Poetry News

Letter from Jim Harrison to Peter Brandvold

By Harriet Staff

Head on over to Peter Brandvold’s blog to read a letter that Jim Harrison sent him as a young writer.

Brandvold writes:

The letter below is one of my most prized possessions, and I lost it for a long time before it finally cropped up in some box I had stashed away with other paraphernalia. For about twenty years, I had it tacked to the bulletin board above my desk.

Jim Harrison was my first favorite writer after Alexandre Dumas. When I was in high school and college, I read everything I could find by him, including his relatively obscure poetry. In short, I idolized him. I still think that his “Legends of the Fall” is one of the best novellas ever written. (I still refuse to see the movie. Come on, Brad Pitt as Tristan? Come on!)

So I’m very happy to have found the letter he wrote in response to a three- or four-page, crazy, over-zealous, likely-beer-splashed missive I hammered out a year after I graduated from high school, on my old Royal standard that sounded like a Gatling gun–or would have if I’d been a better typist.

Read it here. (Click on image to enlarge)

Posted in Poetry News on Monday, July 9th, 2012 by Harriet Staff.