“Some people hear their own inner voices with great clearness. And they live by what they hear. Such people become crazy... or they become legend.”
— Jim Harrison
The great writer, novelist, and poet, Jim Harrison, died ten years ago today. Harrison is one of my all-time favorite poets. His writing is unique, funny, and profound all at the same time. He was an outdoorsman, and his verse is deeply rooted in America’s natural landscape—the thickets, the fields, and tree stumps, mountains, and its pristine rivers.
“In a life properly lived, you’re a river. You touch things lightly or deeply; you move along because life herself moves, and you can’t stop it; you can’t figure out a banal game plan applicable to all situations; you just have to go with the ‘beingness’ of life.”
— Jim Harrison
Harrison, like no other, was brilliant at blending the raw vitality of nature with philosophical depth. His writing is both rugged and tender, contemplative and action-oriented. He once said, "I hunt and fish because it helps my writing. Novels and poems are the creeks and rivers coming out of my brain."
“The world that used to nurse us now keeps shouting inane instructions. That’s why I ran to the woods.”
— Jim Harrison
Jim Harrison’s “Letters to Yesenin” is one of his most powerful and personal poetry collections, often regarded as a masterpiece in his body of work. Published originally in 1973 (by Sumac Press) and later reissued by Copper Canyon Press (including in a 2007 edition as part of their classics series), it’s not a collection of actual correspondence but a series of 30 prose-poems written as one-sided letters addressed to the dead Russian poet Sergei Yesenin.
From Copper Canyon Press:
Sergei Yesenin was a Russian poet who, in 1925, hanged himself after writing his farewell poem in blood. Jim Harrison’s gorgeous, desperate “correspondence” with Yesenin is an American masterwork.
In the early 1970s, Harrison was living in poverty on a hard-scrabble farm, suffering from depression and suicidal urges. He began to write daily prose-poem letters to Yesenin, confiding to his unlikely friend about sex, drunkenness, family, politics—about living for another day. Although “the rope” remained ever present, Harrison listened to his poems: “My year-old daughter’s red robe hangs from the doorknob shouting stop.”
In honor of the tenth anniversary of Harrison’s death (sitting at his desk in a solitary cabin mid-sentence of a final poem), I’d like to share the first haunting poem from this remarkable work. I hope you enjoy it.
This matted and glossy photo of Yesenin bought at a Leningrad newsstand—permanently tilted on my desk: he doesn’t stare at me he stares at nothing; the difference between a plane crash and a noose adds up to nothing. And what can I do with heroes with my brain fixed on so few of them? Again nothing. Regard his flat magazine eyes with my half-cocked own, both of us seeing nothing. In the vodka was nothing and Isadora was nothing, the pistol waved in New York was nothing, and that plank bridge near your village home in Ryazan covered seven feet of nothing, the clumsy noose that swung the tilted body was nothing but a noose, a law of gravity this seeking for the ground, a few feet of nothing between shoes and the floor a light-year away. So this is a song of Yesenin’s noose that came to nothing, but did a good job as we say back home where there’s nothing but snow. But I stood under your balcony in St. Petersburg, yes St. Petersburg! a crazed tourist with so much nothing in my heart it wanted to implode. And I walked down to the Neva embankment with a fine sleet falling and there was finally something, a great river vastly flowing, flat as your eyes; something to marry to my nothing heart other than the poems you hurled into nothing those years before the articulate noose.