Jeffrey Harrison Named 15th Westminster Poet

For 2014-2015, the English Department has invited New England poet Jeffrey Harrison to be the 15th Westminster Poet. The visiting poets series began in 2000 (there was no poet in 2001). The previous Westminster Poets have been Linda Pastan, Billy Collins, David Huddle, Stephen Dunn, Marilyn Nelson, Ted Kooser, Naomi Shihab Nye, Li-Young Lee, Dorianne Laux, Tony Hoagland, Terrance Hayes, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Mark Doty and Naomi Shihab Nye in a return visit.
 

Jeffrey Harrison is no stranger to Westminster either, having been a Friday Night Reader in January of 2013. Harrison graduated from Cincinnati Country Day School the year before Michael Cervas, head of Westminster’s English Department, arrived there to begin his teaching career, and the two joked that the Friday Night reading was really only an audition for the real prize, the two-day gig as a Westminster Poet. When Harrison’s newest volume “Into Daylight” (2014) won the Dorset Prize, Michael decided it was the right time to ask him to return to Williams Hill.
 

Harrison is the author of six books of poems: “The Singing Underneath” (1988) which was selected by James Merrill for the National Poetry Series, “Sings of Arrival” (1996), “Feeding the Fire” (2001), “An Undertaking” (2005), “Incomplete Knowledge” (2006) which was runner-up for the Poets’ Prize, “The Names of Things: New and Selected Poems” (2006) and “Into Daylight” (2014) which won the Dorset Prize. Poems by Harrison have often been read on Garrison Keillor’s “The Writer’s Almanac” and have appeared in The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The American Poetry Review and The Yale Review among other magazines and periodicals. His honors include two Pushcart Prizes, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Travelling Poet Scholarship, the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship.
 

When he came to Westminster as a Friday Night Reader, students liked the way Harrison’s poems frequently start out simple but become richer and more complicated the more the class talked about them. Philip Levine has said of Harrison’s poems: “It’s thrilling to read an entire book of poems written with such pleasure and gusto, Harrison writes with remarkable confidence about a range of ordinary things — salt, rowing a boat, discarded books, a stinking pond — and he gets more out of his subjects than seems possible.” And Jonathan Galassi writes, “Naturalness is the quality I most admire in Jeffrey Harrison’s restrained and deeply affecting poetry. It’s a quality achieved through great art, the eliminating of everything superfluous, easy, or artificial. What remains is utterly convincing, flawlessly right.”
 

English teachers at Westminster remember how easily Harrison interacted with their students, too, something that makes sense since Harrison has taught at George Washington University, Phillips Academy and the College of the Holy Cross, and read at schools and colleges all across the country. Here are links to a few relevant web sites:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Harrison
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/jeffrey-harrison
http://home.comcast.net/~jeffrey.harrison/
 

Harrison was a featured reader at the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival in the early 1990s, and he will again be a featured reader this summer on Wednesday, July 23. Finally, here are a few poems by Jeffrey Harrison:
 

Wherever You Are
 

When I kissed you in the hall

of the youth hostel we fell

into the linen closet laughing

twenty years ago and I still

remember though not very often

the taste of cheap wine in your mouth

like raspberries the freckle

between your breasts and the next day

when we went to Versailles I hardly

saw anything because I was looking

at you the whole time your face I can’t

quite remember then I kissed you

good-bye and you got on a train

and I never saw you again just

one day and one letter long gone

explaining never mind but sometimes

I wonder where you are probably

married with children like me happy

with a new last name a whole life

having nothing to do with that day

but everybody has something like it

a small thing they can’t help

going back to and it’s not even about

choices and where your life might

have gone but just that it’s there

far enough away so it can be seen

as just something that happened almost

to someone else an episode from

a movie we walk out of blinded

back into our lives
 

(from “Feeding the Fire”)
 

Mailboxes in Late Winter
 

It’s a motley lot. A few still stand

at attention like sentries at the ends

of their driveways, but more lean

askance as if they’d just received a blow

to the head, and in fact they’ve received

many, all winter, from jets of wet snow

shooting off the curved, tapered blade

of the plow. Some look wobbly, cocked

at oddball angles or slumping forlornly

on precariously listing posts. One box

bows steeply forward, as if in disgrace, its door

lolling sideways, unhinged. Others are dented,

battered, streaked with rust, bandaged in duct tape,

crisscrossed with clothesline or bungee cords.

A few lie abashed in remnants of the very snow

that knocked them from their perches.

Another is wedged in the crook of a tree

like a birdhouse, its post shattered nearby.

I almost feel sorry for them, worn out

by the long winter, off-kilter, not knowing

what hit them, trying to hold themselves

together, as they wait for news from spring.
 

(from “American Life in Poetry”)
 

Our Other Sister
 

for Ellen
 

The cruelest thing I did to my younger sister
wasn’t shooting a homemade blowdart into her knee,
where it dangled for a breathless second

before dropping off, but telling her we had
another, older sister who’d gone away.
What my motives were I can’t recall: a whim,

or was it some need of mine to toy with loss,
to probe the ache of imaginary wounds?
But that first sentence was like a strand of DNA

that replicated itself in coiling lies
when my sister began asking her desperate questions.
I called our older sister Isabel

and gave her hazel eyes and long blonde hair.
I had her run away to California
where she took drugs and made hippie jewelry.

Before I knew it, she’d moved to Santa Fe
and opened a shop. She sent a postcard
every year or so, but she’d stopped calling.

I can still see my younger sister staring at me,
her eyes widening with desolation
then filling with tears. I can still remember

how thrilled and horrified I was
that something I’d just made up
had that kind of power, and I can still feel

the blowdart of remorse stabbing me in the heart
as I rushed to tell her none of it was true.
But it was too late. Our other sister

had already taken shape, and we could not
call her back from her life far away
or tell her how badly we missed her.
 

(from “Feeding the Fire”)
 

The Names of Things
 

Just after breakfast and still
waking up, I take the path cut
through the meadow, my mind caught
in some rudimentary stage,
the stems of timothy bending
inward with the weight of a single
drop of condensed fog clinging
to each of their fuzzy heads
that brush wetly against my jeans.
Out on a rise, the lupines stand
like a choir singing their purples,
pinks and whites to the buttercups
spread thickly through the grasses—
and to the sparser daisies, orange
hawkweed, pink and white clover,
purple vetch, butter-and-eggs.
It’s a pleasure to name things
as long as one doesn’t get
hung up about it. A pleasure, too,
to pick up the dirt road and listen
to my sneakers soaked with dew
scrunching on the damp pinkish sand—
that must be feldspar, an element
of granite, I remember from
fifth grade. I don’t know what
this black salamander with yellow spots
is called—I want to say yellow-
spotted salamander, as if names
innocently sprang from things
themselves. Purple columbines
nod in a ditch, escapees
from someone’s garden. It isn’t
until I’m on my way back
that they remind me of the school
shootings in Colorado,
the association clinging to the spurs
of their delicate, complex blooms.
And I remember the hawk
in hawkweed, and that it’s also
called devil’s paintbrush, and how
lupines are named after wolves . . .
how like second thoughts the darker
world encroaches even on these
fields protected as a sanctuary,
something ulterior always
creeping in like seeds carried
in the excrement of these buoyant
goldfinches, whose yellow bodies
are as bright as joy itself,
but whose species name in Latin
means “sorrowful.”
 

(from “Incomplete Knowledge”)