This Easter Sunday, I woke to the news that author Jim Harrison had died at 78 years old at his winter home in Patagonia, Arizona. In other seasons, he had come to call Montana home, though he is also inextricably associated with Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where he grew up. Last summer, on my first visit to the U.P., a Jim Harrison quote was printed on the wooden beam of a picnic shack at our campsite on Lake Superior. That wild, remote part of the country (that country of its own) shaped Harrison; his first subject (his first love) remained the natural world.
There have been some good recent profiles of Harrison – Dean Kuipers’s late 2015 profile in the Los Angeles Times, “Jim Harrison on spirits, bad poetry and the wonder of nature,” and earlier, Tom Bissell’s 2011 feature “The Last Lion” in the magazine Outside.
When I heard of Harrison’s passing, I went to my folder full of old letters to find his. I had met him when he visited the University of Iowa in 2003. I was in my first semester of graduate school, and I had just turned 22. He said I could send him some poems, and I did. He wrote back from Patagonia, Arizona in black felt-tip pen on “Brown Dog Productions” letterhead, filling both sides of the paper. Instead of the date, he wrote “the day of the year the moon is closest.”
He was kind about the poems, less kind about the “life of a writer” in our American moment. “I see your life as possibly melancholy with 750 dollar prizes, teaching jobs, the occasional awards with an eye wistfully cocked toward becoming something ‘real,’ something more than being the residue of your creative acts,” he wrote to me. (In the LA Times profile above, he bemoans “everybody getting an MFA,” talks about “not being a smutty little cog in the culture.”) He continued, “Avoid Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. Too lugubrious.” But it was too late for that advice already.
He earned a BA in 1960 and an MA in comparative literature in 1964, both from Michigan State, then taught as an assistant professor of English at SUNY Stonybrook for just one year before leaving academia to write full-time. (In my 2003 letter, he writes, “I only taught once, something called ‘modern poetics’ for a year so what can I say about your work because I don’t have a critical frame of mind? Only that I ‘experienced’ it . . .”) He recommended reading poetry in Spanish—Lorca, Neruda, and the then-“newish” Copper Canyon anthology of contemporary Mexican poetry, Reversible Monuments, as well as the French symbolists and classical Chinese poetry. He recommended this that I might “aerate” myself beyond contemporary American poetry, “a muddy creek in a suburb.”
He always identified as a poet, though of course his fiction made his name. When I woke to the news of his Saturday death, it was sad, but strangely perfect that it was Easter Sunday; in his letter from 13 years ago, he writes, “It is my poetry morning, Sunday, to displace that wretchedly compromised Protestant holiday of my youth.”
This letter was just a kindness to a young writer—one of so many, I imagine—but the turns of phrase are…well, they’re Jim Harrison.
Here’s his poem “Debtors,” from Songs of Unreason (Copper Canyon, 2011):
They used to say we’re living on borrowed
time but even when young I wondered
who loaned it to us? In 1948 one grandpa
died stretched tight in a misty oxygen tent,
his four sons gathered, his papery hand
grasping mine. Only a week before, we were fishing.
Now the four sons have all run out of borrowed time
while I’m alive wondering whom I owe
for this indisputable gift of existence.
Of course time is running out. It always
has been a creek heading east, the freight
of water with its surprising heaviness
following the slant of the land, its destiny.
What is lovelier than a creek or riverine thicket?
Say it is an unknown benefactor who gave us
birds and Mozart, the mystery of trees and water
and all living things borrowing time.
Would I still love the creek if I lasted forever?
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R.I.P. Jim Harrison
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