W.Va. poet laureate finds divinity after silence
Marc Harshman’s new book of poetry, “Following The Silence,” pays homage to West Virginia and to many aspects of the human psyche and experience. Harshman is a prolific author of both children’s books and poetry, and is in his twelfth year as Poet Laureate of West Virginia. A longtime Wheeling resident, Harshman was born and raised in Indiana, and has said he feels a strong kinship to late-19th century fellow Hoosier poet James Whitcomb Riley.
The book’s title poem expands upon Riley’s poem, “Silence.”But whereas Riley writes of a personal epiphany that came to him while “out on the edge of Chaos, all alone,” Harshman shares a love experience, which includes “a kiss long enough for tasting,” and ends with he and his companion filling “the air / with stories about listening / and then listened ourselves / to the stream, listened / to follow the silence home to our hearts.” Nature encourages a respect for silence and listening.
Echoes of great poets and songwriters are everywhere. In “Mariners,” the nod to Coleridge segues to a Bob Dylan-esque first line: “Two men sit talking, one voice with a whistle / and the other a cough.” In “The Winter Box,” the speaker plans to “sing the saddest songs I can find” — “Christmas in Prison” and “Hello in There” by John Prine — “and do as I always do, / throw words / ahead of me and follow.”
In “A Man,” the title character “walks back and forth / with decisions yet unmade. / Such times as these call for portents and poetry, / but the familiar will again arrive / without consulting us.” The poem concludes with a thorough evocation of William Butler Yeats’ “The Second Coming”:
“Far away the gathered prayers lift their lonely petitions / even as the acolyte without a concern in the world / snuffs each candle and drags his way / back through the sacristy into a world / hurrying to dinner, a world / where fields matter little and decisions / get made with easy and careless confidence.” The poem captures a wide swath of perennial and pandemic-era problems, whether they be personal, religious, social or political.
Three consecutive poems near the end of the book have epigraphs from Joseph Campbell. The third one, “Symbolic,” is a long prose poem that begins with “Of course, the symbols were never going to work out the way you’d hoped” and ends with “Call it resurrection, if you will, but let it go at that.
No symbols, please.”
The Campbell epigraph here says that mythology is meant to show “everything as a metaphor to transcendence.” To paraphrase another Campbell epigraph Harshman uses: We live; we find truths; we relate them. The poet endorses this direct-but-never-simplistic view of mythology and life.
There are odes to the past (“VW Beetle”) and to the famed natural beauty of the Mountain State (“A Question” and “Locust Grove”). And in “This Far, And…”, the poet presents a Nietzschean protagonist: “The last good man [who] draws a line: / this far, and no farther” — who embodies the poverty and pain that both caused and resulted from the opioid epidemic, since in the end he is “no more a man / than any junkie / with a smile / and a needle / he swears / points true north.” Good and bad and hope commingle, as they must.
Harshman’s background also includes time at Yale Divinity School, and he has led workshops on poetry as prayer. It is not hard to recognize religious overtones, in the widest sense of “religious,” since he offers us an abundance of everything — life and death, nature and nurture.
As he writes in “A Dozen for Emily”: “the divine chaos / returns / our only partner.” Marc Harshman’s “Following the Silence” should rekindle in many a new passion to look, listen, learn and love.
Or as he writes in “The Picnic Table at Dusk,” there is “enough mystery to satisfy / any number of theologians and poets. /…just look / at your grandmother’s salt and pepper shakers, / how still they are, how reverent, fine, and perfect.”