Letters to Yesenin Book

Here's a quick draught: Jim Harrison writes 30 letter-poems to a Russian poet named Yesenin who committed suicide at age 30 in 1925. Jim is at the beginning of his writing career, doing a lot of poetry writing himself, is a new father, and toys with the idea of suicide while writing a suicide. (Well, at least he's on topic.)

This might get morbid ipso fasto, but Harrison keeps it light with his constant self-deprecating (and often dark) humor. For instance, let's look at letter-poem #2 (note: they are all the same length):


I don't have any medals. I feel their lack
of weight on my chest. Years ago I was ambitious.
But now it is clear that nothing will happen.
All those poems that made me soar along a foot
from the ground are not so much forgotten as never
read in the first place. They rolled like moons
of lights into a puddle and were drowned. Not even
the puddle can be located now. Yet I am encouraged
by the way you hung yourself, telling me that such
thing don't matter. You, the fabulous poet of
Mother Russia. But still, even now, school girls
hold your dead heart, your poems, in their laps
on hot August afternoons by the river while they wait
for their boyfriends to get out of work or their
lovers to return from the army, their dead pets to
return to life again. To be called to supper. You
have a new life on their laps and can scent their
lavender scent, the cloud of hair that falls
over you, feel their feet trailing in the river,
or hidden in a purse walk the Neva again. Best of all
you are used badly like a bouquet of flowers to make
them shed their dresses in apartments. See those
steam pipes running along the ceiling. The rope.


You see how discursive he is. Very much a "letter" approach (or what we called "epistolary" back when people wrote letters and didn't worry about 130 characters or whatever the hell Pirandello searches for on Twitter). Other lines randomly liked from the letters:


"These past weeks I have been organizing myself into my separate pieces."

"Fruit and butter. She smelled like the skin of an apple. The sun was hot and I felt an unbounded sickness with earth."

"All my books are remaindered and out of print. My face in the mirror asks me who I am and says I don't know. But stop the whining. I am alive and a hundred thousand acres of birches around my house wave in the wind. They are women standing on their heads. Their leaves on the ground today are small saucers of snow from which I drink with endless thirst."

"I was proud at four that my father called me Little Turd of Misery."

"The endless bondage of words."

"Imagine being a dog and never knowing what you're doing. You're simply doing: eating garbage, fawning, mounting in public with terrible energy. But let's not be romantic."

"She has green eyes and is recent from the bath. If you were close enough which you'll never be you could catch her scent of lemon and the clear softness of her nape where it meets her hair. She'll probably die of flu next year or marry an engineer. The same things really as far as you're concerned."

"Pleasure gives. And takes."

"A good poet is only a sorcerer bored with magic who has turned his attention elsewhere."

"But maybe even Robert Frost or Charles Olson don't know they are dead. That would include you of course. It is no quantity, absolute zero, the air in a hole minus its airiness, the vacuum from the passing bird or bullet, the end of the stem where the peach was, the place above the ground where the barn burned with such energy we plugged our ears."


You get the idea. A glimpse in the mind of a young and restless poet paying homage to a young and resting suicide. Organized stream of consciousness. Of a sort. And worth the warm half hour against the radiator to read.