BCC SHines A Light On: Jack D. Harvey
BCC Shines a Light On:
Jack D. Harvey
Name of the piece published by BCC:
When/where was it originally published:
Duane’s Poetry, 2019. Said magazine terminated publication a couple of years ago. Also published in BCC in 04/24.
Tell us more about your piece! What is the background of the piece? What led you to write it? What’s your process?
The piece was written about one of my former wives, long before we were married. Since the piece was written around the date of the title (1972), over fifty years ago, I have no concrete recollection regarding my impetus to write it or what you call “my process.” In the first place, most writers, including poets, find it difficult to talk about their work and the generation or creation of their work because it is such a dippy process, (with a bow to Richard Feynman), involving as it does, the gnomic, cryptic, ambiguous, incantatory, discontinuous, oracular and accidental nature of creation of language, the putting together of words. If you strip away the poet’s personae to the bare face of the poet, you will find that his own face is nothing more than a mask and that is as it should be. If you have any competence in your craft, your voice is always there, no matter what persona you assume. “Cleave the rock and I am there.” The simple answer to what inspired this poem is that I have no answer.
How did you feel when it was first published and how have your thoughts or feelings on the piece changed from then to now?
I have been writing poetry for years and it is on the internet and in magazines. Getting published is no big deal and has no effect on my thoughts and feelings about the piece. I still remember my feelings regarding the piece and fundamentally, they have not changed, even though the subject of the poem is long dead and I am an old man, on my third marriage. As Thomas Mann said, “deep, deep is the well of the past; shall we not say it is bottomless?”
Is there a specific message you would like readers to take away from reading this piece?
Tout court, it’s a love poem, written by a relatively young man. What message? That we hope that love lasts and transmutes over time. Personally I have my doubts, as expressed in a poem I wrote called “Headlines,” which is available on the internet and from a portion of which I quote below:
God, sly as a fox and bold as a lion
scales down his limitless circumference,
signaling from the sky,
comes down again, this time
harrowing not only hell,
but earth’s own sweet self,
not only boxing
the daily evangelists into oblivion,
but bringing to us all
His grace and terrible truth;
ripping out now with
the message of eternity;
none of it lasts, folks,
not a goddamned bit of it.
What else would you like to tell readers about your writing? (Doesn’t have to refer only to your BCC piece).
Back in the fifties, when I was in my teens, I spent summers in Gloucester, Mass, where my parents had a summer cottage. I had the good fortune to meet a poet called Vincent Ferrini and his friend, the better- known poet, Charles Olson. Vincent encouraged me to write poetry and was both supportive and critical. Alas, Vincent and Charles are long dead. In any event, that was how I started and I have been writing poetry ever since. .As far as stylistic influences, I would say Ezra Pound, Dante and Horace were major influences on my poetry, but there were many others, developed over a lifetime of reading poetry in a number of different languages. Pound, whatever his pretensions to such, was no philosopher or economist, but his ear was unerring. As he said somewhere, poetry has to be closely tied to music --when it isn’t, it degenerates and, in turn, music has to be closely tied to dance (he meant tribal, ritual or communal dance) or it degenerates. Too many “poets” these days chop prose into lines and call it poetry, based on some kind of expectation that sentences chopped into lines will yield/deserve some kind of special pleasure and significance. I try to avoid that and follow Pound’s advice.
Why does poetry matter and why do I read and write poetry? Poetry matters in this age of iron where language and especially the spoken word are degenerating at a rapid pace. Poetry makes mythology and mythology is the third eye for all of us, opening our minds to possibilities beyond the daily bread of our lives. This is important. Nevertheless, poets these days serve at a ruinous shrine and we know it. Yet, I do not despair. At my age it is unbecoming. If I were a reductive Freudian, I would say that my writing harnesses or displaces some deep-seated neurosis in a positive way. As Freud said, “Artists, like neurotics, flee a reality that is hardly satisfactory to them and take refuge in a fantasy world, but-unlike the mentally ill-are able to find their way back.” So I say I persist writing poetry because writing poetry to me is like breathing-I can’t survive without it. And perhaps for some of the reasons Orwell sets forth in “Why I Write.”
Where can readers find more of your work? (Website/social media, etc)
Just Google “Jack D. Harvey + poetry.” The “D.” is to distinguish me from a dashing young English race car driver who has quite a large following on the internet.
