Dead Man's Float by Jim Harrison (review)

There is a rugged, American individualism in the poems of Jim Harrison, one I have come to greatly admire, and kudos to Copper Canyon Press for their multibook publishing project to support and advance Harrison's reputation and legacy. In a way, his career ran contemporaneously with the Beat Poetry movement and shared in its gritty unconventionality and salty realism; although I daresay he would have resisted the comparison for unlike the Beats, Harrison was not one to preach a heavy-handed Eastern philosophy or fiery political polemic. To my mind he was much more a private person, a loner, a frontiersman more akin to the nature writer and conservationist, John Muir. I am also referring to that deeper Beat mentality described by Ginsberg: "As someone in the tradition of the old-time American transcendentalist individualism, from that old gnostic tradition … Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman …"

Harrison's verse holds kinship with Gary Snyder, Rexroth's early poems, and also the California poet Robinson Jeffers, who lived a spartan life off of the land near the Carmel coast and wrote in verse focused keenly on nature, the vivacity of life in the wild and all its beauty and struggle. Like Jeffers, Harrison writes abundantly about the small world he experiences just outside his front door and along the local trail.

The plain-spoken American vernacular so cherished by William Carlos Williams; the raw unfiltered, truth-speaking of Ginsberg; the Zen-like spiritual natural vision in Snyder, where Indian myths and gods continue to hold sacred sway and physical experience brings epiphany, are indeed all elements of Harrison's poetic.

But the voice is finally uniquely his, spare, authentic, dry, and true-grit masculine. The verse is feisty, wily, and parsed out in an even iambic pentameter. Typical of Harrison is his poem "Old Man":

An old man is a spindly junk pile.He is so brittle he can fallthrough himself top to bottom.No mirror is needed to see the layersof detritus, some years clogged with it.

The conceit of the man as a junk pile is expanded upon later. This employ of extended metaphor is quite prevalent in all of Harrison's verse. There is as well a sobering self-examination, a touch of dark humor, as Harrison self-deprecatingly portrays himself warts and all. He continues:

          The junk pile is withoutsympathy for itself. A life is a life,lived among birds and forests and fields.It knew many dogs, a few bears and wolves.Some women said they wanted to murder him but what is there worth murdering?The body, of course, the criminal bodydoing this and that. Some will lookfor miraculous gold nuggets in the junkand find a piece of fool's gold in the emptycans of menudo, a Mexican tripe stew.

The "gold nuggets" of a refined, polished and high-brow artistry are not to be found in Harrison—instead the reader, he suggests, will find only "fool's gold," a rough, impure, earthy substitute, the inverse of things luxuriant and ostentatious, his body merely a disposable can, a trashy vessel packed with innards.

So often, as above, Harrison, the elder poet, embraces the monikers of old coot, codger, or geezer. He admits to aches and pains, fears and dread. He speaks of wistful memories in the accumulating slagheap of the past. In "The Dog and Tobacco Room," he writes:

I am the old man alone in a hotelwaiting for a ride north to Mayo Pain Clinic.Loneliness is only a theory when we havethe past, which is a vast tumble of events.Sort and re-sort and never win.We live with our memories, a backpackof mostly trash we can barely carry.

In "Seven in the Woods" he observes:

          Time is a mysterythat can tip us upside down.Yesterday I was seven in the woodsa bandage covering my blind eye,in a bedroll Mother made meso I could sleep out in the woods …

          … I can still inhabit that boy...