Jerry Harp

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Biographical note:  Jerry Harp grew up in Mt. Vernon, Indiana (U.S.A.). He has degrees from Saint Meinrad College (B.A.), Saint Louis University (M.A.), the University of Florida (M.F.A.), and the University of Iowa (2002). His books of poetry include Creature (Salt Publishing, 2003) and Gatherings (Ashland Poetry Press, 2004). He co-edited, with Jan Weissmiller, A Poetry Criticism Reader (University of Iowa Press, 2006). His reviews appear regularly in Pleiades. He teaches at Lewis & Clark College.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844710287
ISBN-10:  1844710289
ISBN-13:  9781844710287
Author:  Jerry Harp
Title:  Creature
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Sep-03
Extent:  112pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  7 mm
Weight:  168 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 9.99
Price:  USD 15.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  These poems function as experiments in epistemology. Attentive to the ways that sensory experiences coalesce into cognition and the ways cognition remains always thoroughly sensory, these poems experiment with the complex ways in which being in the world means thinking with one’s whole body. By occupying a variety of shifting subject positions, making use of various forms (both traditional and nonce forms), and engaging both explicitly and implicitly with texts from various traditions, these poems seek to address the cognitive, spiritual and erotic experiences, longings and desires that come with living in the material world.

These concerns come into especially intense focus in the Creature poems. While the Creature is as human as anyone else, he has certain misgivings about the old term ‘human,’ especially insofar as it is associated with hierarchical notions of human domination that can sometimes slide into abuse. The Creature poems explore the subject’s continuity with the world, including the world of artifice and technology. The Creature longs for a deeper connection to the world and to the divine, though he can experience great confusion about where to find either. The Creature is also thoroughly textual, and he longs for a new language in terms of which he can more truly live.

Table of contents:
1 Their Solitary Way
The Millennium Turning
To the Reader
Our Host Confused
‘Evening Faces’
History
Plato’s House
Summer
Traveler
What is Found
‘Why Not Be Totally Changed into Fire?’
Such Blessing
‘Their Solitary Way’
The Operation
Roughening
2 A Man Who Was Afraid of Language
A Man Who Was Afraid of Language
The Monastery Gate
A Priest I Once
What Was to Happen Already Occurred
Drifting
Summer Work
What is Revealed
Harold Graves Considers the Last Decade
River Front Bar
At the Archabbey
Colloquy
Sanctuary
Country House
Monuments
Psalm in a Time of War
3 Creature
Creature’s Introduction
Creature Downcast
The Creature Bids Farewell to His Mate
Creature Arrested
Creature Back Home
The Creature Entranced
Creature’s Class War
The Creature Enraged
Creature at the River Front
Creature in Extremis
The Creature Midway
Creature’s First Memory
The Creature’s Thanksgiving
The Creature at Leisure
Creature’s Morning Song
Creature Remembers His Mate
Creature at the Mall
Creature in Congruence with the Moon
Summa Contra Creature
Creature’s Love Song
Creature’s Nightmare
The Creature’s Evening
Creature at a Party
Creature’s Lament
Creature by the Window
Creature’s Pronouncement
Creature Lights a Candle
The Creature Outside
The Creature on Saturday
Creature’s Confession
Creature on Delivery
Creature at Rest
The Creature Goes Home Again
The Creature’s Activism
Creature at the Airport
Creature on Art
The Creature’s Summa
Creature on the Town
Creature on the Fourth of July
The Creature on His Beat
Creature at Work
Creature Considers the Dark
Creature Meets the Executioner
The Creature’s Reverie
The Creature Walking
The Creature’s Sadness
Creature at the Piano
The Creature Searching
The Creature in Repose

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Excerpt from book:  

Creature’s Introduction

I’m told I’m one in a series.
Anonymous messages arrive in the mail
Detailing factory rebates

And opportunities for extended phone lines.
I search in vain for posters bearing my likeness.
The answers I receive on the street

Tell me that I must have been altered.
The photographs I take turn up blank.
If I speak deferentially and stare

At the ground, eventually someone
Calls my name. I never can tell what they’re thinking.
Sometimes I wonder am I thinking at all.

But I’m no reprobate. I am no throwback.
Standing in line I hear people laugh.
I go out running under stars.

I improvise rhythms on the trees.
A world unto myself, I’m no one’s champion,
And I never could please my woman.

Perhaps this is why she went away, hopped
On a motorcycle with a scrawny, tattooed man
Who fired her into my worst memories and dreams.

Now I caress only the wall.
When I answer the phone, no one speaks—
Only distant sounds like interstellar clicks.

I do not recall what language I am.
Long ago I lost the ability
To associate faces and smells.

The boys at the bar give me drinks as I leave.
I go walking the alleys at night
And ransack garbage cans for keepsakes—a bracelet,

A crowbar, a picture of a man watching the sky.
The brand of airplane I like was discontinued.
I walk into churches in the late afternoon

And linger to inhale the smoke of votive candles.
The boss props me against a wall
Until he needs me to make deliveries

Or sandblast another table and chairs.
There go the bells again, the crack in the hour
A cynical note, three in the morning already.

Review quote:  Jerry Harp’s dreamscape poems are sturdier than they first appear, a pleasing series of contemplations of the millennial aesthetique du mal. Time after time, it is the tension between panic and good manners that he manages to make dramatic and attractive. A very impressive first collection!

David R. Slavitt

Review quote:  Let the new poet discover all at once his true subject and he will begin writing easily and very well. Jerry Harp is not the only poet to have had such luck, but so far as I know, he may well be the latest.

Donald Justice