Requim For a Poet

Photo by Lesly DeLaat

On the anniversary of Jim Harrison’s passing March 26, 2016

Jim Harrison hooked me soon after a friend pressed a copy of Sundog in my hands and told me I’d like it. A lot.
Having been told that before I was skeptical and it settled into my TBR pile for a time as I waded through a few others but then one night after finishing my latest read I picked it up and it vaulted me into Harrison fandom forever. Beyond his novels are his poetry, words woven together in a way that captures life (and death) in such an absorbing manner.
Just before we began Near North Now back in 2016 Harrison passed. One of our earlier articles written by Gabe Konrad referenced Harrison along with a pair of his contemporaries, poets who also had Michigan roots. In doing so he introduced me and presumably others  to their work and I have passed their names along to friends who also savor a good piece of poetry.
This being the anniversary of Harrison’s passing we reached out to Gabe asking permission to reprise the piece he crafted back when NNN was an infant and he graciously agreed.

Harrison Revenant
By Gabe Konrad

After the initial shock from the death of Jim Harrison—the prolific novelist and poet that we Near Northerners like to claim as our own—we can console ourselves that he left behind so many great books and what is really a family of great poets.  Two of the well-established Michigan poets that Harrison fans will enjoy are Judith Minty and Dan Gerber.  Gerber will sound familiar, of course.  He is from the baby food family, but took a different path in life, pursuing passions as disparate as car racing and poetry.  Gerber and Harrison co-edited the literary journal Sumac, which was based in Fremont, from 1969 to ’71, and ran the Sumac Press which specialized in local poets.  While Gerber now resides in California, that Michigan feel lives in his words:

Here like the tropics
in summer
in the forest, in the lake
or where the forest ends
a desert of dry grass and stones
over dirt roads, the heat
making you one with
the air
and thus not being one
separate
from that which surrounds you*

Gerber has had several novels and collections of poetry published and his latest collection, Sailing through Cassiopeia (Copper Canyon Press, 2013), shows that he is stronger than ever.

Another friend and compatriot of Harrison is Judith Minty.  Born in Detroit, Minty’s first book of poetry won the United States Award of the International Poetry Forum, and she has gone on to publish several full-length books of poetry and chapbooks.  Her essays, prose and poetry has appeared in over fifty anthologies and journals.  Along the way she has been awarded the Villa Montalvo Award for Excellence in Poetry and the Eunice Tiestiens Award from Poetry magazine, among other honors.

Minty has taught at several universities, including the University of California, University of Alaska, Grand Valley State, and a decade-long stint as director of the Creative Writing Program at Humboldt State University.

Well travelled, Minty now resides in Muskegon, though Michigan never left her writing.

No clouds for a week. May,
yet this day belongs to summer.
I have bolted my house
to race north again to woods
that lace the light with new leaves.**

While throughout Minty’s work there is a strong sense of place, leaning heavily on the North Woods of Michigan, the Great Lakes, and California, it is Judith’s depiction of the reality of truth that has moved her well beyond the confines of a “regional poet” to the mantel of “Great Poet.”  

*From the poem “In Michigan” in The Revenant collection (Sumac Press, 1971).
**From “Sprint, Part 1” in Yellow Dog Journal (Parallax Press, 1991)

Editors Note: Judith Minty passed away in 2017 a year after this story was posted