Joseph H. Harrison

1957 - 2024

Joseph H. Harrison

August 26, 1957 - February 13, 2024

"On Tuesday, February 13, 2024, the poet Joseph Harrison died at home in Baltimore, not quite five months after a diagnosis of brain cancer. He was 66 years old. Just days before the end, he had received an advance copy of his Collected Poems from Waywiser Press, and although he could no longer read, he was delighted to hold it in his hands.

Born in Richmond, Virginia, he was the son of Joseph Hobson Harrison Jr., an Auburn University history professor, and Olivia Johnston Hart, a school board member. He earned his B.A. in English at Yale-studying with Harold Bloom, who became one of the major admirers of his poetry. He began graduate work at Auburn University and became a Baltimorean when he continued his studies at Johns Hopkins. He was the Senior American Editor of Waywiser Press and founded its ongoing annual Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize in 2006. He published four volumes of poetry with Waywiser: Someone Else's Name (2003), Identity Theft (2008), Shakespeare's Horse (2015) and Sometimes I Dream that I Am Not Walt Whitman (2020) - and two collections of earlier work with Syllabic Press: The Imposition of Ashes (2017) and The Fly in the Ointment (2014).

Joe was the oldest of five children: all of his devoted siblings were with him at the end. He was a famous raconteur. He loved to tell long, elaborate stories, and often found the turns in his own plots so funny that he was incapacitated by laughter, and would have to start over. He was a statistics-equipped expert not only in literature but in baseball, football, film, and American politics. He was a marvelous, multitasking host, and grilled some of the best steaks I've ever eaten. That mid-twentieth-century taste in food extended, unapologetically, to his writing style. He wrote in rhyme, mostly, and meter, always, and when he was told his work had elements in common with Anthony Hecht or Richard Wilbur (true), he was delighted. That said, he loved helping to discover and nurture younger poets who wrote nothing like him. Joe had a nearly photographic memory and an awe-inspiring aural memory: he could quote passages at will by all of his favorite poets, who ranged from Horace to Shakespeare to Dickinson. When he gave his own poetry readings, he barely glanced at the page: he declaimed his lines by heart in a unique Southern accent-an amalgam of Virginia, Alabama, and I don't know where else-while training his eyes directly on his audience.

When he received his shocking prognosis-twelve to eighteen months, which turned out to be far too optimistic-he made a point of telling people what he loved and admired about them. And he wanted, too, to spare us too much grief. Around the time he turned fifty, probably thinking he had three or even four more decades ahead, he wrote the following poem, "To My Friends." I want to pass it on now, not only to memorialize Joe but to offer comfort to you, reader, the next time you experience a major loss".

Mary Jo Salter

TO MY FRIENDS

My good friends, when you're under the illusion

That the common end of things has ended me,

Whether that end was sudden or wretchedly slow,

Peaceful or violent, untimely or, finally, wished for,

Don't spend too much time grieving, as if I were gone

To some murky underground region of swampy water

And cavernous absence, metallic and silent and cold,

Or some plush resort in the stratosphere of our dreams

Pillowed with cumuli, graced by ethereal muzak,

Or some massive confusing impersonal processing center

With lines and obscure snafus and numbers not names,

Away from the sun and the sound of the wind in the trees,

But after a short ceremony, public or private,

Listen for the wings of the birds, and ask where we're going,

Alabama or Delaware, Canada, Yucatan,

And wish me luck in the next life, who now have wings.

Joseph Hobson Harrison III (August 26, 1957- February 13 2024) was the son of Joseph Hobson Harrison Jr. and Olivia Johnston Hart, both of Richmond. He is survived by his four siblings, Helen Harrison (Silver Spring, Maryland), Robert Harrison (Austin, Texas), Elizabeth Harrison White (Auburn, Alabama), and Mary Olivia Harrison (Atlanta, Georgia). He is survived by nieces and nephews Olivia White, Zoe Harrison Deal, and Olivia Maulsby, Harrison White, Owen White, and Declan Harrison.

In lieu of flowers the family requests donations be made to the B'More Clubhouse, a local organization Joe believed in, whose mission it is to help those suffering from mental illness

donations to bmoreclubhouse.org

In Praise of Joseph Harrison's Poetry

"Joseph Harrison's poetry is modern without being modernist. That is, he employs the tools and materials of traditional poetry to construct a kind of verse that is appealingly new, yet never transgressively so. His poems reflect a renewed lustre in our direction, and we come away deeply refreshed" - John Ashbery

"Shakespeare's Horse is Joseph Harrison's full emergence as a poet, still in the eloquent and formal tradition of Richard Wilbur and Anthony Hecht but with an accent now pitched in a new mode. Among the book's triumphs are 'Wakefield', 'Dr. Johnson Rolls Down a Hill', 'Damon', and 'Harrison's Clock'. Yet I take a particular joy in the brief but enigmatic'Hamlet' and the remarkable title sonnet. The kind of comedy Harrison works into his subtle meditations is refreshingly original. Should he further refine his already agile art, there will be no one of his American generation who so challenges the eye and the ear to come together."- Harold Bloom

"Someone Else's Name is a first book 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 Joseph Harrison's hands verse is an art, a living art and a generous one. 'The dead keep singing' he writes in 'River of Song', and they do in the lyric ventriloquism of these pages: Frost, Auden, Stevens, Dickinson, Baudelaire, Hardy, Shakespeare, and most surprisingly, Whitman"- Rosanna Warren