Pearl Harbor Lookout
Ok, younguns-
Poetry workshop todaythanks to a guy
whose place of worship
truth, beauty and love
still sometimes breathe
A place for the outlaws of poetry and the written word.
A poet technically is supposed to be a “thief of fire” but as easily as anyone else he becomes a working stiff who drinks too much on late Friday afternoons.
— Jim Harrison
Shirtless and disheveled with his one bad eye glazed over, Jim Harrison sits at his writing desk in a dark room in his musty Montana cabin. A writer from Esquire magazine arrives on his doorstep for an interview. Jim totters over to let him in.
The writer shows up just in time. In four months, Jim Harrison, one of the finest writers of our era, will be dead.
The stench of smoke and solitude permeates the room. It’s the place he likes to hide from the anemic sensibilities and endless bustle of the modern world. “At my cabin made of logs there is less distance between inside and outside. You can smell the heart of the forest as you sleep and hear the river passing beside the north side of the cabin.”
With a boozy, cigarette-soaked voice, Jim asks his magazine guest, "would you like some vodka?" as he pours himself a stiff one. Of course, this is after pounding a few glasses of Les Sang des Cailloux, a French wine that he adored.
It’s 4 pm on a weekday.
Harrison was a hard yet liberal-minded man, an outdoorsman, a hunter, a walker, a food-lover, a big-hearted intuitive poet worn ragged by trying times.
He was stabbed in the eye as a child by a neighborhood girl. “I probably wouldn't have been a poet if I hadn't lost my left eye when I was a boy,” he once wrote, “a neighbor girl shoved a broken bottle in my face during a quarrel. Afterward, I retreated to the natural world and never really came back.”
Jim spent his late teenage years roaming around the country as an aspiring “beatnik.” In his early 20s, both his father and sister were killed instantaneously in a car accident (he backed out of the trip at the last moment.) And the following decade, Jim and his wife and daughter, lived on less than $9,000 a year as he tried to make it as a writer.
That’s when he wrote his renowned novel, Legends of the Fall, which put him on the literary map. “I wrote Legends of the Fall in nine days and when I re-read it, I only had to change one word. There was no revision process. None."
By the end of Harrison’s life, he’d produced 14 books of poetry, 11 novels, 9 novellas, 3 non-fiction works, and one children's book.
But what he wanted to be remembered for most was his poetry. “We are supposed to write poetry to keep the gods alive," he says with a toothless smile.
Jim Harrison died eight years ago today.
Shortly after his death, Anthony Bourdain, a huge fan of Harrison, said this: "There were none like him while he lived. There will be none like him now that he's gone."
Jim’s friend and fellow writer, Thomas McGuane, in a beautiful remembrance article, writes:
“On Saturday night, my oldest friend, Jim Harrison, sat at his desk writing. He wrote in longhand. The words trailed off into scribbles and he fell from his chair dead. His strength of personality was such that his death will cut many adrift. He was seventy-eight years old and had lived and worked hard for every one of those years…He was active and creative to the end, but it was time to go: no one was less suited to assisted living.”
Let’s raise a toast for Jim on this fine spring day.
I’ll leave you with one of my favorite poems that Harrison wrote toward the end of his life. You can find it in his excellent book—Jim Harrison: The Essential Poems.
Death Again
Let’s not get romantic or dismal about death.
Indeed it’s our most unique act along with birth.
We must think of it as cooking breakfast,
it’s that ordinary. Break two eggs into a bowl
or break a bowl into two eggs. Slip into a coffin
after the fluids have been drained, or better yet,
slide into the fire. Of course it’s a little hard
to accept your last kiss, your last drink,
your last meal about which the condemned
can be quite particular as if there could be
a cheeseburger sent by God. A few lovers
sweep by the inner eye, but it’s mostly a placid
lake at dawn, mist rising, a solitary loon
call, and staring into the still, opaque water.
We’ll know as children again all that we are
destined to know, that the water is cold
and deep, and the sun penetrates only so far.
Sloan BashinskySloan’s Newsletter
Very nice, Erik.
as if death and life dictated their poem...
to write a novel and change only one word...
his Muse in full bloom,
Harrison was the paper, the ink his blood, the pen his soul, the poet was God
I wonder if he somehow knew when his time was up?
I wonder if I will somehow know that moment is near?
I had a man about half my age do work around my version of Walden
he was handy with tools
and made me a sign to hang in my living room
words from the Gladiator movie-
“What we do here today echoes in Eternity”
I once had a novel sit me down and write it self
but not every word and phrase was perfect,
and I was the eidtor who fixed what needed fixing
and later there was more fixing by me,
not the story, but the kind of flubs
dyslexia spawns
Every poem that came out of me
wrote itself as I watched,
Along the way
I concluded all of life is poetry,
poetry is life
that’s all there is,
but seeing it,
well,
that requires esp, I suppose
or blind luck
this morning I’m trying to see poetry
in a huge container ship knocking down
the Francis Scott Key bridge in Baltimore harbor,
the CNN news guy on my TV now is
wondering the why?
This morning an amiga with three eyes sometimes
called me about it,
I said how could it be an accident?
It had to be intentional
She said she thought the same
I did not yet see what flew into my brain
just now listening to the CNN guy-
Key wrote the Star Spangled Banner
about a naval battle there,
the container ship and its captain
were seized by Something-
Wake the fuck up, America!
Or die
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia-
"The Star-Spangled Banner"
The earliest surviving sheet music of "The Star-Spangled Banner" from 1814
National anthem of the United States
Lyrics Francis Scott Key, 1814
Music John Stafford Smith, c. 1773
Adopted March 3, 1931[1]
Audio sample
Duration: 1 minute and 19 seconds.1:19
"The Star-Spangled Banner" (instrumental version by United States Navy Band)
filehelp
"The Star-Spangled Banner" is the national anthem of the United States. The lyrics come from the "Defence of Fort M'Henry",[2] a poem written on September 14, 1814, by 35-year-old lawyer and amateur poet Francis Scott Key after witnessing the bombardment of Fort McHenry by British ships of the Royal Navy in Outer Baltimore Harbor in the Patapsco River during the Battle of Baltimore in the War of 1812. Key was inspired by the large U.S. flag, with 15 stars and 15 stripes, known as the Star-Spangled Banner, flying triumphantly above the fort during the U.S. victory.
The poem was set to the tune of a popular British song written by John Stafford Smith for the Anacreontic Society, a men's social club in London. "To Anacreon in Heaven" (or "The Anacreontic Song"), with various lyrics, was already popular in the United States. This setting, renamed "The Star-Spangled Banner", soon became a well-known U.S. patriotic song. With a range of 19 semitones, it is known for being very difficult to sing, in part because the melody sung today is the soprano part. Although the poem has four stanzas, only the first is commonly sung today.
"The Star-Spangled Banner" was first recognized for official use by the U.S. Navy in 1889. On March 3, 1931, the U.S. Congress passed a joint resolution (46 Stat. 1508) making the song the official national anthem of the United States, which President Herbert Hoover signed into law. The resolution is now codified at 36 U.S.C. § 301(a).
March 29, 2024 Update:
I read online that the container ship Dali, based in Singapore, leased by a Dutch shipping company, had experienced lesser mishaps, but had passed inspection certifications and was cleared to sail. The timing of the 300 meter fully-loaded ship losing power after two tug boats escorted it away from the dock and returned to the dock is too spooky to ignore. Even if the tugs were still with the Dali, I doubt they could have made any difference, given the ship’s weight 8 knots (9 miles per hour) speed when it lost power as it neared the bridge.
This USA Today article does not persuade me the two tug boats might have made a difference if they had remained with the Dali. Nor does anything I have seen online on TV persuade me this was an accident.
Tugboats left before ship reached Baltimore bridge. They might have saved it.
Emily Le CozTrevor HughesUSA TODAYMarch 27, 2024As investigators work to determine what caused the hulking Dali container ship to topple Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key bridge in a matter of seconds on Tuesday, maritime experts around the country are pointing to what could have stopped it.
Tugboats.
These small but mighty vessels tow and push ever-larger ships through channels and help them when their propulsion systems – or lack thereof – cannot. They are standard equipment in ports worldwide and are especially useful to help ships with docking and undocking.
On Tuesday, a pair of tugboats operated by McAllister Towing and Transportation did just that, helping the Dali unmoor itself from the main terminal at the Port of Baltimore and orient the ship toward the open waters.
But they broke away before the massive ship navigated under the bridge, as is common practice. Minutes later, the Dali appeared to lose power and propulsion, sending the craft adrift and directly into one of the bridge’s support columns. The steel-truss bridge immediately collapsed into the frigid Patapsco River.
The accident is igniting debate over the proliferation of “megaships” that fuel today’s commercial transportation industry and whether port protocols have ramped up to safely accommodate them. Although the Dali is average-sized compared to many of these behemoths, the devastation it caused in Baltimore was formidable.
Had the tugboats accompanied the ship all the way under the bridge, some experts said, they might have been able to stop, slow, or steer it away from danger.
Such a scenario should be standard operating procedure in all ports, said Capt. Ashok Pandey, a master mariner and associate professor of maritime business at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy. But he said the industry’s reliance on tugs has waned over the years as technological advancements gave many ships the ability to maneuver through channels independently.
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