Jeffrey Harrison’s collections are published in the US and not available through Griffin Books, except his selected poems ‘The Names for Things’ published by the excellent Waywiser Press, which was my own first introduction to his work. One of its blurb quotes is from James Merrill: “There is no one else for whose poems — their tone and wording and overall approach to things — I feel greater sympathy and admiration.”
Jeffrey Harrison
can stand comparison
with James Merrill, whose encomium
shines like chromium.
I love Harrison’s poetry. In the Finding Poetry book club I discussed ‘Hitting golf balls off the bluff’, but I can’t find a copy of that which I’m happy to link to. So for this blog post I’ll discuss ‘The One That Got Away’, which is also in ‘The Names for Things’, and on the poetry foundation website (and about which I can make most of the same points):
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=37131
In some ways Jeffrey Harrison’s poems seem typical of mainstream contemporary poetry. They very often relate anecdotes, which they enrich with perceptual details. I think Harrison’s anecdotes and details are particularly well chosen, and his descriptions are very well made — his imagination makes interesting turns. In this poem, I admire the way ‘nets’ are evoked first as a visual metaphor for the light pattern, only to return as devices for catching, catching the moment in this case, or rather failing to. Likewise the dripping paddle is a visual image I enjoy holding in mind as well as a metaphor for the perceived slowing of time.
What I also admire so much about Harrison is his tone (and especially his attitude to himself and his content), and his forms. He can be very funny and self-deprecating. He can also be completely, almost nerdishly, sincere, as he is in this poem and which may be why I don’t find it sentimental, despite its lushness.
And finally, form. Harrison doesn’t use rhyme, but is brilliant with metre. This poem is in blank verse, i.e., unrhymed iambic pentameter. Metre is about as neglected as rhyme in contemporary poetry I think, and just as, or more, central to form. I’m interested in it, partly because I enjoy its effects, and partly because it’s so tricky to theorise (a cognitive psychologist speaking here) – it’s very easy to say roughly what is at stake, but very hard indeed to give a complete account.
The difficulty stems from the fact that in any particular metric scheme there is an ideal and there are approximations to the ideal. Also, expressing the ideal (or at least ideally expressing the ideal) is surprisingly hard, and typically uses concepts that are themselves hard to define, even if easy to grasp roughly, intuitively. Syllable, for example. Stress, for example, Foot, for sure! If you want to learn about metre, I recommend Timothy Steele, ‘All the fun’s in how you say a thing’, which expresses an unusual theory of metre in terms of relative rather than absolute levels of stress, which I find convincing.
I enjoy Harrison’s level of compliance, when he uses metre. Some contemporary formalists are too approximate, in my book. I won’t name names. I think people assume that irregularity is essential to avoid stiltedness, and I think that’s false, or at least overstated.
Let’s look at ‘The One that Got Away’ to see how Harrison handles metre.
First, consider the sentences and line breaks. The sentences are perfectly formed, varied in length and syntactic complexity (from ‘We drifted in silence.’ to the first and last sentence, each of which spreads over four lines). The line breaks do not disrupt the syntax, rather they complement it, or accentuate it. In terms of lines and sentences the poem is structured as it could be if it were smooth free verse. But it’s not: the line-sentence structure additionally serves a metric pattern, iambic pentameter. Sentence and metric line are working together.
As for the metre: I’d say, L1, L2 are perfect iambic pentameter. So are the lines beginning with ‘as if’, ‘in undulating’ and ‘The paddle’. The other lines have various substitutions (a trochee instead of an iamb here, an extra unstressed syllable there) which are never irksome, are always easy enough to read over, or through.
Surely the final, perfect line would not be quite as beautiful and affecting without all this rigour?
Stephen Payne 