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This poem has raised a lot of comment on Facebook:

Lisle’s River

Dust followed our car like a dry brown cloud.
At the river we swam, then in the canoe passed
downstream toward Manton; the current carried us
through cedar swamps, hot fields of marsh grass
where deer watched us and the killdeer shrieked.
We were at home in a thing that passes.
And that night, camped on a bluff, we ate eggs
and ham and three small trout; we drank too much
whiskey and pushed a burning stump down the bank -
it cast hurling shadows, leaves silvered and darkened,
the crash and hiss woke up a thousand birds.

Now, tell me, other than lying between some woman's legs,
what joy have you had since, that equaled this?

Jim Harrison (1937-2016)

Hmm. I can hear the sound of a spoon scraping the side of a pot. What are you stirring here, Sam? What is Facebook saying?

I am but two cups of Twinings English Breakfast away from the horror of tangling with your Transformer. I am a husk, I tell you.

But, for what it's worth, here are a few sparks from synapses in what's left of my brain.

What larks!
Tom Sawyer.
Papa Hemingway.
Iron John.
Was it the stump of a birch someone had swung on?
The light, the light of the spinning, burning wood. Mmm. Chesterton! In the gloom black-purple, in the glint old-gold.
I was there, in my dungarees, hiding behind a bush. They didn't see me.

What's wrong with it? Light the candle-stub and look at it again...

Is it that bit about lying between the legs of a woman, the unequivocal image of the orgasmic whoopee?

Well, of course, by modern standards that is probably unacceptable. In order to avoid accusations of bias he should have made it clear - "other positions are available".

Discussion touched on the gender of the campers--two men, man and woman, etc. It's clearly two males if you pay attention to the progress of the "we" and the "you" in the final stanza. But most women were angry about the ending, especially that "some woman," so angry that they started attacking the whole poem. Alicia Stallings did note that the simile in the opening line is pretty dead: a dust cloud like a dust cloud.

My feeling is that this is a grown man speaking to an old friend about a camping trip they took as adolescents. It's nostalgic and verges on sentimentality. Harrison was a very macho-looking guy who wrote poetry and novels, a lot about the outdoors. But he was also married to the same woman from 1959 to her death in 2015. He died the next year at 78. Incidentally, it was through his work that I discovered the ghazal, though Adrienne Rich published hers at about the same time.

I argued that if he had written "your woman" instead of "some woman" he might have squeaked through.

It is very hard for men to write about non-sexual love for other men. Crane's "The Open Boat" gets it right about the "subtle brotherhood of men," which is something the four men know but won't say. Women don't, I would argue, have a comparable problem talking about their non-sexual love for other women. But a man who brings it up, even to a close friend, is probably going to hear "Brokeback Mountain!" So Harrison knows he's treading on dangerous ground; even so, he makes one fatal misstep.

Whitman's expressions of "manly attraction" are sometimes sexual but at other times not. That quality of "adhesiveness" he talks about doesn't always happen in a pup tent. This is something that I think Tim Murphy understood pretty well, though sometimes he could be a bit naive in extolling the virtues of some fine farm boy he'd met. Men who have worked together or have fought together probably understand this "band of brothers" type of love, but they have a damn hard time articulating it. I think Harrison tried but came up just a bit short.

The "better than sex" trope is used in the South, mainly by women being naughty. https://www.google.com/search?q=bett...hrome&ie=UTF-8

https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/...recipe-1951935

(cross posted with Sam)

A couple of initial thoughts:

Lying is an ethically dubious practice at the best of times, and possibly more so when one is between a woman's legs, especially if that's how you got there in the first place. (Although given the acoustics and the probable position of the mouth to tell a lie between a woman's leg, it's possible the lie might not be heard, which might be a mitigating factor: perhaps he is lying only to himself?)

More seriously: The poem seems to be a celebration of male (hetrosexual) friendship. (The N might be a gay man or a lesbian, and/or the friend a lesbian, but that seems unlikely). So, the two men do manly things, at least in terms of a certain view of what's manly: they drink whiskey, swim and canoe in rivers, fish, hike though forests, camp, and set fire to things.

The joy they share in doing this is only really surpassable by sex with "some woman", which seems to indicate that only the physical joy of sex is being considered, as which particular woman it is doesn't seem to be a factor: the joy being contrasted is not the (arguably greater) joy one experiences when having a sex with a woman one loves, for example. Also, the possibility that deep friendship with a woman or a romantic relationship (sex aside) with a woman might bring similar joy seems to be discounted.

If you wanted to see a metaphor in the stump they burn and cast into the river (that they destroy, discard or liberate), I'd say it might stand for their metaphorical emasculation/castration.

-Matt

What I was mostly reminded of was the young man on the West Coast who videoed himself setting fire to dry brush and put it on Facebook and is currently, i am told, in custody. Times change, i guess.

Cheers,
John

x
I like it.
Nothing gold can stay.
I don't think there are any other (intended) metaphors to decipher, no genders to parse. Just one man's thoughts. Just passing through.
x

I wonder what river it was? Lisle, Illinois, is somewhere near the DuPage River, but not near enough to account for this, at least from the maps I've seen. Much is lost with time.

"Some" woman as opposed to "your" woman seems to me a way of signaling your heterosexual nature while displaying an affection that you're afraid will be misconstrued as homosexual -- or correctly construed as homosexual, for that matter. This particular attempt hasn't aged well, but men are like this. We're a bunch of damn fools, I mean.

Best,

Ed

My two or three cents:

I haven't read much of Harrison's poetry, because I don't like it. He's always struck me as a kind of Big-Sky Bukowski-- and I don't like Bukowski, either.

Not that this poem's first 11 lines did much for me, but the last two are so disappointing. So . . . Now, why'd ya have to go and write that? Not just the blase misogyny, but the measuring of one joy against any other joy-- asking whether it "equals" this or that. As rustic and unpretentious as all the camping trip pleasures are, the rating/comparing belies the mindset of narrow, shallow hedonism.

A poem like this one just begs to be parodied. But that got done already, anytime anyone parodied Hemingway.

I’m not on other social media. Just lucky about that, I guess. I laughed at Ann Drysdale’s parting remark. Not quite sure about the burning stump. It’s very much a “guy thing” poem, and as a slightly outdoorsy guy with imagination, it works for me. But I think it makes one heck of a lot of difference who the woman is. Totally. In every possible way.

Where’s the rhyme? Where’s the attention to syllables? It’s all imagery. Is that legal?

As for women reading it, mileage will doubtless vary. Can’t be sure, of course! but some I have known a little (or a lot) here and there, I think could understand it as an appreciation. I’d welcome a woman’s version of the same that could be equally engaging. Yes, I do.

Thanks, Sam. Excellent poem. The rude "some woman" phrase is a shaded contrast to the still glowing significance of the burning stump crashing down the river bank into the water. Drunken fiery destruction, hooray!

As for guys' camaraderie, at a party in high school, talking with friends, I used the word "homoerotic" to describe it, which I thought was the correct use of the word. They've never let me forget it!

Is the meter "loose syllabic"? The lines have more or less 10 syllables, as if there were a distant recollection of IP as providing a desirable standard line length.

Matt Q, I did suggest that "some woman's legs" might refer to the table of a woman who had succeeded in drinking Mr. Harrison under it.

Despite my previous approving post, it’s glaringly clear that this is a high-level Potemkin poem with no reality about events that never happened, including anything having to do with a woman or women. Sam, this was written by a platypus with an expensive Oxford MFA who had read Gray’s Anatomy closely: my proof is the phrase “camped on a bluff” — a pure giveaway that the platypus holds no worthwhile cards and is betting that no-one has read Susan Sontag (brrr) on “camp”. Add to that, the doubtless fictitious “Manton” and other touches, it’s poporn, like a pinup of no artistic value except to those dupes who waste their time imagining a better life in the great outdoors, or under a table among the French chairs at Versailles in 1763.

Still, as a total fabrication, it’s not too bad. Other opinions are available.

Manton, MI, and the river is the Manistee; both are very manly indeed.

Jim Harrison was, from all accounts, quite manly, too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Harrison

Thanks for the background on Jim Harrison. My post # 12 was the product of working with academic articles on Greco-Roman classics, a few of which will try to persuade the reader that a dead sparrow was actually an impotent phallus (Catullus), or further and worse. The data are sparse enough that I soon expect to read that someone can solidly prove that Julius Caesar never existed, or that Aristotle taught that the world was entirely fat.

I like most of this at first blush, but the close turns me off. Not so much because it's piggish, though that doesn't do the poem any favors, as is. No poem should be for everyone. A poem that appeals to men, certain men, ha, could be bold. My problem is nothing is done with it. And that it's uninteresting. Even sloppy, lazy. Maybe exactly that was intended, but it doesn't work for me.

And Daniel, I'm not Buk's biggest fan, but I do like some. A lot. I don't know this poet at all, but based on this lone poem, I don't see the similarity.

No similarity to Bukowski from what I know of his work.

The last line is I5 and so are several others. I'd call it "close blank verse."

An admirable technique, akin to Aaron P's irregular rhyming.

Here I go again, swinging for the bleachers, but a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. I will return with my shield or on top of it. I tried fully twenty alternatives to the abhorrent “some woman’s”, and after savoring some fine vintages with differing levels of selection among excellent women, comparisons, narrowing down among great women, and maintaining as wide an appeal to the alley cats among men as I could (hey, there are some truly in every way dynamite women out there!), I nudge forward this sentimental wording: “one’s beloved’s”.

Is that manly enough for Jim Harrison’s poem?

I honestly don't see what all the tut-tutting is about. Surely it isn't news that some people have casual hookups with partners whom they regard as more or less interchangeable. As long as everyone involved is a fully consenting adult, and has the same expectations re: love and faithfulness (or lack thereof), what's the big deal?

[Clarification: People who mistakenly assume that they are in an exclusive sexual relationship are not fully consenting.]

Would we also scold the female sex workers and one-night-stands in the narrator's past for their disrespectful attitude, if they were to refer to him vaguely as "some man" who once lay between their legs? I don't think so.

I also have no problem when a male narrator addresses his male friend in terms that make it clear that the addressee is male.

This isn't that very annoying pseudo-universal "you," which seems to be addressed to every human being on the planet, but turns out to be addressed only to half. This "you" is addressed to a specific, individual person who happens to be male. (Yes, the "you" asks us to imagine ourselves in his place, but as him, not as ourselves.)

My personal distaste may be the only common denominator of Harrison's and Bukowski's poetry. I doubt that that is so, but I'm content to leave fuller comparisons and contrasts to any sufficiently interested.

Julie, I appreciate your thinking on the sexual mores immediately upthread.

There's something I wanted to add. [humph . . .] It's like this: I enjoy fencing, the sport. The backyard club of fencing enthusiasts that I practiced with for a while had all kinds of fun. I just can't imagine finishing a good bout, then pulling off my mask to exclaim, "This sure beats wasting your time between some woman's legs!"

When one tactic of praising one thing is the disparagement of something else, one has said something about both things and about oneself.

It may just be a matter of taste. Had I been this poem's auditor, and the camping-trip companion, I would have to have replied, "Really, bro? I like camping and I'm glad to spend this time with you, but if I had a girlfriend, I wouldn't be here right now."

Daniel, I think you're right about how the poem's addressee might respond. And if he did, I think he'd be missing the homoerotic subtext of that unexpected closing comparison. Male bonding occurs in some weird ways (perhaps like any bonding), and that I think is one of them in action, or at least in intention. A kind of vicarious sexual adventure.

Cheers,
John

Thus spoke Zarathustra. I think we’re talking about having fun, pleasure if you will, in company. If every time I and my wife are laughing at a TV show, is it heteroerotic; if the same is true with a friend from across the hall or with my biological brother, is it ipso facto homoerotic? Not necessarily. It Could Be, of course. But does having fun always and have to require a sexual spin? At this point, I think I will retreat from this thread into my monkish cell of academic and literary mental stimulation or go buy groceries at a neighborhood mixed sex grocery store. Sail on, posting people. How many angels can prance on a pin? Seventy-three.

It's not the riverside companionship that's homoerotic per se. It's the addition of the "some woman" comparison at the end. I stand by my analysis.

Cheers,
John

Update. Or as Einstein put it: "A journalist asked Einstein what he would do if Eddington’s observations failed to match his theory. Einstein famously replied: “Then I would feel sorry for the good Lord. The theory is correct.”"

Maybe drunken stump arson really is better than casual sex with a nondescript partner. I can't say that I've ever tried either.

Far be it from me to yuck someone else's yum (she said, primly).

Actually, unlike David discussing his relationship with Jonathan, which is the passage I immediately thought of when I read that part of the poem, the poet here does not say that what he felt while sharing this experience with his male friend was better than a heterosexual episode.

As I see it, the narrator is either saying that lying between some woman's legs is on the same plane of joy as this experience, or that a heterosexual experience is too exceptional for fair comparisons to be made to it--thus removing it from the conversation (even as he is introducing it to the conversation). Either of those messages is pretty different from how a lot of people in this thread seem to be interpreting the gist.

I'm surprised that no one has yet mentioned that The New York Times published an essay last week about how difficult it is for heterosexual men to talk about the non-erotic love they feel for other men in their lives--in part because they're so terrified of being mistaken for homosexual, and being attacked, either literally or figuratively, by other men terrified of homosexuality.

I was keenly interested in the subject of things men aren't allowed to say without negative social consequences, because there are so many things that women are not allowed to say without negative social consequences. But I thought the New York Times essay wasn't quite a bullseye. I would like to see some of the poets here try to do justice to that topic.

Part of the communication problem is that English, usually so rich in synonyms with various shades of connotation, has surprisingly few words for the various flavors of love. It's harder to talk about something clearly when the vocabulary for it is so limited, when compared to the subject's complexity. For example, a lot of the nuance of the triple "Do you love me?" "Yes, Lord, you know that I love you" exchange between Jesus and Peter (John 21:15, John 21:16, and John 21:17) is lost in translation, because each of them is using a different verb for "love" until the third time, when Jesus finally switches to the verb that Peter is using. (This conversation takes place after Jesus's death, and thus after Peter's triple denial--an opportunity for a triple do-over. But it seems to me that something pretty important is happening in that shift from one verb to another. I can't quite figure out what it is, though.)

That's interesting, Julie. And maybe that's a reason I'm missing something in the poem, the close. I never actually felt that that was some kind of barrier. Or maybe I just grew up around relatively open-minded, easy going men/boys. Well, ok, maybe more of the former than the latter. My father did fall into that category, however. He didn't so much show his emotions enough directly to those closest to him, but he was such a compassionate (and admired) man towards others that, frankly, it, strangely, lost a certain amount of importance. But a fear of expressing emotions among good male friends past and present? Not so much.

Just to say I am I think pretty comfortable expressing my love for my male friends. But I still think male bonding expressed via an image of sex with "some woman" to close is a homoerotic choice. I'd find it more straightforward for Harrison to say "I love you." And whyever not, after all?

Cheers,
John

It's funny to see how this thread has progressed, as I've been reading Mario DiGangi's Homoeroticism in Early Modern Drama, which is somewhat of a seminal work for establishing that the bonds of male friendship and the bonds of male sexuality -- not to mention the language used to express the two -- were rather slippery during the English Renaissance. I guess that's never stopped being the case.

Anent Julies’s comments, I’ve always liked the medieval distinction between love as caritas and cupiditas.

When someone quotes the bible, I do a kind of opposite Manchurian Candidate thing. But the verb choices there could really be interesting for a poem. Of course, Jesus finally choosing the right verb choice in the end seems suspect. I'd have to see the original, written between 200 to 300 years after Jesus's death*.

*It may be as early as 150 years. I honestly can't remember. Anyway, a long time.

Well, there's a Lisle and a Manton (and lots of killdeer) in Australia. That may make the last two macho-man lines understandable. I prefer Wilbur's "Running" retrospective on happiness.....

Less than a century, dammit. In an oral culture, dammit. Where men did all the editing, and had done so for over a thousand years, dammit. And women are were generally not full partners, dammit.

I have heard male evangelicals talk about their love of Jesus (to the point of tears) more than their love of the Father or the Holy Spirit. I suppose that because Jesus is the Lord any kind of homoerotic tinge is removed. But is it? I do think that men have a harder time talking about their love of one another than women do. I often used to see male Indian students holding hands as they walked to class. It's a custom of friendship, I suppose. Men do seem to a bit more frequently huggers of each other than they were in the past. There's always this:

https://poets.org/poem/hundred-collars

Thanks, Sam. Frost's customary appearance of ease. I think Ishmael shares the bed with Queequeeg the first time they meet, in an inn. But these two cases are less about bonding, I think, than about trust. And the ways we meet strangers.
I've often found it odd that Father and Holy Ghost get such short shrift from believers in a nominal Trinity. Jesus perhaps seems more approachable, like Mary. Though the Father does have a big white beard.

Cheers,
John

x
The dismantling of male machismo is in full swing. But they die hard. We have a zombie macho man in the WH. They will continue to haunt. In general men are hard-wired to be sexually repressed. Change the children.

In my family men kiss men on the lips. I think that's the most honest expression of love regardless of who is who. It is pretentious to think the poem in question (way back when Sam posted it) is anything other than a man's inclination to compare ecstatic experiences with the groin. I am a dandelion. I do not.
x
x

Jim is nobly trying to get us back on topic, but I wanna digress again....

This is, in my opinion, a big part of why the Ten Commandments include a prohibition on images of the ineffable. Once worshippers have in their heads and hearts a specific visual image of what or whom it is that they worship, it's very hard for some of them to dislodge that in order to glimpse anything sacred in people who don't match that picture.

I'm convinced that many white male Christians are essentially worshiping the image of themselves in power. Their notion of God is tied to a picture of a frighteningly temperamental old white authoritarian and a somewhat nicer, younger white guy who went around performing special favors for people he deemed deserving, and threatening evildoers with future woe. They feel it is their sacred calling to emulate those two models.

The fact that the historical Jesus was almost certainly not European-looking just can't compete, in many people's minds, with all the beautiful European masterworks that depict him as such.

Many Christians are at a loss as to what to do in their heads and hearts with the symbolic representation of the Holy Spirit. It's impossible to take those artistic depictions as literally as artistic depictions of the old and young white guys, without feeling silly for worshipping a pigeon. So it's easier to just ignore it. And they do.

Yeah, Sam, boys do that here in Taiwan too. Though I don't think it happens much by the time they reach junior high school. I don't teach kids, but a few teachers here have told me that it's quite common.

What Julie said.

Cheers,
John

I should probably hasten to say that I think visual art is a legitimate form of expression and exploration in the area of spirituality/religion. I'm not an iconophobe. I'm just very, very wary of the power of both art and spirituality/religion itself to present personal and political agendas as universal truths.

It's why I'm happy when God is played by Morgan Freeman or Alanis Morrisette. Nothing wrong with visual images, from my end, but they deserve to be mixed up a bit. I don't believe God is an old white dude.

Cheers,
John