William J. Harris, an Ad Astra poet, is featured in Poetry (Feb. 2023)

A poem from this blog, published May 21, 2010, is among poems by friend, scholar, and poet Billy Joe Harris in a portfolio of lyrics in the Feb. issue of Poetry. I have always had the highest regard for Billy as a poet and as a person. Some of his generosity of character shines through in the Poetry interview that accompanies the portfolio. He was an essential member of the Poetini group that met regularly with Ken Irby, Judith Roitman, Stan Lombardo, Susan Harris, Joe Harrington, Jonathan Mayhew, Beth Reiber, Barnie Warf. Below is a reprint of that May 21 post, also available in the print anthology I published with the Washburn University Center for Kansas Studies, To the Stars: Kansas Poets of the Ad Astra Poetry Project.   (Another poem, "Practical Concerns" by William J. Harris is also on this blog, Nov. 13, 2010). Denise Low, Feb. 24, 2023.

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Billy Joe Harris, University of Kansas professor emeritus, spent a sabbatical year studying poets and painters, including artist Giorgio Morandi. He admires Morandi for “muted colors and radically reduced subject matter.” He employs this approach to his own verse. His work suggests narratives, but in such concise form that cultural referents may be minimal. In the poem “Sympathetic Magpies,” the Chinese origin of the legend is secondary to the universal concept of bridges. Further, the stanzas’ own parallel lines suggest intervals of bridge girders. Love creates a bridge between mortal and immortal beings, and the interplay between heaven and earth are universal. The memorable magic here is the bridge made of magpies. The poem has parable-like directness, with love that can defy the decrees of heaven. Like bridges, romance between a young weaver and herder can be set in most times and places. The Milky Way itself is another kind of bridge. Then Harris shifts to present time, inviting readers to also become part of legends through the poem. With a few simple images—lovers, Heaven, and bridges—the poet creates a story, briefly outlined yet complete like a Morandi painting. Harris said of the painter: “His quiet visual drama tells you that you need no more than these few objects to tell the human story.” This also applies to “Sympathetic Magpies.”

SYMPATHETIC MAGPIES by William J. Harris
There is an old Chinese legend
About a weaving girl and a cowherd
Falling in love and being punished
By Heaven because she was celestial
And he was a mere mortal

Heaven only allowed them to meet
Once a year
On the seventh day
Of the seventh month

The magpies were so sympathetic
Each year
On that day
They made themselves
Into a bridge
Stretching across the Milky Way
So the lovers could kiss

Poems are sympathetic magpies
Bridges between lovers
Bridges between selves
Bridges between worlds

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Education: Harris received a BA in English (Central State University 1968), MA in Creative Writing (Stanford 1971), and PhD in English and American Literature (Stanford 1974).

Career: William J. Harris is an emeritus professor of American literature, African American literature, creative writing, and jazz studies. He taught at the University of Kansas, Pennsylvania State University, and Cornell University, among other universities. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. This poet and critic’s books include: Hey Fella Would You Mind Holding This Piano a Moment (Ithaca House 1974), In My Own Dark Way (Ithaca House 1977) and Personal Questions (Leconte Publishers, Rome, 2010). He has published in over fifty anthologies. He is the author of the critical work The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka (University of Missouri Press 1985) and editor of The Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader (Thunder's Mouth Press, 1991, second edition, 2000).

William J. Harris reads "Nobody Wants to Write an Elegy" English & Italian

William J. Harris: "Nobody Wants to Write an Elegy"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytavbCJvcG4
This link leads to YouTube version--with Italian translation by Nicola Manupelli. Stanley Lombardo reads the Italian at this Feb. 23, 2012 reading at the Raven Bookstore in Lawrence, Kansas. Harris's introduction references Kevin Young's elegy for his father. The poem is from a new bilingual book CROONERS by Harris and Manupelli.

Billy Joe Harris reads "I and the Motel Room" by Nicola Manupelli and his own poem "A Guy in a Black SUV."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPSkEmC6kdE

William J. Harris poem "Practical Concerns": Print and U-Tube Link

William J. Harris


PRACTICAL CONCERNS

From a distance, I watch
a man digging a hole with a machine.
I go closer.
The hole is deep and narrow.

I ask the ditchdigger if I may climb down
and ask the bird a question.
He says, why sure.

It's nice and cool in the ditch.
The bird and I talk about singing.
Very little about technique.

Louis Copt filmed Harris’s poem “Practical Concerns”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBhBVO-f_G4

Selected Publications of Wm. J. Harris: The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka: The Jazz Aesthetic (1985), Hey Fella Would You Mind Holding This Piano a Moment (1974), and In My Own Dark Way (1977).

Kansas Univ. Associate Professor Harris has also published poetry in fifty anthologies, and some of the more recent work appears in Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies (2004) and Every Goodbye Ain't Gone: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry by African Americans (2006). He is the editor or co-editor of The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader (1991, 2000), Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of African American Literary Tradition (1997) and a double issue of The African American Review on Amiri Baraka (Summer/Fall 2003).

For more on painter and film maker Louis Copt:
http://www.louiscopt.com/
 http://www.louiscopt.com/video.html 

AD ASTRA POETRY PROJECT # 46: WILLIAM JOSEPH HARRIS (1942 - )

Billy Joe Harris, University of Kansas professor, spent a sabbatical year studying poets and painters, including artist Giorgio Morandi. He admires Morandi for “muted colors and radically reduced subject matter.” He employs this approach to his own verse. His work suggests narratives, but in such concise form that cultural referents may be minimal.

In the poem “Sympathetic Magpies,” the Chinese origin of the legend is secondary to the universal concept of bridges. Further, the stanzas’ own parallel lines suggest intervals of bridge girders. Love creates a bridge between mortal and immortal beings, and the interplay between heaven and earth are universal. The memorable magic here is the bridge made of magpies. The poem has parable-like directness, with love that can defy the decrees of heaven. Like bridges, romance between a young weaver and herder can be set in most times and places. The Milky Way itself is another kind of bridge. Then Harris shifts to present time, inviting readers to also become part of legends through the poem. With a few simple images—lovers, Heaven, and bridges—the poet creates a story, briefly outlined yet complete like a Morandi painting. Harris said of the painter: “His quiet visual drama tells you that you need no more than these few objects to tell the human story.” This also applies to “Sympathetic Magpies.”



SYMPATHETIC MAGPIES

There is an old Chinese legend
About a weaving girl and a cowherd
Falling in love and being punished
By Heaven because she was celestial
And he was a mere mortal

Heaven only allowed them to meet
Once a year
On the seventh day
Of the seventh month

The magpies were so sympathetic
Each year
On that day
They made themselves
Into a bridge
Stretching across the Milky Way
So the lovers could kiss

Poems are sympathetic magpies
Bridges between lovers
Bridges between selves
Bridges between worlds

*****************************
Education: Harris received a BA in English (Central State University 1968), MA in Creative Writing (Stanford 1971), and PhD in English and American Literature (Stanford 1974).

Career: This poet and critic’s books are: Hey Fella Would You Mind Holding This Piano a Moment (Ithaca House 1974), In My Own Dark Way (Ithaca House 1977) and Personal Questions (Leconte Publishers, Rome, 2010). He has published in over fifty anthologies. He is the author of the critical work The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka (University of Missouri Press 1985) and editor of The Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader (Thunder's Mouth Press, 1991, second edition, 2000).

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©2010 Denise Low AAPP 46 ©2009 “Sympathetic Magic” by William J. Harris

Harrington, Harris, and Irby to read Nov. 12, 4:30 pm, Spencer Museum of Art

Don't miss this return engagement by three University of Kansas scholars and professors: Joseph Harrington, Billy Joe Harris, and Kennth Irby

More from Lyn Hejinian: Correspondence with Billy Joe Harris about Pastiche, Poetic Forms, & More

My thanks to both William J. Harris and Lyn Hejinian for their permission to post their recent correspondence:

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From: Harris, William J. 3/9/2008 12:28 PM To: lyn hejinian

Dear Lyn,It was really great having you here and in so many different situations. You had a real impact on the community--people really enjoyed your visit. And it was lovely for me to get to know you some--I hope there will be other times to deepen our relationship.I have a few questions. Which Beethoven fugue did you play from? It was quite beautiful. It seems to me that the Beethoven and Ascension were unresolved works but the cartoon piece (which I really enjoyed) seems to be more pastiche than unresolved. I am going to play part of Ascension to my advanced poetry class and ask them to talk about the shape of it. This is a question for me. After years I have returned to writing poetry and I am very interested in the issue of form--not right or wrong but why. When I asked Paul Muldoon (he was here a week before you) why he altered the form of his villanelles and sestinas, he had a hard time with the question. He finally said because he wanted to shake things up. So my question to you is why do you feel the need to create forms--forms to substitute for the traditional ones? Why don't you throw the wholeformal thing out the window? When some one called your forms arbitrary that didn't seem correct. To use 45 (?) sentences in a work because you are 45 (?) doesn't sound arbitrary but personal. In fact, it is no more arbitrary than writing a sonnet. How does the new sentence differ from the old line because some of your sentences just look like lines to me. Thanks for coming. It really was a great time. Best, Billy Joe

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From: lyn hejinian Sent: 3/10/2008 10:20 PM To: Harris, William J

Dear Billy Joe,It was great for me too--the visit, the getting to know various people there--especially you. I hope I will be able to stay in touch with everyone. As for your questions: You are right that the Carl Stalling cartoon score hasn't all that much affinity with either the Beethoven (which is his Grosse Fuge Op. 133 [aka Great Fugue]-the recording I have is by the Guarneri Quartet on a CD titled "Beethoven: The Late String Quartets Opp. 127, 130, 131, 132, 133, 135") or Coltrane's "Ascension." Those two works are, so to speak, bursting at the seams-there's not enough room in them for all that the composers are trying to get in. "To Itch His Own," on the other hand, is a work that has room for all kinds of different things. The contrast that I was trying to set up, then, was between in internal otherness (an otherness erupting from within and bursting out) and an exterior otherness (existing on the outside and invited in). My other (perhaps less commendable) excuse for playing the Stalling score was its sheer surprise and pleasure value. And I do think the score utilizes but doesn't domesticate its materials; they remain surprising and intact-at least to my ear. Your message got me to thinking more about pastiche in this regard. It seems to me that the ironic subversion characteristic of pastiche doesn't (or doesn't always) domesticate the pastiched elements. Nor does it necessarily nullify them-though there is no denying the nullifying potential of irony.

But irony, in addition to having the capacity to be deprecatory and/or sarcastic, can also be joyous (raucous, hilarious-expressive of an affirmation) or sentimental. I mean sentimental here in a positive sense-as a positive term. I am interested in the 18th century notion of sentiment or sensibility-as an affirmation of a capacity for full emotional experience of the world. But the idea of sentimentality as a key element in modern writing hit me when I was reading Langston Hughes's The Big Sea. I was struck by two features of that work: the montaged structure of the work and the richness of the gaps between the vignettes (chapters)-gaps redolent of everything Hughes hasn't (or perhaps can't) say. Irony always establishes a gap-between what's said and what's not said but felt or meant. Sentimentality as, say, Laurence Sterne used it-or, to my mind, as Hughes used it-works by virtue of an almost identical kind of gap.

Pastiche is a particular kind of montage-but it isn't so far from the montage that structures The Big Sea (or Montage of a Dream Deferred). I don't know why, by the way, I saw this first in Hughes-I see it everywhere in the paratactic structures of Language writing now. Anyway-those are my thoughts for the moment on pastiche-for what they are worth. Your real question was about form-the invention of forms: why do it, and how. I've never been interested in "the craft of poetry" or in technical perfection, so the problems (or fascinations) presented by given forms have never played much of a role in my work. (An exception might be "the sentence"-but sentences aren't literary forms properly speaking.) And yet form-the shape or structure or set of enablingconstraints-is the first thing I work on when planning a new project. The initial challenge is to find a form that is pertinent to the project (rather than arbitrarily imposed on it) and that will be a dynamic facet of it. The work's form is, in this sense, closer to the "working method" than to form in the conventional sense-certainly it is intended to be reflective of an approach to the project (whatever it might be). I spend a lot of time thinking about various possible forms for the project I have in mind-which is to say, ways to approach it. The forms, then, are project-specific.

I don't want to bore you-but I will briefly describe the form of my most recently finished work, and my rationale for it. The work is called "Lola"; it's coming out next fall in a book I'm calling Saga/Circus. The work is meant to be a circus (a cruel entertainment involving clowns, also a battlefield, and also a small American town with its various citizens). As a circus, I decided it needed three rings-so there are three chapters. But, just as a circus spectator's attention goes from ring to ring, so the chapters come forward-in other words we come to "Chapter Two" (or "One" or"Three") repeatedly. The work moves through them quickly (the chapters are short). here is also a parade. The effect is Steinian and entertaining and the atmosphere is dark. The form is pretty loose-it was mostly a matter of determining to use the 3 chapter/3 ring motif. Does any of this help? Does it even answer your question? Warmly, Lyn

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From: Harris, William J 3/11/2008 6:42 AM To: lyn hejinian

Dear Lyn,Boy, does it help! What a wonderful, rich letter. The phrase "enabling constraints" ties in--helps clarify my thoughts about poetic constraints. I come out of Williams, Baraka and Olson (organic form) and didn't really start thinking about poetic constraints for experimental writers until read Ron Pagett's HANDBOOK OF POETIC FORMS in 2001 which changed my way of thinking about poetry. I want to keep talking--I do really want to keep in touch. Best, Billy Joe

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From: Harris, William J. 3/11/2008 11:50 AM To: lyn hejinian

I am in this wonderful world right now where lots of people are talking to me about poetry. I love it. Thanks for the prompts. I never used them before I came here. I have been thinking about them a lot--their magic. After a poetry reading on Sunday one of my former students said to me my prompts gave him permission to be creative. I am now reading Williams' book," Spring and All," for the first time--I had read the poems before but without the prose--and it seems the work is incomplete without the prose. I have decided when I play the Coltrane in my class I will also play Mozart for contrast. Best, Billy Joe
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From: lyn hejinian 3/11/2008 2:31 PM To: Harris, William J.

Dear Billy Joe,I want to stay in touch too. I was thinking about the question of form again this morning, largely because I was reading my daily dose of Adorno's Aesthetic Theory and the dose in question was titled, yes, "Form." I was having difficulty concentrating on it, as my own thoughts kept digressing onto pathways of their own--perhaps stimulated by his, but saying so suggests that I understand his, and I am not confident that I do. That book of Ron Padgett's has been a godsend, especially for teaching. I often (although by no means always) am asked to teach a workshop of sorts. For grad students, I don't give assignments--but for undergrads, I do. Often I have them embark on a "serial poem" whose parts, as they provide accruing contexts for each other and influence the trajectory of the poem, must emerge in response to assignments--which set up some sort of constraint. I'll attach my list of such assignments, just for the fun of it. Very best, Lyn

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From: lyn hejinian 3/11/2008 5:35 PM To: Harris, William J.

Isn't it awful that the prose got disappeared from "Spring and All" for almost 50 years? It amazes me that people don't realize how important context is. Best, Lyn