An example of the elegance of clear and simple speech in poetry

by DRM

When I write a poem I try to keep the words as sim­ple and true as I can man­age. The temp­ta­tion to show-off with lan­guage is always there, and the temp­ta­tion to force mean­ing will make me pause and doubt the words. I know that the music is in the plain­song of lan­guage and that mean­ing is in the pre­cise and sim­ple state­ment of what we expe­ri­ence and observe.

I was in school with Jeff Har­ri­son. Here is one of his poems. I like his poetry because he is able to be skilled and direct. He uses lan­guage that you can hold on to. He can be very smart, but he doesn’t let being very smart get in his way.

Here’s how he explains it:

I tend to dis­like delib­er­ate obscu­rity, for instance, and I tend to grav­i­tate toward poetry that is seri­ously engaged with both expe­ri­ence and language.

A poem:

Vis­i­ta­tion

by Jef­frey Harrison

Walk­ing past the open win­dow, she is sur­prised
by the song of the white-throated spar­row
and stops to lis­ten. She has been think­ing of
the dead ones she loves–her father who lived
over a cen­tury, and her old­est son, sud­denly gone
at forty-seven–and she can’t help think­ing
she has called them back, that they are call­ing her
in the voices of these birds pass­ing through Ohio
on their spring migra­tion… because, after years
of sum­mers in upstate New York, the white-throat
has become some­thing like the fam­ily bird.
Her father used to stop what­ever he was doing
and point out its clear, whistling song. She hears it
again: “Poor Sam Peabody Peabody Peabody.“
She tries not to think, “Poor Andy,” but she
has already thought it, and now she is weep­ing.
But then she hears another, so clear, it’s as if
the bird were in the room with her, or in her head,
telling her that every­thing will be all right.
She can­not see them from her second-story win­dow–
they are hid­den in the new leaves of the old maple,
or behind the white blos­soms of the dog­wood–
but she stands and lis­tens, know­ing they will stay
for only a few days before mov­ing on.

2006

You can visit his web site here.