[R. S. Gwynn]

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)

[Ann Drysdale]

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".

[R. S. Gwynn]

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

[Matt Q]

(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

[John Isbell]

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

[Jim Moonan]

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

[Ed Shacklee]

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

[marly youmans]

The structure reminds me of certain Cavafy poems--memory of a lost time of pleasure, followed by brief lament. And that makes me question whether this brief time (also "a thing that passes") pays tribute to a long-lost friend. In that case, the narrator would have no reason at all to invoke a specific woman because he has no way of doing so. He is then limited by facts (whether autobiographical to Harrison or created.)

I dislike the opening because it makes me think of cartoon farts: ridiculous.

As the mother of boys who grew up camping and the wife of someone who tumbled up in a blue collar family, I find the stump business quite apt for what young guys do when camping and carousing in the woods. The quickness, the hurling lights and shadows, the hiss, the awakening of birds: these are more vivid for me than anything else in the poem.

[James Brancheau]

I'll stand by what I said. While there's no doubt that this poem shows talent, I have to question the poet's vision, based on the close. Which is, to be kind, unoriginal. Lazy. Or worse, deliberately appealing to an audience who is sympathetic to the same. Hoagland knew how to do this.

[Rick Mullin]

Keep in mind that Harrison had his eye torn out when he was a kid by a girl with a broken bottle. They were arguing about something.