How Jim Harrison Lost His Left Eye & Other Tales from Esquire

Get ready... It's Legends of the Fall scribe and poet Jim Harrison, telling Esquire what all there is: "I probably wouldn't have been a poet if I hadn't lost my left eye when I was a boy." C'mon:

...A neighbor girl shoved a broken bottle in my face during a quarrel. Afterward, I retreated to the natural world and never really came back, you know.

It's just like when I was twenty and my father and sister got killed in a car accident. I thought, If this can happen to people, you might as well do what you want—which is to be a writer. Don't compromise at all, because there's no point in it.

If all I did was answer the correspondence I get, that would be my job.

It's like hunting with Mario Batali. He checked his fancy phone and said, "Fuck. I've got 280 e-mails." And I said, "What do we do now?" And he said, "Nothing" and put it in his pocket, and we went hunting.

I don't hunt mammals. My friends all do. I love antelope and elk, but I depend on the kindness of friends, because I shot a deer when I was young and it was very unpleasant.

Unlike a lot of writers, I don't have any craving to be understood.

There's more! At Esquire.