Eratosphere - Joseph Harrison obituary

This is indeed sad news. Phil Hoy set up the Waywiser Press in 2001 – 2002. In 2003, he invited Joe and myself to join him as its first editors, editing collections and screening entries for the Anthony Hecht Competition, whose current cycle is its nineteenth. Joe was very active at the American end of the operation, reading submissions and organizing events, though in later years, other editors joined the Board, too. I was lucky enough to spend time with him over the years, in the USA, when my wife and I stayed with him at his house in Baltimore, as well as on other occasions, and when he stayed with us here in Yorkshire, and also during visits he made to London, when he would rent a pleasant apartment in Belsize Park, near Hampstead Heath.

Staying with him in London, I had the benefit of his company, uninterrupted, for hours at a time, which was entertaining, stimulating but also challenging. He was formidably well-read. He was also immensely courteous – he was always courteous – to one whose own reading had been less extensive or whose career had taken him in directions not always connected with literature. I remember once inviting Joe to discuss John Ashbery, a topic he turned to without hesitation, fluently giving me an account – with extensive quotations from memory – of key poems in Houseboat Days. Joe was one of those poets – like Bob Mezey and Timothy Murphy – who seemed to carry in their heads an entire and detailed library of verse, perfectly catalogued and ready for immediate access.

He was, of course, a fine poet with an incredible technical facility in rhyme and metre, setting himself madly intricate formal challenges and bringing them off with intelligence and brio. One of my favourite poems of his is “Harrison’s Clock”, which, in a single sentence of 196 lines in fourteen, rhymed, symmetrically metred, fourteen-line stanzas, tells the story of the creation by his near-namesake, John Harrison (1693 – 1776), of the first reliable marine chronometer. This allowed mariners to determine their longitude, which was crucial to accurate navigation. Joe’s poem is a masterpiece of verbal engineering, a poetic equivalent of the clock itself. (“Harrison’s Clock” is the final poem in his 2015 collection Shakespeare’s Horse.) I recall that on one his visits to London he went down to the Greenwich Museum to view the actual clock.

Six months ago he had been diagnosed with a brain tumour. He underwent chemotherapy, but it was unsuccessful. Just before the end he was able to hold in his hand a hardback copy of his Collected Poems, which has just gone to press but is not yet available. Sadly, he could no longer read.

Alas…

Clive