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Jeffrey Harrison's Feeding the Fire is available from Sarabande Books (www.sarabandebooks.org). Harrison is the author of two previous collections, The Singing Underneath, selected by James Merrill for the National Poetry Series, and Signs of Arrival.
Jacqueline McLean: Titling a book of poems seems like a difficult enterprise. I want to ask you to talk about the significance of your title, Feeding the Fire. In presenting this question, I have a few thoughts in mind. First, there is your marvelous line from Kafka which prefaces the collection: "What one writes is merely the ashes of one's experience." This is a particularly apt line for poetry, in which we relive or try to recover something of the essence of what once was. Yet I see a contradiction here or at least an intriguing complication. In a poem like "White Spaces," you recover (without bringing him back) a college professor who continues to compel you. The closing lines of the poem read:
Gone now, known too briefly and too long ago
for me to bring him back in a poem,
though I'd like to think that what he was
and what he gave me hover at the edges
of these lines, in the white spaces around them
...always asking what can be found in words
and what forever lies beyond them.
I love this closing couplet, for this is the stuff out of which a great conversation about poetry might be made. Is it right to assume that for you, in Feeding the Fire, the written word is both "merely the ashes of one's experience" and "what forever lies beyond them"? I seem to see both of these energies at work, in fine tension, in the collection. Could you pick this question up and run with it?
Jeffrey Harrison: The Kafka quotation, along with the Bachelard and William Carlos Williams quotations it appears with, are an attempt to set up a metaphor for writing--and especially writing about memory, because this is sort of a memory-obsessed book. The idea is that we feed our experiences to the fire and watch them flame up in the act of writing, so in a sense these past experiences live again. Afterward, we are left with the ashes--which could be the poems on the page. Then, to extend the metaphor even beyond those three epigraphs, the reader breathes the ashes to life again in the act of reading--or so I hope.
The contradiction or tension that you see is definitely there, and it is there in most poetry about past experience or any kind of loss. The experience is gone, but in a sense you are bodying it forth again in language, so you end up sort of having it both ways. I cannot have my professor back in real life, but by writing about that loss I can, paradoxically, experience him again in language, and in the imagination--at least to some extent. The poem tries both to bring him back and to acknowledge that he can't be brought back. This double-edged quality is, I think, an aspect of all elegies, and of many other poems besides, and it is part of the "redress" that Heaney writes about in "The Redress of Poetry." I also like your word "recover." We cannot bring back the dead, but writing the poem is a kind of recovery, in both senses of that word. But it's only a partial recovery. There are hundreds of examples of this kind of poem, probably thousands, but a good one, just off the top of my head, is Larkin's wonderful poem "The Explosion," in which he envisions again the miners who have died in an explosion, and ends the poem not with their death but with "the eggs unbroken," leaving us with the image of them before the disaster. The poem's amazing power comes from that complicated relationship between loss and memory.
That final italicized couplet of "White Spaces" is also an acknowledgment of the limitations of language. Some things are, finally, "beyond words" in the sense that they can't be expressed in words. And so we are bound to fail, over and over again. And yet we go on trying, and by trying perhaps find some sort of redemption in our failure. This poem, by the way, took me ten years to write and changed shape many times. I sent one of the drafts to someone who also knew Bert Leefmans, my professor--knew him, in fact, better than I did. Her letter, which was largely about how impossible it was to capture Bert in words, was so moving that I found myself wanting to use parts of it, and that's how I came up with the idea for the inter-spliced couplets which appear in the poem's final form.
McLean: I would like this interview to be useful for developing poets interested in putting together a first or second collection of poems. (And perhaps every poet is a developing poet.) As a teacher of poetry, I am drawn to your work because I think your organization offers a good deal from which other students and writers of poetry can learn. Would you discuss your method in organizing this book in three parts? Here, you might also talk about the relationship of the poems within a particular section as well as the relationship of the first poem in a section and the last. One point to focus on might be Section II, which opens with "The Burning Hat," one of the poems that really moved me (a poem I shared with my creative writing students). This same section closes with "White Spaces." How do these two poems frame Section II?
Harrison: I've assembled three book manuscripts now, and I've helped my friends do it, too, so it's something I've thought about a lot. There are poets like Louise GlŸck who write books as a whole, but many of us write one poem at a time so that when we are ready to put a manuscript together we have to find a way for the poems to work as a book. I usually end up on the floor, with the poems spread out all around me, making piles and looking for sequences. It's like a huge game of solitaire that can take weeks or even months. There are so many ways that poems can be grouped--by subject, by theme, by style, etc. Are you going to put all the narrative poems together, or are you going to intersperse them with more lyric poems?--the way a rock band will alternate fast songs and slow songs. Now I'm mixing my metaphors. But going back to cards, it's sort of like when you have one of those complicated hands in gin rummy where you don't even know whether you're going for runs of the same suit or groups of the same value (three-of-a-kind, etc.)--only there are more factors than that. In my last book, Signs of Arrival, I had to decide whether to group the travel poems together or intersperse them throughout the book. I tried it both ways (actually, several different ways with each of these approaches), then decided it worked best if most of them were in the middle section of the book. The first section could then become, loosely, a "before travel" section, containing poems about childhood, but also some other poems. The last section was harder to define, but it had "after travel" poems about starting a family, but also poems of the present moment. This simplified description makes it sound more coherent than it is, because not all the poems fit so neatly into the sections. You don't want the sections to be boringly literal; you want a little "shake" in the thing. But there is definitely an over-arching structure, a trajectory.
In Feeding the Fire, I'm not sure I could even put into words what the three sections are doing. And it would take another long game of solitaire for me to remember everything I was thinking when I grouped them. But those groups are the result of a very long process of arrangement. One thing I didn't want to do was to put the poems in a sequence that was too narrative in a linear way. If I'd wanted that, I would have started the whole book with "The Burning Hat," because it is the earliest memory in the book. Instead, I tried to undermine chronology somewhat, and to intersperse other kinds of poems among the memory narratives, looking for other kinds of connections. After the first section, then, "The Burning Hat" becomes a kind of flashback, a new beginning. In some very general way, that section has something to do with losses, beginning with the seemingly trivial loss of that hat and including perhaps a loss of innocence, so it makes sense that it ends with a little sequence of elegies, culminating with "White Spaces." But I saved one elegy for the last section, partly so that all of them wouldn't be clumped together. That poem, "Arrangement," is the penultimate poem in the book and comes right before "Car Radio." That may seem like an odd juxtaposition, since they are very different, but the link there is that both are poems about driving.
Often one of the first things that happens when you look at your poems with the intention of arranging them into a manuscript is that one or two poems present themselves as good poems to begin the book with, or at least to begin a section with. One interesting fact is that those same poems often work well at the very end of the book or a section, so you try that too. But with this book, "Green Canoe" seemed a good introductory poem, even though it wasn't written with that intention. After you have that first poem, you say, "Okay, what poem would work well next to that poem?" and you just keep going like that until you get somewhere or it dead ends. I put "Lure" after "The Green Canoe" for a couple of reasons. One is that it has the exact same setting (a lake in the Adirondacks) but it is a totally different kind of poem. On the continuum between lyric and narrative, "Green Canoe" is more lyrical, generated by its own sounds, by language, by voice, and by the metaphors it plays out. "Lure" is more narrative, and it is generated by memory, though sound and tone are still important, of course. "Lure" also introduces some different subject matter, the idea of sexual awakening, which comes up later in the book. By starting the collection with those two poems, I think I was able to give some idea of the variety of poems the reader would encounter in the book. The first section ends with "Rowing," which on one level is very much like "Green Canoe"--a lyric poem about being in a boat on a lake, but by this time the theme of sexuality has been established and the whole poem becomes a metaphor for sex. Those two poems frame the section in the sense that they are similar, and yet we have arrived somewhere new.
McLean: I just watched, for the third time, Li-Young Lee's reading and interview with the Lannan Foundation. In his interview, he talks about the lyric poem as an ideal vehicle for autobiography. His premise is as follows: If the self is always provisional and always in flux, then the poetic enterprise makes great sense for autobiography because poetry is about uncovering a self that might be different at each sitting.
There are many 'selves' in Feeding the Fire. Could you talk a little about your own thoughts on the relationship between lyric poetry and autobiography? Here, you might discuss "Car Radio," the last poem in the collection.
Harrison: I'm intrigued by Li-Young Lee's idea. I've always thought of narrative poetry as being the vehicle of autobiography, and lyric poetry as being almost a break from it. But I think I see what he means (though I haven't seen or heard this interview). Lyric poetry would be autobiography in a less literal, less mimetic, and more indirect way than narrative poetry. It is not recounting former selves, the way memory narratives sometimes do. Instead, it becomes a portrait of the self at the moment of writing the poem. You might call it autobiography of the present moment, or autobiography in real time. Though I have never thought of it that way, I think I'm doing that kind of thing in the more lyric poems of this book--they can't help but be, in a sense, the inner speech of the self. But I am also doing the other thing--the quasi-autobiographical narratives of memory. Not that the two modes are mutually exclusive. Some of the poems ("Family Dog" comes to mind) might be doing both at the same time--writing about memory in a way that encompasses the present moment.
"Car Radio" does try to capture, or at least address, that idea of the self in fluxÑand also perhaps the play between narrative and lyric, between memory and the present moment. As I said earlier, this is a memory-obsessed book, though there are lyric breaks from that obsession. "Car Radio" addresses this idea of recalling former selves, and you could say that the memory-narratives in the book are analogous to the switching of channels on the radio to get to different eras. In other words, I've been flipping channels all through the book. So this poem seems to look back on, and speak to, one of the major themes of the book, which is why it seemed like a good poem to end with. In the end, though, the poem wants to acknowledge that tendency to look into the past but leave it behind, opting for the present moment. So it ends on a more lyrical note.
McLean: How do you feel about revision? Is it a process you embrace or abhor? Who are your best critics?
Harrison: I revise a lot. It can be hard work, and sometimes you get that demoralizing feeling that you are never going to get it right, but the rewards far outweigh the frustrations. Revision can lead to new revelations as you delve deeper into the material. And even if you over-revise and end up going back to something like an earlier version, you have learned something in the process, and there is almost always something in the newer version that you want to take back to that earlier version. Usually, though, the poem gets better and you don't go back. My philosophy is that it is almost never too late to improve a poem. Some of my poems go through so many revisions that I can't even get a large paper clip around all the pages, and I have to move on to one of those black spring clips usually used for book-length manuscripts. Other poems don't go through quite so many revisions, and a very few go through hardly any at all.
My best critics are Robert Cording, Baron Wormser, and Peter Schmitt, all good friends, and all good poets. They have totally different angles and almost never agree. I also periodically show my poems to other poet friends, including Karen Chase, Theodore Deppe, Jessica Greenbaum, and William Wenthe (I am probably forgetting someone), as well as to a few friends who aren't poets, which can be very helpful because they think in other ways.
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