A note about Someone Else's Name

 

Finalist for the 2005 Poet's Prize

Whose name is this? In the poems of Someone Else's Name, the names of the poets - Frost, Donne, Burns, Shakespeare - converge with names from the bizarre annals of contemporary Americana - Donal Russell, Larry Walters, Dewitt Finley. Both lost and found within the book's forest of surrogate identities, its poems about other people and poems about other poems, the poet names and unnames, is named and unnamed. Such metaphoric play turns out, moreover, to be the way the word works in the world at large, as the poetic imagination reads the surprising correspondences of the signs and figures it finds there.

The first section of Harrison's book, "Songs and Sonnets," starts with nine lyrics that take their promptings from spontaneous origins, meteorological, lexical, literary and emotional. These are followed by a sequence of sonnets, "As If," in which a conventionally and unconventionally hapless protagonist - not to be identified with or distinguished from the poet - pursues an ephemeral beloved, both real and imagined, through the turns and triangulations of a love affair and the endless echo chambers of the sonnet form.

The second section, "Stories," presents a series of poems, each based in part on a strange tale taken from the daily news: a robot named Dante sent down into an active Antarctic volcano; a man in California who attached a flotilla of helium balloons to a lawn chair and shot up into the jet lanes over Los Angeles; a man in Oregon who willed that, after his death, his skin be used to bind volumes of his poetry. In trials by water, earth, air, fire and ice, by law as well, these doomed questers seem, at moments, figures for the poet in his solitary enterprise, "As if the times gave us, in daily pages, / Untimely legends we're the fractals of."

"Signs and Figures," the final section, opens further to the figurative play Baudelaire called "correspondence," finding metaphoric patterns in the unwitting irony of roadside markers; in the juxtaposition of the nineteenth-century suburban landscape garden cemetery to the urban misery that encloses it in the twenty-first; in the mysterious and sporadic cornucopia of the fishes offered up, when conditions are just right, by Mobile Bay in Alabama. Some poems here consider the ways poets (Frost, Donne, Burns, Keats and Shelley) have been memorialized; others concern the survival of poetry in our checkered present, its persistence as "the music of whatever comes to mind."

A note on Joseph Harrison

Joseph Harrison was born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1957, grew up in northern Virginia and Alabama, and took his BA from Yale in 1979 and his MA from Johns Hopkins in 1986. His poems have appeared in various journals, amongst them The Antioch Review, Boston Review, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, and The Yale Review, as well as in The Best American Poetry 1998. His book Someone Else's Name was published by Waywiser in the UK in 2003 and by Zoo Press in the USA, and was a runner-up for the 2005 Poet's Prize. Earlier in 2005 he received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Praise for Someone Else's Name

"[No] reader of this book could doubt for an instant that the poet not only loves his art, but delights in it, treating it with all the playfulness Frost so strongly recommended. Most of Mr Harrison's poems are high-spirited romps, though perfectly contained within the metrical and stanzaic schemes he assigns himself and so clearly enjoys deploying. He is a poet who makes the most of his forms, which, together with an unusually versatile diction (as 'who can sing both high and low') keeps himself on his toes, and keeps his readers alert to every change in the linguistic topography he leads us through.

... I want to single out two major poems for comment, eminent amidst their excellent companions. Of these, 'View of Baltimore from Green Mount Cemetery' strikes me as an achievement that belongs with the great elegies in the language, utterly unembarrassed in the company of Gray, and, indeed, serving as an urban, sophisticated and modern counterpart to that poet's rural and simplistic view of life and society. This poem is a triumph in its breadth and depth of vision, its huge compassion, its irony, civility, and quiet refusal to adopt grand, funerary postures. There is a surer grasp of the modern world in this poem than can be found in most poetry or fiction. The other, no less ambitious, is 'Mobile Bay Jubilee,' in which a ground (or sea) bass from Spenser serves to contribute to a music wholly Mr. Harrison's own, a glorious mix of headlong improvisation and formal orthodoxy, like the best New Orleans Jazz (though the setting is Alabaman, where even tall tales are true), in which the bounty of the sea annually gives itself up in a sort of piscine miracle, like the fertility of the mind, ('that ocean where each kind / Does straight its own resemblance find ...') or like the one Ben Jonson describes in 'To Penshurst.'

... The jubilation of 'Mobile Bay Jubilee' balances the solemnity or the occasional note of gloom to be found elsewhere. And these two major poems serve to exhibit, in their polar pivots of grief and gaiety, the impressive extent of Mr. Harrison's vocal range. As Frost said, after the immedicable woes comes play. Mr. Harrison's technique never fails him, his capacity for conveying the deepest and most subtle feelings is sure and accurate. Best of all, in every poem here, irrespective of mood or weight, the reader will encounter the sheer joy of a poet gladdened by his own art, alive to the liberties and limits of form and imagination - playful, serious, gifted, multi-vocal and athletically adroit."– Anthony Hecht (from the Introduction)

"Sad and funny by turns and often simultaneously, the quests, meditations, and laments in this rich collection are unfailingly sane – no, more than sane, wise. Furthermore, Harrison's every poem is lullingly melodic, though each sings a different tune. This exceptional debut is a rare delight." – Rachel Hadas

"Someone Else's Name is a first book full of stunning performances, each one infused with wit, feeling, and humanity, and each one delighting in the full use of the medium and its devices. It's a happy thing to witness the emergence of such a talent." – Richard Wilbur

"In this brilliant first book the deepest of feeling and the most profound thought rise up in response to a glittering surface of wit, which is never an end in itself. Throughout these poems, deep poetic learning and passionate responses to immediate experience interanimate one another. Mr. Harrison's imagination is unflagging, and can keep going through 'As If', a splendid revisionary sonnet sequence, or the remarkable 'Mobile Bay Jubilee'. His is an outstanding talent, and he does not betray it by anything but the most meticulous of workmanship." – John Hollander

"Someone Else's Name is a book of brilliant wit, erudition, and technical ingenuity, and, played for the highest stakes, is no less than a quest for personal and artistic identity through poem after poem in which no reader can fail 'Underneath their curlicue and flair / [to] hear the real pathos there.' It is a stunning book." – Greg Williamson

"Seven years ago the poet Greg Williamson sent me a slim manuscript by his close friend and Johns Hopkins colleague, Joe Harrison. I was very impressed by what I read, but it just didn't prepare me for the impact of this stunning and ample first collection. Harrison has all of Williamson's strengths. He is a punctilious metrist, a born rhymer, an inventor of graceful, intricate stanzas. He's also ingeniously contemporary, as in the two poems for Dante the robot, which was lowered into the caldera of Mount Erebus. In flawless terza rima, of course. Or the little ode "Air Larry," about the nut case who rode his helium-balloon-powered lawn chair into the jet space 16,000 feet above L.A. Yet everything he writes is invested with a deep learning, worn lightly, borne of wide reading in the canon. He is a far more mournful poet than his younger friend, and his concerns are more elemental, less cerebral. If I have any reservation about either of them, it is that they are too much concerned with the themes of iteration, with writing poetry on poetry. But that's the reaction of a farmer to most academics. In his fifth decade, Harrison is a fully formed, dazzlingly fine poet; and every lover of our ancient art will be grateful to have this book on his shelf." Amazon and BN.com ranking, five stars." – Timothy Murphy

Book of the Year Nominations

Washington Post, December 2004

Edward Hirsch

"The poems in this first book are so witty and formally adept, so technically accomplished, that they almost seem to come from another era."

Then failure be my triumph! Year by year
I've artfully pursued the non-career
From the beginning, down to these very words.

These very words, like bells, will take their toll.
Let's at the least, Petrarchan rigmarole
Aside, admit that that's the case.

.......................................I tire
Of such exertion, come up short of breath,
No longer young, and straining to expire
At times when every line's a little death.

A little death goes a long way, it's true.
Bare boughs, bare choirs, a dangling leaf or two

Wordplay and allusion are Harrison's stock-in-trade and he is a master of both (the love which is the subject of 'As If' is described there as pursuing "a course sidereally crossed"). There is a constant fire-work display of half quotation and pun - too much so, no doubt, for some tastes. For the most part I found it exhilarating; Harrison's sheer facility is itself exciting and only occasionally does it seem to get the better of him and lead him into excess. At his best he is a master of the counterpoint between the demands of, on the one hand, syntactical structure and, on the other, those of metre and stanza form. Watching him find ways to meet both demands is one of the pleasures of reading this collection. Harrison's use of the traditional forms he adopts I adapts is never merely slavish. So. when he writes rhyming couplets he effectively syncopates the rhyming:

Will someone tell me, please,

Who carved these trees
With someone else's name?

These woods won't be the same,
For I thought, all along.

Mine was the only signature among
These pale textures of bark

Rising out of the dark
Underworld of the forest floor.

But who was here before?

Traditional genres are 'updated' too. 'As If' redesigns the Petrarchan sonnet sequence, and in 'View of Baltimore from Green Mount Cemetery' the traditions of Graveyard poetry are recomposed (though not quite as radically as they were by the English Harrison in 'V'). Joseph Harrison's is a distinctive voice which is never less than highly entertaining; this is a mind of great quickness and wit, served by a sheer skill that is itself a pleasure to encounter. " – Glyn Pursglove

Rattapallax, Summer 2003

"Joseph Harrison’s first collection, Someone Else’s Name, carries a glowing blurb from Richard Wilbur (complimentary almost to the point of giddiness), and a lengthy, glorifying introduction by Anthony Hecht which, taken together, may be the closest thing to a money-back guarantee a publisher can offer ...[The book] is ... a Major Accomplishment ...And, more importantly, it is enormous fun." – Jon Mooallem

The Hudson Review, Spring 2004

"... in an effusive introduction to Harrison's first collection ... [Anthony Hecht compares the poet] to none other than John Donne. While this may be a bit overmuch, one can well understand Hecht's enthusiasm for Harrison, who, as he observes, obviously 'not only loves his art, but delights in it.' Harrison has formidable technical skills yet wears them lightly: 'everywhere,' as Hecht puts it, 'the poet is both at liberty and in control.'" – Bruce Bawer