Liberties of the Imagination: 5 poems by Joseph Harrison, with commentary by Mary Jo Salter (pictured left).
Joseph Harrison (b.1957) has many admirers, but I’ve always felt that his works deserve a wider audience. Harrison, who lives in Baltimore, is the author of the forthcoming Collected Poems (2024). He is also the American editor of the Waywiser Press, founded in England by Philip Hoy. A signal goal of the press is to publish winners of the Anthony Hecht Prize, given for a distinguished first or second collection of poetry. Hecht, an important influence on Harrison, wrote an introduction for Harrison’s first book, Someone Else’s Name, published in 2003 J
As Hecht wrote, Harrison is “alive to the liberties and limits of form and imagination.” Liberties and limits—the alliterative phrase links the similar sounds of two words seemingly opposite in meaning. But as Harrison’s poems illustrate, the limits of form often make possible the liberties of imagination. Harrison is about as formal as contemporary poets come, a writer who delights not just in sonnets but longer perfections like sonnet crowns and sestinas. His meter is pitch-perfect, and rhyme, when he uses it, is almost always exact. That said, he uses such conventions to highlight unresolvable ambiguities, disparities, mysteries.
Someone Else’s Name was followed in 2008 by Identity Theft, whose similar title highlights one of Harrison’s themes: who am I? Am I the person others take me for? Love poems, and notably Harrison’s, often ask whether our true selves have been read properly by the loved one. It’s not only his love poems, though, that profit from biographical elements, and often the lives described or narrated are of other writers: Horace, Samuel Johnson, Dickens; most of all Shakespeare. In fact, Shakespeare’s Horse is the title of Harrison’s volume of 2015, and it was succeeded in 2020 by Sometimes I Dream that I Am Not Walt Whitman, which includes deft homages to Whitman as well as Dickinson. The challenges of naming and of being named are as old as Adam, but Harrison continually does new things with the abstraction of identity and with how we name those conceptions.
To show at least some of what I mean, I’m going to write every day for five days a brief comment on one poem by Harrison among my favorites.
Let me start with the very first poem in Joseph Harrison’s first book. In retrospect, it’s highly characteristic of his poems to follow, diverse in manner as they are. It’s written in rhyme (couplets) and meter (iambic, though with lines of varying length). Consistent with Harrison’s lifelong devotion to Shakespeare, it mentions several of the Bard’s characters, and places us in woods that call up the Forest of Arden. I’ll say more after you read it.
ALL THAT’S LEFT
Will someone tell me, please,
Who carved these trees
With someone else’s name?
These woods won’t be the same,
For I thought, all along,
Mine was the only signature among
These pale textures of bark
Rising out of the dark
Underworld of the forest floor.
But who was here before?
Who chiseled each new line
On everything I thought was mine,
Initialing all these
Purely imaginary trees
Deep in the forest of my mind?
No Orlando, mad for Rosalind;
These cuttings, even when crude,
Speak only out of solitude,
The signs of a single heart
That gave its love to art
And wore that on its sleeve,
Having come to believe
It was the necessary sacrifice,
And paid the price.
If someone else could see
These careful lines, would he,
Underneath their curlicue and flair,
Hear the real pathos there,
The note of the ultimate cost
When feeling itself is lost
And all that’s left is the mark
Of absence against the dark?
I said at first that the poem is in couplets, but that’s a tricky assertion. The poem actually begins with a one-line stanza and ends with a one-line stanza. Furthermore, the first line, “Will someone tell me, please,” rhymes with the end word, “trees,” of the first line of the second stanza, at which point a rhyme for the next couplet—broken by the space between stanzas—is introduced and seems to be dropped. The rhymes are always immediately heard, yes, but the visual effect if you were only to read one rhyme-staggered stanza at a time would be that nothing rhymes. The stand-alone first and last lines of the poem also serve to illustrate the theme: the poet can only write if he can be alone with his imagination. Yet he learns as time passes that other poets (symbolized by those who write their “signature,” or their “lines,” on trees) have been here in the forest before him.
Harrison’s rhyme scheme enacts that delay, that indebtedness to the past. In a further twist, lovers write their joined names on trees, but the poet gives his primary love to art itself. I take the last lines “all that’s left is the mark// Of absence against the dark” as deliberately ambiguous. “Absence” may mean that most poets never make a mark that endures, like Shakespeare’s. Or it may mean that the poet’s mark on a tree—on a poem, that is—only highlights his physical absence after death. Or maybe Harrison intends both readings. The “real pathos” for me is that he sets down in especially skillful lines the doubt of all poets as to whether they’ve made their mark.
— Mary Jo Salter
“All That’s Left” is from Someone Else’s Name, Waywiser Press (2003)
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Author: The Best American Poetry
