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REMEMBERING Poet, Writer and Gourmand, Jim Harrison

Jim Harrison (1937-2016)
Jim Harrison (1937-2016)

Jim Harrison, one of America’s most versatile and celebrated writers, died last Saturday. He was the author of over thirty books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, the most well-know was probably Legends of the Fall, a trilogy of novellas. His latest poetry collection, Dead Man’s Float, was published earlier this year. His death came on the heals of Ancient Minstrels, also a collection of novellas, which launched in March.

Jim Harrison’s essays on food and our relationship to it are among my favorites and as I searched my bookshelves over the past few days, The Raw and the Cooked, Adventures of a Roving Gourmand is one of the two books of his that seem to have survived my downsizing. That’s an issue of shrinking real estate not regard.

Food – according to Jim Harrison – is more than food. It is a metaphor for life and living. The trick is to enjoy as much as you can without killing yourself because then you couldn’t continue to eat. Some of the meals he describes sound truly epic.

In 2007, Harrison was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

A rough and tumble sort, his preference was for the out-of-doors and he spent his time between Montana and Arizona.

If you are viewing this post from email, it is likely you’ll have to link through to watch the video.

41EhApVh1NL._SX331_BO1,204,203,200_Tomorrow

I’m hoping to be astonished tomorrow
by I don’t know what:
not the usual undiscovered bird in the cold
snowy willows, garishly green and yellow,
and not my usual death, which I’ve done
before with Borodin’s music
used in Kismet, and angels singing
“Stranger in Paradise,” that sort of thing,
and not the thousand naked women
running a marathon in circles around me
while I swivel on a writerly chair
keeping an eye on my favorites.
What could it be, this astonishment,
but falling into a liquid mirror
to finally understand that the purpose
of earth is earth? It’s plain as night.
She’s willing to sleep with us a little while.

Excerpt from In Search of Small Gods, © Copper Canyon Press, 2010; the photograph is from Jim Harrison’s Amazon page 

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Celebrating American She-Poets (6): Young People’s Poet Laureate, Jacqueline Woods … Brown Girl Dreaming

Jacqueline Woodson by David Shankbone under CC By SA 3.0 license
Jacqueline Woodson by David Shankbone under CC By SA 3.0 license

American poet and writer, Jacqueline Woods (b. 1963) was named Young People’s Poet Laureate in June last year by The Poetry Foundation. The $25,000 laureate award is given every two years to poets devoted to writing quality poetry for children and youth. Poetry Foundation President, Robert Polito, said Jacqueline is an “elegant, daring, and restlessly innovative writer.”

Jacqueline has written some thirty books. She’s won a National Book Award and three Newberry Honor Medals.

51-Pl9BJ7IL._SX331_BO1,204,203,200_I just finished reading Brown Girl Dreaming, a memoir in free verse that is not just for brown girls. It can be read in one sitting but like all good poetry is meant to be relished … there is much to savor.

What I like about this work – and what in part accounts for its popularity – is that it puts family life and youthful reflection smack-dab in the context of history. Woodson grew-up during the civil rights movement and tells of watching the Black Panthers on television and sitting in the back of the bus, though Woodson’s mother made a point of affirming for her children that they were as good as anyone.

I enjoyed – and think most kids would too – how Woodson writes about the contradictions in family stories. The day, for example, that she is born is reported differently by mother, father and grandmother, each absolutely sure that he or she is the only one who got it right.

This is a wonderful book for any young person. I venture to say, however,  if yours is a child who dreams of being a writer and can’t envision it happening, then you must put this book in that child’s hands. S/he will be forever grateful.

© 2016, Jamie Dedes

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Celebrating American She-Poets (4): Pearl Buck “Words of Love”

I give you the books I’ve made,
Body and soul, bled and flayed.
Yet the essence they contain
In one poem is made plain,
In one poem is made clear:
On this earth, through far or near,
Without love there’s only fear.

Essence by Pearl Buck, novelist and humanitarian

No one will think first of poetry when they think of Pearl Buck. She was primarily a novelist and memoirist. She did write poetry though and one collection was published. I consider her a sort of spiritual mother and so include her early in this ongoing Thursday series: Celebrating American She-Poets.

Pearl S. Buck (1892-1973) was born in Virginia, the daughter of Presbyterian missionaries. She grew up in China and spoke Chinese before she spoke English. Her Chinese name was Sai Zhenzhu.

Pearl Buck was a prolific writer of novels and memoir who started publishing her stories and essays in the 1920s in popular periodicals of the day: The Nation, The Chinese Recorder, Asia, and The Atlantic Monthly. Her first novel was East Wind, West Wind (John Day Company, 1930).

Of her novels, The Good Earth is the best known. It won the Pulitzer in 1932. The focus of most of her writing was China and the Chinese. When Chinese-American author Anchee Min wrote Pearl of China, a fictionalized account of Pearl Buck’s life, she said that she was touched by the warmth and understanding with which Ms. Buck had written about Chinese peasants and their lives.

Pearl Buck was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938.

To my knowledge, there is only one small book of her poems. The collection is titled Words of Love. It is simply illustrated with Asian art by Jeanyee Wong and was published a year after Ms. Buck’s death by the John Day Company, the publishing firm run by Pearl Buck’s second husband, Richard Walsh.

I found a copy of Words of Love in a used-book store some years ago. The poem quoted above is an excerpt. In brief, eloquent, deft strokes, Ms. Buck’s poems do indeed express the themes of her novels. I can’t help but wonder whether there might be more of her poetry stored in some university archive awaiting discovery by an ambitious student or devoted biographer.

Dust-jacket, Words of Love by Pearl S. Buck.

© 2016,  Jamie Dedes, All rights reserved; illustrations are in the public domain

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as writers it’s all a gift, all grist for the mill …

Unknown-2“A writer – and, I believe, generally all persons – must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.” Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), Argentinian poet, short-story writer, essayist and translator, Twenty-Four Conversations with Borges: Interviews with Roberto Alifano, 1981-1983