I believe
in steep drop-offs, the thunderstorm across the lake...
Like so many of my love affairs, this started with Anthony Bourdain…
Parts Unknown. Season seven, episode five. “Montana”. I fell in love with Big Sky Country but even more so with the late Jim Harrison (1937-2016). Harrison was an old friend of Bourdain’s, both literally and figuratively. Harrison, wise and appearing wizened, shuffled off this mortal coil before the episode’s premier in May of 2016. Something about his way of being captured me then—even without knowing his words or his work. I’m wondering if the same will happen to you, too.
Last year I bought a copy of Complete Poems. It’s done a grand tour of my writing studio: left desk space, centre desk space, right desk space. Beside the printer, on top of the printer. Bookshelf, another bookshelf, a box on the floor. It even made its way to my bedside table, at least for a short while. A bookmark lives in the same place its lived since I broke its spine: page 601, “I Believe”, from his collection In Search of Small Gods. The Complete Poems feels like the opposite of a Small God; its enormity terrifies me.
It doesn’t matter how deep of a pull I feel to something, how much I wish to worship it—a writer, a story, a philosophy, an idea, a way of being—I’ll find a way to dance around it. To avoid it. To keep it further than arms reach (and in my small studio, everywhere is within arms reach).
I’m kind of fed up with living like this. I’m fed up of putting off reading books I want to read because they feel too big or too sacred and I feel too small or too profane to be with them. The true profanity here is ignoring the call of the sacred. Poems are sacred. Words are sacred. Bourdain and his friends are sacred—to me, at least.
And sacred things make me feel, my dudes. I have so many feelings! And in this newsletter-podcast project I promise that I’ll always share my true, authentic, real, genuine, honest-to-the-Small-Gods feelings. You have my word(s). And my tears.
I’ll try to record and release a poem once a week, sometimes twice, or more or less depending on how his words flow from poem-to-poem, collection-to-collection, and how my energy flows from poem-to-poem, collection-to-collection. As these are mostly his words, not mine, subscription is free. If that changes, I’ll let you know.
So, if you’d like to come with me, come with me. Let me read you the Complete Poems of Jim Harrison for as long as I can sustain it, though, it’s unlikely the poems will ever cease in sustaining me.
Here’s to Jim Harrison and his words. I’m excited to explore them with you. And here’s to Anthony Bourdain, the man who keeps giving me life, and the lives of others, even after his death.
