Jeffrey Harrison
Jeffrey Harrison is the author of three books of poetry, The Singing Underneath (1988),
a National Poetry Series selection, Signs of Arrival (1996), and Feeding the
Fire, published by Sarabande Books in 2001. He has received fellowships from the John
Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as a
Pushcart Prize, the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Scholarship, and the Lavan Younger Poets
Award from the Academy of American Poets (a prize which bears the distinction of no longer
existing). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Poetry, The
Paris Review, The Yale Review, Poets of the New Century, and in many other
magazines and anthologies. He has taught at several universities, and at Phillips Academy,
where he was the Roger Murray Writer-in-Residence for three years.
Harrison grew up outside of Cincinnati, Ohio, and has since lived in New York City, Japan,
Iowa, Washington, DC, San Francisco, Woodstock, CT, Chester, CT, and Andover, MA. He now
lives in Dover, Massachusetts, with his wife, two children, and dog, and plans not to move
again for a long, long time.
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I am somewhat wary of statements of poetics, since
they often just barely conceal the glinting edge of an ax to grind. I don’t believe
in schools or movements but instead that a poet should be able to write in as many ways as
he or she is moved to do; and, further, that any form, style, mode, or poetic device can
be used to good or ill effect—depending not on what is being used but on how it is
used. If these statements seem obvious to you, good. But there are others out there
vigorously proselytizing for one particular aesthetic, as if the one true god were
narrative, or the lyric, or formal verse, or free verse. Any of these will do, as long as
it is done well. The one true god is authenticity, but it has as many shapes as a Hindu
deity. I believe that a poet must write what comes naturally, but I also believe (and this
may seem contradictory) that there is a necessary restlessness to being a poet, and if a
poet doesn’t have this quality, then he or she is destined to be reincarnated over
and over in the same poem. One doesn’t consciously change the way one writes, it
happens naturally over time, but the restlessness helps move the process along.
For further thoughts, go to:
http://www.smartishpace.com/home/dynamic.html?interview-harrison.html