Notes for a Jim Harrison Interview

Notes for a prelude to an earlier Q&A interview with poet and novelist Jim Harrison:

“Jim –

“Like a diving board, these questions are meant as jumping-off points. They await your exotic, mid-air maneuvering; no-splash 10-pointers; or massive cannonballs of spray washing the sun-block off the babes at the edge of the pool…

“…Harrison’s warm-blooded media personae sprang from his natural swagger and wit… his love of art, stories, food, drink and a Dionysian-courting of the Word. Like Falstaff, he chose Life as the answer to the question. Wisdom sprang from the tested, hard-earned lessons of walking back-and-forth on Blake’s Road of Excess. Throughout, he followed – most closely –his self-anointed gods on earth, the whispering spirits, the woods and fields, the animals, the birds, the rivers and mountains. True writers and poets read his work as transfusions of the Blood of Art. But again, dim-witted people misread his novels, believing his outlying, brutish, alpha male characters are stand-ins for Harrison rather than witty, ironic metaphors for escaping a life of entrapment – a life in which true consciousness is foreign and forever unapproachable instead of native.”