By Joseph Harrison
Waywiser Press; 2024
Paper
Reviewed by Steve Harrison (no relation)
Poetry in the 21st century is very much alive, and here is a volume to prove it. Joseph Harrison’s Collected Poems, which will be generally available in April 2024, gathers poems from four of the poet’s previously published volumes: Someone Else’s Name (2003), Identity Theft (2008), Shakespeare’s Horse (2015), and Sometimes I Dream That I Am Not Walt Whitman (2020). Throughout the collection, Harrison delights in the poetic forms of the past, and invents intricate new forms that highlight his verbal virtuosity. “Runaway Blimp,” for example, is a poem of one sentence that winds through ten tightly rhymed stanzas of eight lines each. By contrast, Harrison’s poems in the style of Emily Dickinson are short, direct, and spare.
The opening poems in Someone Else’s Name (2003) remind us that love reveals our shortcomings yet enables us to forgive ourselves for some portion of them. “As If,” a series of twenty-two sonnets, is wry and passionate by turn. Phrases from Shakespeare, Donne, Marvel, and other Renaissance poets appear, yet Harrison makes their romantic dilemmas his own. In sonnet 7, Harrison trashes his rival: “I know I cannot match his gift, his scope / (He frequents prostitutes, he peddles dope).” Anthony Hecht calls this sequence “as fine a tour of the conundrums of identity, love and doubt as any I know.” The book ends with the magnificent “Mobile Bay Jubilee,” which describes a rare evening when oxygen-starved fish crowd the shallows and are harvested by excited residents.
Identity Theft (2008) deals with the malleability of personal identity in the digital age. The title poem consists of seventeen nine-line stanzas, each one rhymed ababbcbcc, one message of which is, “No, you can’t win the game, and, yes, you have to play.” In “Trajectory” Harrison notes that “The person jabbering in the street alone / Was certainly deranged. / Now he’s just on the phone.” Perhaps the sweetest poem in this section is “On Rereading Some Lines of Poetry,” in which Harrison revisits Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” and finds refreshment for his soul there. However, “Who They Were,” a meditation on the poet’s childhood, is equally tender, as is the concluding poem, “To My Friends,” which advises us, “Don’t spend too much time grieving.”
Shakespeare’s Horse (2015) is musical, brilliantly crafted, and has, according to critic Harold Bloom, comedy that is “refreshingly original.” In “To Riccardo Duranti” Harrison congratulates his friend on his luxurious situation on a “farm in the Sabine Hills,” but concludes by warning that “your nasty old neighbor . . . cheats at pool like a little Berlusconi.” In “Damon” Harrison shows that “alizarin” can rhyme quite sensibly with “zeroes in.” Who knew?
In Sometimes I Dream That I Am Not Walt Whitman (2020) Harrison considers the sources and varieties of poetic excellence. “Orogenesis” compares poetic inspiration that rises from the unconscious mind with the “compressed volcanic agony” that moves beneath tectonic plates. In other poems he channels the voices of Whitman, Dickinson, Frost, Stevens, and others. “Mark Strand” is a gentle remembrance of a poet Harrison knew and admired.
Joseph Hobson “Joe” Harrison III grew up in Auburn, Alabama, and graduated from Auburn High School in 1975. He got a B.A. degree at Yale, where he studied with Harold Bloom, who became a constant fan of Harrison’s poetry. Harrison obtained his M.A. at Johns Hopkins University and lived in Baltimore for the rest of his life. He was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2023 and died February 13, 2024. He lived long enough to see an advance copy of his Collected Poems, and to enjoy hearing them read aloud by friends who visited.
Harrison had a nearly photographic memory. He was knowledgeable on many topics, among them the history of baseball, which he knew from A to Z. He could quote long passages of poetry by his favorite writers, and when he gave public readings, he amazed his audiences by reciting his own works, some of them quite lengthy, with hardly a glance at the text.
In the 1980s my wife and I regularly spent July in a rambling old house on Gilmore Pond in New Hampshire, where the air was cool and the water invigorating. Joe and other friends sometimes joined us there, and I remember most sharply our evening conversations. Sitting on the screen porch overlooking the lake, we tested various brands of bourbon, Scotch, and brandy, and talked long about art, baseball, politics, and the oddities of life in the United States. We argued and laughed.
In “Like a Ghost I Returned,” one of the poems in which Harrison imagines Walt Whitman speaking from beyond the grave, he wrote, “The real me had moved on, living and breathing in poems.” Now Joe Harrison has left us, but not without the rich gift of his Collected Poems.
Steve Harrison grew up in Montgomery, Alabama, attended Auburn University, and worked in the software industry. Since his retirement, he has taught courses in poetry and world literature.
