Joseph Harrison
Publication (US): March 15th, 2020
Publication (UK): October 15th, 2020
In his sixth book of poems Joseph Harrison further refines his already agile art. His characteristic metrical and syntactic ingenuity are on display here again, as is the surprising capacity of his figurative imagination. Poems in a variety of forms, some elaborate and nonce, display a range of mood, mode, and matter: there are political poems, ekphrastic poems, poems on the metaphoric implications of scientific terms. At the heart of the book, though, is an astonishing advance in Harrison’s explorations of intertextuality: these poems risk a kind of poetic shamanism, a lyric ventriloquism that channels the voices of precursors American and English. The uncannily resonant music that results is both his and theirs, contemporary and traditional, idiosyncratic and familiar. Joseph Harrison has written a book that challenges our notions of poetic identity, a book where the present and the past sing to each other, and to the future.
praise for Sometimes I Dream That I Am Not Walt Whitman (2020):
“We are at a moment in the history of literary culture when traditional standards of clarity, eloquence, aesthetic splendor, refined comedy, and civilized pathos have been set aside. I read a great deal of contemporary poetry. Not many volumes hearten me, Joseph Harrison’s new one does. The Walt Whitman poems catch him as only Pessoa/Campos does. The Charles Dickens poem brilliantly exemplifies what John Ruskin meant when he talked of Dickens’ ‘stage fire’. “Mark Strand” returns me to my own dreams about my late friend. Best of all is “Shakespeare’s Head,” an achieved phantasmagorial of permanent power.” — Harold Bloom
“In Joseph Harrison’s hands, verse is an art, a living art, and a generous one. ‘The dead keep singing,’ he writes in ‘River of Song,’ and they do in the lyric ventriloquism through these pages: Frost, Auden, Stevens, Dickinson, Baudelaire, Hardy, Shakespeare, and most surprisingly, Whitman. Harrison’s tight forms gesture toward psychic volcanos and hurricanes, and his rhymes deploy lethal wit as in “Runaway Blimp,” about a military-industrial boondoggle where “a multi-billion dollar clusterfuck” clicks with “run amok.” His dexterities don’t just serve satire; the poems play a wide scale of feelings: tenderness, wonder, wry meditation, indignation, and fury. A selfless book, in the best sense.” — Rosanna Warren
“In his brilliant, dark, and companiable new book, Sometimes I Dream That I Am Not Walt Whitman, Joseph Harrison, one of American poetry’s best-kept secrets channels the voices and spirits of dead poets as wide ranging and diverse as Mark Strand, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and Walt Whitman himself. But Harrison never merely ventriloquizes these and other voices; or if he does the ventriloquism, as he implies in his amazing sequence, “The Compromised Ventriloquist,” is reciprocal–such that, as he says elsewhere in the book, “every transformation / Becomes another act of self-creation.” This book obliterates the dichotomies of self-expression and impersonality, personal disclosure and self-effacement, tradition and innovation. In the place of such facile and misleading oppositions Harrison has written a book that engages the particularities of our moment with a hawk’s eye view of linguistic, metrical and cultural history. The imagination that animates these poems is intimate and vatic, prophetic and mundane, scientific and fantastic; the music is all his own yet everyone’s, “dark and deep / And cold as interstellar night,” while unforgettably humane. I love this book”. — Alan Shapiro
“His suite of cannily resonant imitations of the good gray poet notwith-standing, Joseph Harrisonn is indeed not Walt Whitman, nor does he seek to be, but his verse responds eloquently to the ardent prediction in Democratic Vistas that the “highest poems” to come would spring from “the assumption that the process of reading is . . . in the highest sense, an exercise, a gymnast’s struggle.” Harrison’s intensely wrought poems reward the reader well beyond the demands they make. Ebullient yet concentrated products of an audacious prosodist and sytactician, an exhilarating logophile and a master of tone, they evince a maker’s maker. A set of poems in Emily Dickinson’s mode balances the Whitman suite, and Frost and Stevens, Yeats and Auden and Merrill ghost happily through this volume, itself a “unity of network.” It compasses “structures of posed placidity”–structures that arise, we come to know, from an “intemperate liquidity / Whose outbursts, unpredictable, reveal / A flare for the dramatic.” — Stephen Yenser
