, like mouths, like ears, like posts and beams, like cups and bowls, like empty ditches and puddles: water-splashers, arrow-whistlers, howlers, gaspers, callers, screamers, laughers, warblers-- leaders singing out yuuu! and followers answering yeee! When the wind's light, the harmony's gentle; but when the storm wails, it's a mighty chorus. And then, once the fierce wind has passed through, the holes are all empty again. Haven't you seen felicity and depravity thrashing and flailing together?"

"So the music of earth means all those holes singing together," said Adept Adrift....

--Chuang Tzu

"And I don't care about our losses because the moon is our mother and our father. And now let's go down to dinner."

Dave Douglas & Brass Ecstasy ~ This Love Affair from Greenleaf Music on Vimeo.

A prose poem composed from phrases within Across the River and into the Trees:

It looks as though it had been cut out of wood. They have all been captured by treachery, the Colonel thought, and their claws are pegged. I am brutal, and it is not that I have erected the defense. Doesn’t all have to be palaces and churches. The Colonel looked out of the windows and the door of the bar onto the waters of the Grand Canal. “Yes. But kiss me first.” They stood there and kissed each other true, since it was very heavy hair and as alive as the strange, rare smile which rises from the deep dark pit, that is within them. They had deads too, confirmed by some politician in uniform who has never killed in his life. This high pressure salesman. Now we will cut out all references to glamour and to high brass. The dark ones last the best, and all are wounded for life, no longer of any use to the Army of the United States. He shut it carefully and well, sleepy now the way a cat is when it sleeps within itself.

Some dark humor in Across the River and into the Trees, which reminds me of a side story Cormac McCarthy maybe would want to pick up and take off with. The scene is Col. Cantwell being driven by an underling in the American army and talking about the 16th century Venetian artist, Titian:

"Well, if he painted any really good pictures of that country I'd sure as hell like to trade him out of some of them."

"He painted some wonderful women," the Colonel said.

"If I had a joint or a roadhouse or some sort of an inn, say, I could use one of those," the driver said. "But if I brought home a picture of some woman, my old woman would run me from Rawlins to Buffalo, I'd be lucky if I got to Buffalo."

"You could give it to the local museum."

"All they got in the local museum is arrow heads, war bonnets, scalping knives, different scalps, petrified fish, pipes of peace, photographs of Liver Eating Johnston, and the skin of some bad man that they hanged him and some doctor skinned him out. One of those women pictures would be out of place there."

The exaggerated masculinity in Hemingway's novels can be an easy target for critiques, especially in Across the River, which is fine, especially when critiquing Across the River. But the fact remains Hemingway can demonstrate keen insight into human psychology through his machismo:

"Poor man."

"Yes, poor man all his life. Although quite rich in money and with a lot of armor."

"Do you have anything against armour?"

"Yes. Most of the people inside of it. It makes men into bullies which is the first step to cowardice; true cowardice I mean. Perhaps it is a little complicated by claustrophobia."

An excellent observation, and an important one when considering that the subtext of the book is how military organizations operate in modern warfare. While the main story is ridiculous, Hemingway can use the simplistic innocence behind the concept, and especially Renata's underdeveloped character, to juxtapose the realism of Col. Cantwell's war recollections:

"How do you make a break for armour to go through? Tell me, please."

"First you fight to take a town that controls all the main roads. Call the town St. Lo. Then you have to open up the roads by taking other towns and villages. The enemy has a main line of resistance, but he cannot bring up his divisions to counter attack because the fighter bombers catch them on the roads. Does this bore you? It bores the hell out of me."

"It does not bore me. I never heard it said understandably before."

"Thank you," the Colonel said. "Are you sure you want more of the sad science?"

"Please," she said. "I love you, you know, and I would like to share it with you."

"Nobody shares this trade with anybody," the Colonel told her. "I'm just telling you how it works."

Well, I liked it. But apparently most have not and cite Across the River and Into the Trees as once of Hemingway’s worse novels, generally getting excoriated by the critics at the time of its initial publication. The story is that of a retired U.S. Army officer, Col. Cantwell, returning to Venice to be with his 19 year old lover, Renata. Much of the book focusing upon their conversations, the contents of which reveal that Cantwell is ill, that he fought about Italy during World War II, is physically disfigured, was demoted in rank by his superiors when they needed a scapegoat because of a costly tactical error (which they made), that he divorced his wife because of her own social ladder climbing, and so forth. So Cantwell has his share or problems, but then compensated by the Hemingway ruggedness to ensure he’ll go down with his head up, with fists swinging, and perfectly capable of carrying an obsessive, nearly devotional, love for his 19 year old Renata.

Not much of a plot, a much too obvious metaphor, even cliché when compared to Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (although I have to wonder if Nabokov had these two books in mind when he wrote Lolita). And I don’t think Hemingway even came close to achieving what his intentions were for the novel:

"Book start slow, then increase in pace till it becomes impossible to stand. I bring emotion up to where you can't stand it, then we level off, so we won't have to provide oxygen tents for the readers. Book is like engine. We have to slack her off gradually."

About as emotional as as Fleetwood Mac pop hit, and all of the band's internal drama. All I can say is Hemingway must have been wrapped up into his subjective relationship with the novel if he thought he was working up the emotion to the point where the reader can’t stand it.

So why did I like it? The same reason why I like all Hemingway books, for the prose. Of America's modernist fiction writers, I’d argue Hemingway’s writing comes closest to what could be termed a ‘poetic style' (although I might change my mind next time I pick up a Faulkner book). Partly because, in order to effectively employ a minimalist approach, there must have been a concise intent on Hemingway's part to create his text by seperating the wheat from the chaff. This sort of craftsmanship then bringing an inherent musicality to the language. But also, and more importantly, there is Hemingway’s reliance upon understatement and suggestion for his stories, choosing to leave a significant portion of what goes on in the stories untold, thereby opening the texts up and increasing the demand upon the reader to participate in the creation of the stories. When discussing his books, more often than not what is shared is either a personal take on the stories or focusing the discussion upon the mechanics of the writing, which is not unlike discussing poetry.

All poems
are easy poems


It's just that some
are even easier


than others
These we call


the easiest poems
of all


.........--Michael Palmer

Jim Harrison and John Ashbery are not writers that would often be paired together, if at all ever. Harrison, a growling woodsmen of American frontier letters and Eastern philosophy. Ashbery, an urban coffee shop tenure who's made himself at home within the abstracts of modern art and French surrealism. But I find similarities in their poetic voice, including the syntax, how the breath and thoughts are measured out, and the slightly plaintive and humorous tones when they read their works. Voice samples can be found here-JA and here-JH.

So what I'm going to do is post a section from a poem from each, and then at the bottom of the post reveal which is whose.

1.
What am I to make of this? Where did it come
from to the weary human who'd rather parse
the mysteries of oatmeal topped with strawberries,
but then any kid knows that during a long night
the imagination thumbs its nose at civilization
as the lid of a jar screwed on too tight
that has no idea what its true contents are.
The billions of neurons fed by a couple of trillion
cells aren't confused. Perhaps a simpleminded
neuron remembers when...

and

2.
For a while we caught the spirit of things
as they had drifted in the past. And we got
to know them really well. Cobwebs sailed
above the shore. Undaunted, the girl picked
them out of clouds, all being mysterious
and rubbery. Later a shroud lifted
them above the cement dream of taxis and life.
This was the more or less expected
way of things running out, and back
together again. What we couldn't see was
delightful. July passed very quickly.

Answer: 1. 'Old Times', Jim Harrison. 2. 'To Be Affronted', John Ashbery.

Time
--Jim Harrison

Time our subtle poison runs toward us,
and through us, and out the other side.
We've never been in the future except for a moment.
Time's poison is in the air we breathe
and the faint taste in the water we drink.
We are dogs who love the morning walks
but not their names. They don't know they're dogs,
but no one had the right to give them the wrong names.
Time never told us to have faith in the sepulcher
that awaits us. The night carves us into separate acts,
but I do have faith in that turbulent creek
of blood within me.

From a recent interview at PBS:

JEFFREY BROWN: Now 71, Jim Harrison is a Falstaffian figure: blind in his left eye from a childhood accident, chain-smoking his American Spirit cigarettes, part wild man, part cultivated literary lion, who peppers his speech with talk of birds and great poets of the past.

It's poetry, in fact, that has remained Harrison's first love. His new collection is called "In Search of Small Gods."

JIM HARRISON: You sense those spirits in certain, often remote places, whether it's the spirit of animals, the spirit of trees. So those are the small gods.

JEFFREY BROWN: And they appear throughout these poetry, so it sounds like they're coming from the walks.

JIM HARRISON: I think that's true, you know, because sometimes you have little breakthroughs. I've known this group of ravens for 19 years, for instance, Chihuahuan ravens, Mexican ravens. And last year, several times, they began to take walks with me.

JEFFREY BROWN: But then you put them into poetry?

JIM HARRISON: Yes, then you do. You know, what is it that Blake said? How do we know but that every bird who cuts the airy way is an immense world of delight close to our senses five, that perception? What is possible in the natural world?

[...

...]

JEFFREY BROWN: There is, in fact, much about loss and grief in Harrison's writing these days. His brother and a number of friends have died in recent years. And on our walk near Antelope Butte, he told me of a talk he'd had with one of them, a Native American, just before his death.

JIM HARRISON: And I was really falling apart, and he says, "Don't be upset. These things happen to people." Isn't that an incredible thing to say?

JEFFREY BROWN: Yes. Of course, a lot of characters in your books...

JIM HARRISON: ... are like that, yes.

JEFFREY BROWN: ... are like that, huh? "These things happen." They go through all kinds of tragedies.

JIM HARRISON: Well, that is that Native American stoicism. You know, they tend to see the whole arc.

Moving higher my thumping chest recites the names
of a dozen friends who have died in recent years,
names now incomprehensible as the mountains
across the river far behind me.
I'll always be walking up toward Antelope Butte.
Perhaps when we die our names are taken
from us by a divine magnet and are free
to flutter here and there within the bodies
of birds. I'll be a simple crow
who can reach the top of Antelope Butte.

Jim Harrison made a name for himself with character rich novels that would also include deep appreciations for their regional settings, quite a few based in Northern Michigan. Harrison has also published poetry throughout his life, however, the content has perhaps been too personal to acquire a readership beyond the loyalty of his fans. But in Harrison’s newest collection, In Search of Small Gods, Harrison focuses more upon the artistic crafting of poetry than he has in previous collections, as well as broadens his subject matter, and perhaps this will widen his reputation within poetry communities. Case in point is the structuring of the book, which is divided upon into three sections to create a guided conflict-resolution framework to a reading.

Within the first section, the poems are largely free verse contemplations upon the usual Harrision topics, such as death, life, Hemingwayesque masculinity, the natural world, and these framed within an Eastern based mind set. In this section though, there is a particular focus upon Harrison’s contemplations of mortality, his age of 69 being noted as well as the deaths of loved ones. But the poems also extend their reference beyond Harrision by acknowledging other locals and cultural traditions in the world, Latin America in particular. The poems also tend to be darker, the section concluding with a longer poem about a period of depression Harrison found himself struggling with, and his plans to conquer the depression.

I hope to define my life, whatever is left,
by migration, south and north with the birds
and far from the metallic fever of clocks,
the self staring at the clock saying, "I must do this."
I can't tell the time on the tongue of the river
in the cool morning air, the smell of the ferment
of greenery, the dust off the canyon's rock walls,
the swallows swooping above the scent of raw water.

In the second section, Harrison only writes in paragraph poems, varying from a half a page to two pages. The tone is more detached because of the poetry primarily relying upon specific details, almost in list form, which include both personal memories for Harrison as well as historical events during the twentieth century. While some of the references are ‘factual’, many times its clear that they are not and suggests Harrison’s effort to create his own mythology based upon these events and details, and then worked into conceptual narrative.

It safe for me to continue smoldering just below the temperature of actual flame wondering if there's a distant land where life freely flows like a river. Years ago in a high green pasture near timberline I watched a small black bear on its back rolling back and forth and shimmying to scratch its back, pawing the air with pleasure, not likely wanting to be anywhere or anyone else. ('Burning the Ditches')

The third section is much more lyrical and composed from looser and more abstract constructions, one poem being written about the French surrealist René Char. In these poems, while Harrison still references the topics of the first section, the style of the poetry is more open and suggests a new attitude towards the conflicts brought into the first section. The resolution obtained, the page turned, as confirmed in the last poem where Harrison references his new age of 70. Harrison, of course, is not one for crudely definitive answers, but the stylistic changes are expressive enough. For this reason, I found this section the most enjoyable and where I would turn to first for repeated readings, partly because I want to enjoy and share in the expression, but also because this is a poetic approach not found in earlier collections and is a fresh change for someone that has been reading Harrison for the past ten years.

While I have enjoyed all of Harrison’ books, after reading this collection, I might prefer to see Harrison stick to poetry from here on out. Maybe its time for him to leave behind the worldly weight of the novel and allow himself to live within the broader perspectives that poetry can provide, not unlike the Chinese poets which Harrison has modeled much of his literary life upon. He concludes the book with a poem which references the 11th century Su Tung-p’o, and here are the opening lines, which I think makes an explanation for the title obvious enough:

On my seventieth birthday reading Su Tung-p'o
in the predawn dark waiting for the first birdcall.
"I'm a tired horse unharnessed at last," he said.
Our leaders say "connect the dots" but the dots
are the 10,000 visible stars above me.

[Driveway]

Hungry Again
--John Ashbery

Since I could not shout
I stood near the spout
the rainwater was running out of.
The rain, sentries,
taxed me with appearing.
Soon it was all old as clay.

Why wait for another day?
You know this one is happening
and will be the same after it has happened.
Nothing will come to take its place
and that will be fine, good.
Though not inhuman, we can play
at what it would be like to be God,
and God will not take us away.

Another time I was at your house.
It was suddenly dark inside.
A wind swept past the bark
of some trees. It was overdue,
they said. All storms are inept.
It was time to find the mind-crystal,
pore over what we still had,
the huge resource we owed.

Leo Kottke, The Fisherman, June 22, 1977. Montreux Jazz Festival.