Letters to Yesenin

Jim Harrison

Sergei Yesenin was a Russian poet who, in 1925, hanged himself after writing his farewell poem in blood. Jim Harrison’s gorgeous, desperate “correspondence” with Yesenin is an American masterwork.
 
In the early 1970s, Harrison was living in poverty on a hard-scrabble farm, suffering from depression and suicidal urges. He began to write daily prose-poem letters to Yesenin, confiding to his unlikely friend about sex, drunkenness, family, politics—about living for another day. Although “the rope” remained ever present, Harrison listened to his poems: “My year-old daughter’s red robe hangs from the doorknob shouting stop.”

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ISBN: 9781556592652

Format: Paperback

1

to D.G.

This matted and glossy photo of Yesenin
bought at a Leningrad newsstand—permanently
tilted on my desk: he doesn’t stare at me
he stares at nothing; the difference between
a plane crash and a noose adds up to nothing.
And what can I do with heroes with my brain fixed
on so few of them? Again nothing. Regard his flat
magazine eyes with my half-cocked own, both
of us seeing nothing. In the vodka was nothing
and Isadora was nothing, the pistol waved
in New York was nothing, and that plank bridge
near your village home in Ryazan covered seven feet
of nothing, the clumsy noose that swung the tilted
body was nothing but a noose, a law of gravity
this seeking for the ground, a few feet of nothing
between shoes and the floor a light-year away.
So this is a song of Yesenin’s noose that came
to nothing, but did a good job as we say back home
where there’s nothing but snow. But I stood under
your balcony in St. Petersburg, yes St. Petersburg!
a crazed tourist with so much nothing in my heart
it wanted to implode. And I walked down to the Neva
embankment with a fine sleet falling and there was
finally something, a great river vastly flowing, flat
as your eyes; something to marry to my nothing heart
other than the poems you hurled into nothing those
years before the articulate noose.

About the Author

Jim Harrison (1937–2016) was the author of over three dozen books, including Legends of the Fall and Dalva, and served as the food columnist for the magazines Brick and Esquire. He published fourteen volumes of poetry, the final being Dead Man’s Float (2016). His work has been translated into two dozen languages and produced as four feature-length films. As a young poet he co-edited Sumac magazine with fellow poet Dan Gerber, and earned fellowships from the National Endowment for the …

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Reviews

“[T]he way Harrison has embedded his entire vision of our predicament implicitly in the particulars of two poetic lives, his own and Yesenin’s, is what makes the poem not only his best but one of the best in the past twenty-five years of American writing. It does one of the things that art must do: unflinchingly, it gives us our own image, and it does so in superbly controlled and concise language.” —Hayden Carruth

“These timeless prose poems, reissued as part of a new classics series, prove that the chains that bind the poet are also the chords that release him… [The poems] are texts for an inner strength found when a lone voice reaches out to the invisible many and a lethal and heavenly dialogue is found.” —Bloomsbury Review

“Harrison inhabits the problems of our age as if they were beasts into which he had crawled, and Letters to Yesenin is a kind of imaginative taxidermy that refuses to stay in place up on the trophy room wall, but insists on walking into the dining room.” —American Poetry Review

“The sequence of poems is a powerful plumbing of how to live in a world that says no in 10,000 ways, yes in only a few.” —Lahontan Valley News