Issue 4.3
Fall 2024
Harrison Fisher
Reflection
I wonder if it is common or rare that a poet later in life can look back over 55 years and point to the single poem that made him/her write poems, the one that said, "You want to do this." I can; for me, it’s Kenneth Pitchford’s “The Blizzard Ape,” probably unread and unknown today. The elevated diction and particularly the ending transported teenaged me—I didn’t know what was happening literally in the poem, but I knew I wanted to create that effect on readers with words of my own.
Appearances
Sometimes a black sock
crumpled against the curb looks
like a dead starling.
+
Two steps forward, two
steps backward: no practical
movement in the void.
+
What the mirror says:
nonsense. The mind sees rightly
and turns the eyes off.
​
Harrison Fisher has published twelve collections of poems since 1977, most recently Poematics of the Hyperbloody Real. His poems have appeared in over 200 magazines, including, in 2024: BlazeVOX, Book XI, MIDLVLMAG, Misfitmagazine, Rundelania, and Transom.
Harrison's Book Recommendations
Is Frederick Seidel criminally underappreciated? Earlier this year, I had a revelatory run-in with his massive collection Poems 1959–2009. Normally there are a lot of poems you would gladly miss in a poet’s collected works. Not here. This book is wildly dense, obsessed with a few topics you don’t often see in poems—his work is crazy (in a good way, of course) and transgressive throughout 500+ pages.