[Tim Murphy]

Today I re-watched Legends of the Fall, one of my favorite Westerns, starring Anthony Hopkins and Brad Pitt. Great film, and watching the credits I learned it was based on a novella by Jim Harrison. About fifteen years ago I got a letter from a Jim Harrison praising my early books and asking me to critique a few poems. I gave him a Deep End thorough critique, telling him he was uncomfortably straddling an untenable line between free and formal verse. That his clunky rhythms clashed with his lineation, his rhymes were bad. I suggested he join the Deep End and get some strong medicine. Never heard from him again.

If this is the same guy, and I suspect he was, because he was a terrific, macho story teller in his poems, I've learned that Jack Nicholson loaned him $15,000 to take a year off and finish Legends, and that the year it appeared he earned more than the CEO of General Motors.

Why can't that happen to all of us?

Strange that I would be watching Legends of the Fall on the day he died.

[William A. Baurle]

Jim Harrison was included in a popular anthology of contemporary American poetry edited by Hayden Carruth called The Voice That is Great Within Us. It came out in 1970. I bought it sometime in the early eightees and it's one of those paperbacks I had read so much that both the front and back covers fell off.

The four poems in that anthology are in free verse, without a hint of rhyme or meter. Reminiscent of John Haines, James Dickey, sort of. As you say, a very masculine type of poetry.

Judging by the Wiki article on him, he was quite prolific.

[Tim Murphy]

Matt Labash, the Weekly Standard's fine outdoor writer, just sent me this good poem by Harrison.

They used to say we're living on borrowed
time but even when young I wondered
who loaned it to us? In 1948 one grandpa
died stretched tight in a misty oxygen tent,
his four sons gathered, his papery hand
grasping mine. Only a week before, we were fishing.
Now the four sons have all run out of borrowed time
while I'm alive wondering whom I owe
for this indisputable gift of existence.
Of course time is running out. It always
has been a creek heading east, the freight
of water with its surprising heaviness
following the slant of the land, its destiny.
What is lovelier than a creek or riverine thicket?
Say it is an unknown benefactor who gave us
birds and Mozart, the mystery of trees and water
and all living things borrowing time.
Would I still love the creek if I lasted forever?

[Susan McLean]

That is a lovely poem, Tim. Thanks for posting it.

Susan

[Tim Murphy]

Stephen Bodio, America's finest writer on falconry, was a close friend of Harrison and wrote me this morning, "As a poet, Jim was a great novelist."

[Jennifer Reeser]

Originally Posted by Tim Murphy

Strange that I would be watching Legends of the Fall on the day he died.

Strange for most anyone else. But only to be expected, from you