"I don't film dreams that lack narrative drive."

Saving Daylight, New Poems by Jim Harrison

By Allen M. Jones, 4-24-06

I have a notion that poetry should occasionally be reviewed in the same way that it's written: By analogy.

Jim Harrison's tenth book of verse, Saving Daylight (Copper Canyon Press, $22), has about it all the blue collar wisdom of a Philip Levine. The political conscience of a Carolyn Forché. The finger-shock mysticism of Hopkins. Maybe a rose garden whiff of classical Keats. There's the naturalism of a Mary Oliver, the family preoccupations of early Sharon Olds. Most of all, though, there's Harrison himself. The eccentric, walleyed assuredness of a personality utterly at home with itself, a curiosity equally as willing to peak into his own garbage ("...the food / thawed in the freezer I grieved / over the five pounds of melted squid,") as into a good ontological mystery or two ("None of us is the same person as yesterday. / We finally die from the exhaustion of becoming.")

If you know Harrison's work, chances are it's through his movies, maybe his novels. Remember that unfortunate Brad Pitt flick, Legends of the Fall? Harrison's brilliant novella towered head and shoulders over the celluloid. Costner's movie Revenge came from a Harrison fiction as well and that miscast but well-scripted Nicholson vehicle, Wolf, began as a Harrison screenplay. Call these professional digressions. Guy's got to make a living, after all. But Harrison is first and last a poet. His prematurely named "collected works," The Shape of the Journey, stands as one of the major American poetry accomplishments of the latter half of the twentieth century. The fact that it wasn't weighed down with all available bangles and bows is testament only to the unfashionable orbits of its author. Harrison's professional success (he makes an actual living as a writer, sans the dreadful, insulating alee of academia) and his unashamedly male appetites (hunting, booze, strip clubs) combine to create enough jealousy and suspicion to distance him from those sticks-up-their-asses aesthetes who guard the gates of posterity.

Maybe it's time for a change. Certainly, with Saving Daylight he's slapping yet another brick onto an already substantial edifice of unignorability. Consider his short poem, "Waves," and how it begins with as traditional a poetic conceit as you'll find outside a Grecian urn:

"A wave lasts only moments
but underneath another one is always
waiting to be born. This isn't the Tao
of people but of waves
As a student of people, waves, the Tao,
I'm free to let you know that waves
and people tell the same story
of how blood and water were born..."

It goes on to expand on its own possibilities, live up to its own potential...

"...the way the moon tugs
at our skulls and loins, the way
the tides make their tortuous love to the land.
We're surely creatures with unknown gods."

Elsewhere in Saving Daylight, and unusual to Harrison's body of work, he provides English translations of several of his own Spanish poems. How refreshing to see a poet in the late years of his career taking actual risks. Perhaps by virtue of their original tongue, these pieces depart drastically (in both subject matter and tone) from the other poems in the collection. In the tragic narrative, "Sonoran Corrida," an impoverished twelve year old girl learns that her brother has been murdered:

"It was hot and she was drinking the air
in sobs when a truck drew up
and threw her a bag with a cold
devil's laughter. In the bag
were her brother's tongue and finger
with its ring made of a horsehair nail.
Now she would become a whore or starve,
but she cut her wrists to join her brother.
If you wish to cheat the rich and powerful
you must do it with a gun."

In part due to the deceptively simple pieces of wordplay that precede it (hot / cold; tongue and finger / whore or starve / rich and powerful), the final swinging around to the punch line comes at you like a slug in the jaw. Here's a guy who knows how to play with his readers' attentions. His best poems are like a buddy handing you a pair of binoculars. Look here, there, now over there.

Not that he necessarily has an agenda. Or at least, no agenda that's more important to him than his language. A part-time Buddhist, a devotee of Basho and his haiku cohorts, flip around a few pages after the brutal, cold water shock of "Sonoran Corrida," and you find a quiet strain of no-mind that stands in stark contrast to his politics. In "Night Dharma," for instance, he writes,

"In the stillness that surrounds us
we think we have to probe our wounds
but with what? Mind caresses mind
not by saying no or yes but neither."

Then, just when you think you might have a handle on where the guy's coming from (okay, Richard Gere meets Che Guevera), he twists things around again, delighting in his own lack of predictability, tossing you a couple sliders. In "The Movie," a brilliant, compressed circuit of Hollywood satire and pubescent longing and late-age angst, he begins,

"I'm making a movie about my life
which never ends. The plot thickens
and thickens like an overcooked soup.
The movie features tens of thousands
of characters including those who passed
me on the street without knowing
that I was a star."

He goes on to incorporate a love interest – "From the top of the hill / she sees the world she never made / but has changed with words into the arena / of the sacred." – spiced up with a measure of philosophical profanity: "It's not truth that keeps us alive / but invention, no actual past but the stories / we've devised to cover our disappearing / asses." It's in this poem as well that Harrison throws out a line that, to my mind, might well serve as an epigram for his entire body of work. "I don't film dreams that lack narrative drive."

Trying to come up with good, solid, sweeping statements about poetry, it's like trying to snatch minnows out of mud puddles. By definition, the art resists truisms. For every academic who laments his loss of readership, there's a half-circle of hoodied punks on a Bed-Stuy streetcorner, busting out string after string of formal rhymes. For every half-assed attempt to name a new movement, there's a Brooks Haxton or Kevin Young spinning off into his own hotshot solo. And yet it seems to me fairly obvious that in a sub-culture given mostly over to hushed libraries and sepulchral readings, Jim Harrison and his ilk are palliatives. He's a redemptive, clanging, thumping one man band playing Bach. An artist accessible enough to bring poetry to the people. For years, ever since first stumbling across one of his outdoor essays in an old Clark City Press anthology, I've been thinking, somebody please give this guy a Pulitzer already.

Maybe it's time. I read a great deal of poetry, and Saving Daylight is as worthy a new collection as you're likely to find on the shelves this year.

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