We are Supposed to Write Poetry to keep the Gods Alive

The great Jim Harrison died on this day in 2016

Credit: © Inediz Reports/Demotix/Corbis

A poet technically is supposed to be a “thief of fire” but as easily as anyone else he becomes a working stiff who drinks too much on late Friday afternoons.

— Jim Harrison

Shirtless and disheveled with his one bad eye glazed over, Jim Harrison sits at his writing desk in a dark room in his musty Montana cabin. A writer from Esquire magazine arrives on his doorstep for an interview. Jim totters over to let him in.

The writer shows up just in time. In four months, Jim, one of the finest writers of our era, will be dead.

The stench of smoke and solitude permeates the room. It’s the place he likes to hide from the anemic sensibilities and endless bustle of the modern world. “At my cabin made of logs there is less distance between inside and outside. You can smell the heart of the forest as you sleep and hear the river passing beside the north side of the cabin.”

With a boozy, cigarette-soaked voice, Jim asks his magazine guest, "would you like some vodka?" as he pours himself a stiff one. Of course, this is after pounding a few glasses of Les Sang des Cailloux, a French wine that he adored.

It’s 4 pm on a weekday.

Harrison was a hard yet liberal-minded man, an outdoorsman, a hunter, a walker, a food-lover, a big-hearted intuitive poet worn ragged by trying times.

He was stabbed in the eye as a child by a neighborhood girl. “I probably wouldn't have been a poet if I hadn't lost my left eye when I was a boy,” he once wrote, “a neighbor girl shoved a broken bottle in my face during a quarrel. Afterward, I retreated to the natural world and never really came back.”

Jim spent his late teenage years roaming around the country as an aspiring “beatnik.” In his early 20s, both his father and sister were killed instantaneously in a car accident (he backed out of the trip at the last moment.) And the following decade, Jim and his wife and daughter, lived on less than $9,000 a year as he tried to make it as a writer.

That’s when he wrote his renowned novel, Legends of the Fall, which put him on the literary map. “I wrote Legends of the Fall in nine days and when I re-read it, I only had to change one word. There was no revision process. None."

By the end of Harrison’s life, he’d produced 14 books of poetry, 11 novels, 9 novellas, 3 non-fiction works, and one children's book.

But what he wanted to be remembered for most was his poetry. “We are supposed to write poetry to keep the gods alive," he says with a toothless smile.

Jim Harrison died seven years ago today.

Shortly after his death, Anthony Bourdain, a huge fan of Harrison, said this: "There were none like him while he lived. There will be none like him now that he's gone."

Jim’s friend and fellow writer, Thomas McGuane, in a beautiful remembrance article, writes:

“On Saturday night, my oldest friend, Jim Harrison, sat at his desk writing. He wrote in longhand. The words trailed off into scribbles and he fell from his chair dead. His strength of personality was such that his death will cut many adrift. He was seventy-eight years old and had lived and worked hard for every one of those years…He was active and creative to the end, but it was time to go: no one was less suited to assisted living.”

Let’s raise a toast for Jim on this fine spring day Sunday.

I’ll leave you with one of my favorite poems that Harrison wrote toward the end of his life. You can find it in his excellent book—Jim Harrison: The Essential Poems.

Death Again

Let’s not get romantic or dismal about death.
Indeed it’s our most unique act along with birth.
We must think of it as cooking breakfast,
it’s that ordinary. Break two eggs into a bowl
or break a bowl into two eggs. Slip into a coffin
after the fluids have been drained, or better yet,
slide into the fire. Of course it’s a little hard
to accept your last kiss, your last drink,
your last meal about which the condemned
can be quite particular as if there could be
a cheeseburger sent by God. A few lovers
sweep by the inner eye, but it’s mostly a placid
lake at dawn, mist rising, a solitary loon
call, and staring into the still, opaque water.
We’ll know as children again all that we are
destined to know, that the water is cold
and deep, and the sun penetrates only so far.