The Nebraska Connection

So Jim Harrison has been doing promotion for his new book of poems In Search of Small Gods and I was listening to him and wondering if he has had a stroke. His speech seems slightly off kilter somehow.

(I am interested intensely in the course of strokes right at this moment because my partner in poetic crime here on Meander, Andrew, has had a moderate stroke himself recently.)

So off I went looking for some mention of that and instead I came up with this delightful and interesting review by Jim Harrison of Karl Shapiro’s book.

When I was reading the review I kept thinking the work of Shapiro’s that Harrison quotes sounds so much like the work of my cousin Bobby.

Having spaced out for a moment that the two wrote a still read Prosody handbook. Duh.

It is interesting to me that their work does sound so much alike. I don’t think Andrew’s and my work sounds alike at all, even though we do often use similar source material from Buddhist texts.

Harrison writes a great deal about birds and with my current bird obsession how can one not admire his? Of course he has been known to shoot them, unlike me.

I don’t know if I’ll ever get to Nebraska, but who knows… I may go birding there someday and run into Karl Shapiro’s unhappy ghost.