Jeffrey Harrison : part one

Jeffrey Harrison is the author of six full-length books of poetry, most recently Between Lakes, published by Four Way Books in September 2020. His previous book, Into Daylight, (2014) won the Dorset Prize from Tupelo Press, while Incomplete Knowledge (Four Way, 2006) was runner-up for the Poets’ Prize. His first book, The Singing Underneath, was a National Poetry Series winner in 1987. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the NEA, and his poems have appeared widely in magazines and anthologies, including Best American Poetry and The Pushcart Prize volumes. He lives in Massachusetts and can also be found at jeffreyharrisonpoet.com.

How did you first engage with poetry?

I’m sure it started with nursery rhymes, or with my mother reading me some of the poems of A.A. Milne. The poem of his that she most liked to recite, and the one that stuck with me, is called “Disobedience” and begins, “James James/ Morrison Morrison/ Weatherby George Dupree/ Took great/ Care of his Mother,/ Though he was only three.” The poem has a sense of fun that offsets its darker side about the mother’s disappearance. Maybe it was an early lesson in the way form and content can play off each other in interesting ways. And, as we all know, disobedience is much more compelling than obedience. I later found it in other poets too—Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Philip Larkin, etc.