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McLean: Would you talk a little about your writing habits?
Harrison: I'd say they're kind of lax. I mean, I work very hard when I work, as the above answer would suggest, but I don't have a routine, a special time to write, etc. I'm not sure poets should have a routine. Poems can come from anywhere at any time, but sometimes they're just not coming, and although I don't enjoy those fallow periods, I don't think you can force poems to come. I think some poets write too much, or maybe they just publish too much. They work like coal miners, and their books come out in such quick succession that no one could possibly want the new one yet.
Let's see. I like to have my desk up against a window so I can daydream. (I imagine novelists having their desks shoved up against a wall.) We have moved a lot, but that is one thing that has stayed the same. Right now, my "office" is a tiny alcove, a dormer window off the upstairs hall, but the desk fits right in there. My computer is somewhere else. I don't write on a computer, but sometimes I tinker with a poem on it. I generally use the computer as a word-processor (which is a very weird term, like a cooking appliance).
McLean: Please talk a little bit about the creation of "Not Written on Birch Bark." Do you see this poem as a companion piece or a poem in dialogue with other poems that foreground beauty, writing and imagination, and their relation to "a strip of birch bark/whose native blankness/seemed to ask for words/but left nothing to say." Here, you might also discuss "Not Written on Birch Bark" in relation to other poems in the collection and in relation to all that your title evokes.
Harrison: It's really a poem in dialogue with some of my earlier work. I used to write a lot of what would have to be called, for better or worse, nature poems. My first book is full of them, there are some in my second, and there are a few in Feeding the Fire. So it's not as if I've totally stopped writing them, but there are fewer of them, and perhaps now they are a little different. At first glance, "Not Written on Birch Bark" seems to be a nature poem, and perhaps it is, but it is also a poem about the limitations of nature poetry. My earliest nature poems were written with a kind of innocence, as if there were no separation between nature and the written word--as if, in other words, the poems were written right onto nature itself, onto birch bark. While in some ways that directness may be refreshing, it leaves a lot out. This poem, for one thing, acknowledges the act of writing. But also, at the end, it addresses the, well, dead end of some nature poetry: nature is sufficient unto itself, and in some sense there is nothing you can say about it after you've named it. Of course naming things can be an essential act. But usually we try to do more: we make connections, spin metaphors, bend nature to our ends. This poem does that, too, since it seems almost as if nature has grabbed the paper from my hand and then planted the strip of birch bark in the path intentionally. But it ends on a note that tries to pare things down to what they really are and to acknowledge that nature really doesn't have anything to do with us. The poem "Arrangement" wrestles with the same issue: our need to interpret nature as if it had some bearing on our lives, when in reality it doesn't. And yet we do it anyway--it's part of being human and definitely part of being a poet. "Arrangement" tries to look to nature for solace after a death while at the same time acknowledging that that solace is a human projection.
McLean: The form in which you wrote "Salt" is unique in the collection. It is a form most appropriate to the subject. Please say a little about the form and the subject of "Salt." Did you write this poem in slanting three line stanzas from the get go? Or did the form come with the evolution of the poem?
Harrison: We moved over the summer, and I would have to dig through a lot of boxes in the garage to find the versions of that poem that would answer the question of exactly when that form asserted itself. But my recollection is that it happened fairly early and fairly naturally--it was intuition, not a conscious decision. And while William Carlos Williams did come to mind as someone who had used that form (also Stephen Dunn), I did not go back and make a rigorous study of the variable foot and the triadic stanza. The poem did go through a number of versions, and I remember that the first version arrived somewhere that was entirely unsuccessful. But then I worked my way through it again and arrived somewhere else. The poem always began with the kosher salt I grew up with and went on from there, but I had no idea where I was going. Somehow, perhaps, that open form allowed me to move easily from one subject to another, from the salt to my immersion in things Jewish at Columbia, and then, well. . . it was a total surprise to me when the poem then turned into a love poem and played itself out that way. There is no more satisfying feeling in writing poetry than when a poem arrives somewhere you didn't expect it to.
McLean: "Golden Retriever" is a terrific, visceral poem. It's part of Section II, and it is part of a remarkable series of poems. Can you talk about the relationship between "Golden Retriever," "Another Story," "Masturbation," and "Smoke Follows Beauty"? How do these poems enter into conversation with one another?
Harrison: "Golden Retriever" was a weird poem for me, and one that felt good to write. It is much more oblique than many of my poems. Like "Not Written on Birch Bark," it is a poem in dialogue with some of my earlier work in the sense that it speaks against a poetry of pastoral nostalgia. (I'm not sure I'm being fair to my earlier work, but what the hell.) I was thinking of the retrieval of memories and the tendency to light past events in a golden glow. So in a sense the dog is me, which is perhaps why I can speak harshly to it at the end of the poem. This poem felt very different to me as I was writing it, and that was exciting. I was on a different wavelength--the wavelength of an extended metaphor and a strong voice that felt new to me--and I just rode it out, profanity and all. The ending seems to call for darker memories, so "Another Story" seemed like a good poem to follow it with. It's a different type of poem--more direct, more narrative (with the pun on "story")--but hopefully it has some of the intensity of "Golden Retriever" in its attempt to capture adolescence. And then "Masturbation" seemed to follow naturally from that. It's another extended metaphor (which almost sounds like an off-color joke, with that title), but only the title establishes the metaphor. Without it, the poem would be almost straight memory. So in mode or genre it's something like a combination of the two preceding poems. "Smoke Follows Beauty" seems a little more innocent to begin with, but by the end the smoke seems creepy in a sexual or "deathy" kind of way. It's a strange knot of poems, perhaps having something to do with a loss of innocence.
McLean: If you could share this collection with any poet, living or dead, writing in any language, with whom would you share Feeding the Fire and why?
Harrison: Wow, what a great idea!--being able to give your book to dead people. Can you also arrange for them to tell me what they think? You're crazy if you think I'm going to limit myself to just one.
I'd start with Charles Baudelaire, because he was really my first revelation, when I read him in high school French class. Then Elizabeth Bishop, because she was my second major revelation (in college). James Merrill because he picked my first book for a contest and we became friends, and I'd like him to see what I'm doing now. William Matthews would be cool (I didn't know him). Definitely Keats. Maybe Rilke, though he's not going to like "Rilke's Fear of Dogs." I'm sure I'm forgetting somebody, but I doubt they care. And maybe I'll leave the living alone, though it would be nice if it somehow fell into the hands of Seamus Heaney, but I don't think he needs one more slim volume from another younger admirer.
McLean: Do you share your poems with your children? How do their responses shape the evolution of your work? What do you think a poet can learn from children? (Take this question any way you want to go.)
Harrison: At nine and eight, my kids don't yet play a big role in my writing, except once in a while as subject matter. I've shown them a few poems from my first book, one about an otter, one about seals, etc.--poems which, in hindsight, seem almost to have been written for children. I don't think they're ready for my more recent work. On the other hand, I do think we can learn from children. When my kids were younger, they used to say things that sounded like poetry. Like: "Who makes the clouds move? Who put the bark on the trees?" Once they were looking out the window and one of them said, "The leaves on the ground are like a blanket," and then the other one said, "The grass must be sleeping underneath," and I thought that was a pretty good imitation of Robert Bly. They are definitely on a wavelength that we poets tune into sometimes.
McLean: What responsibilities do you feel the poet has to the community in which he lives? On a local, national or even global context.
Harrison: Answers to that question run the risk of sounding portentous unless they come from poets who came of age in places like Eastern Europe or Northern Ireland. And yet I continue to believe that, even in our society that largely ignores it, poetry has its functions--though one of them might be to write the poems as honestly as one can without worrying about such things. Perhaps honesty is the primary responsibility--honesty about oneself and about what the world is like. But there are numerous other traditional functions that continue to apply to poetry, if not to every poem: to praise, to give pleasure, perhaps at times to frighten or discomfort, to make us see the world freshly, to make sense of life, to delve into emotional cruxes, to keep the imagination alive, to keep the language alive without letting it become self-indulgent. There is a passage in Auden's The Dyer's Hand about the function of poetry which still gives me goose bumps every time I read it. He lists all the different things that poetry can do-- "delight, sadden, disturb, amuse, instruct"--and then says, "but there is only one thing that all poetry must do; it must praise all it can for being and for happening." Amen.
McLean: How is your current work in continuity with the poems gathered in Feeding the Fire? How is it different?
Harrison: I'm not sure, it may be too early to tell. So far, there seem to be fewer memory poems, but that could always change: I'm not going to turn them away if they come knocking at my door. Judging from the way I've progressed up to this point, I seem to write some poems that are of-a-piece with what I've done before and others that move away from my previous work--like two opposing tendencies that don't cancel each other out. I think that is how this book stands in relation to my earlier work: a few of the poems might fit without much difficulty into my previous books, but others wouldn't at all, in terms of style or content. If someone had told me ten years ago that someday I would write a poem called "Masturbation," I would have laughed in his face. I think I've been moving fairly slowly from innocence into experience. It took me three books to get to sex, for instance, but I always was a late bloomer. And the poems about sex (I am probably making too big a deal out of them, because there are only a handful) tend to be submerged in metaphor, and that too was something I hadn't done very often. I believe in writing the poems that come naturally, and yet, at the same time, there is an innately self-critical aspect of my personality that makes me want to move on to other things. A poem like "Golden Retriever" comes totally from that restlessness. A dissatisfaction with one's own work can be demoralizing if you take it too far, but it can also be productive, because it helps you move on. I think there's always part of us that wants to be writing poems that are entirely different from the ones we are writing. Anyway, we'll see what happens. A few of the poems are funnier than anything I've written before, I think.
Jefferey Harrison's third book of poems, Feeding the Fire, will be published by Sarabande Books in November, 2001. He recently finished up a three-year term as the Roger Murray Writer-in Residence at Phillips Academy, Andover, to spend a year on a Guggenheim Fellowship. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Paris Review, Poetry, The Southern Review, Shenandoah, Ploughshares, and DoubleTake. (Photograph of Jeffrey Harrison by Richard Linke)
Jacqueline McLean teaches in the English Department at Texas Tech University, where she is also on the faculty of Women's Studies and the Honors College. She writes and publishes poetry, fiction, biography, and critical essays.
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