I am not interested in going to a lily white heaven. I want greasefire and the boogie. I want nights to yawn into forever, dark bars and road lightning. I want Professor Longhair, endless cases of beer and a woman's waist curled up against mine. Always the groove. Until then, I won't ask for much. Just a few good nights and the chance to keep reading Jim Harrison's Songs of Unreason.

Songs of Unreason, Harrison's latest collection of poetry, is a wonderful defense of the possibilities of living. Far from the pop psychology, woe-is-me memoir, or thinly veiled self-help prose gracing so much of this nation's poetry, Harrison's collection is our last connection to the Romantics and Whitman. His lines come off like the bastard child of Keats and Dogen. His are hard won lines, but never bitter, just broken in and thankful for the chance to have seen it all. In the same way that Zorba grips the window frame and yells out to the dawn just before he dies, Harrison's Songs of Unreason fights against the stale, flattened living championed by so many in this country. In Bird's-Eye View he writes:

You walk through doorways in the mind you can't walk out
then one day you discover that you've learned to fly.
From up here the water is still blue, the grass green
and the wind that buoys me is 12 billion years old.

Mortality tinges these lines as it does so many of the poems in the collection. Harrison is not the aged poet lamenting an oncoming doom or crying over regrets. Instead, we are left to understand it is a simple grace, and a holy moment, to be kissed by a twelve billion year old wind and we had better take notice of it. After all, "we were born to be moving water not ice" (from River I). To breathe but once and major in marketing? To use the missionary position day after day? Fuck! Walking down the street is enough to boil your blood—if you still can feel it surging through your veins. In a country of Wonderbread poets, where people consume increasing amounts of industrially grown flesh, Paleo-diet their way into bastardized "yoga" classes that water down another culture's philosophy and beauty; where music is televised competition of little talent and a willingness to be a pawn of advertising gurus; where The Food Network, once a bastion of great cooking shows and excellent chefs, is now home to butter-dowsed Southern stereotypes and bleached blonde egotistical freaks, none of whom can cook; a country where beneath the new editor-in-chief Bon Appetit sold its soul months ago to faddish hipsterism and name dropping—if the goddamn magazine writes the word "Brooklyn" one more time I will sink the whole fucking borough into the sea—we need hero-poets like Harrison all the more. He writes like the logical culmination of Bryon, Keats and Shelley's passions, Whitman's engrossed celebration and understanding of all sides of existence. Harrison writes without any of the restraint we see many American poets strangling themselves with (though at times one wishes they would restrain themselves so much as to not write at all). Songs of Unreason looks outward as much as it looks inward and in many cases, uses the self to judge and understand the world around him. In She Harrison writes:

At fourteen green was green and women
were the unreachable birds of night,
their fronts and backs telling us
we might not be alone in the universe,
their voices singing that the earth is female.

We are better for having read these lines. While in a few of the poems Harrison veers dangerously close to prose, even with these minor flaws the collection is not marred in the least. It is not an exhibition of a poet lacking control over technique. Instead, Harrison's veering toward prose is more a poet with much to say bursting at the seams and struggling to find a form to contain it all. He is a poet who understands the senses. Allowing each sense to develop, to open itself, adds to the totality of being in miraculous ways. This is the lesson learned from Whitman. Whitman's celebration of the body is less a homoerotic pean than it is an extended ode to the sheer joy of being. Of feeling sweat run down the back, the pull of muscles, the surging of blood. It is the electricity of lips touching after great food has filled the belly and wine ignited the nerves. It is the sun against the face, or the crisp winter air piercing the lungs on a run. Harrison's struggle is to capture the electricity of being and to probe all its facets. He writes a rhythmic line, a howling like the baritone saxophones barreling along Little Richard's music:

The birds are confounded by this rare snow
so I go out with a spatula to clean the feeders,
turn on the radio not to the world's wretched news
but to the hot, primary colors of cantina music,
the warbles and shrieks of love, laughter, and bullets (from Desert Snow).

The repetition of the "o" and "w" sounds in these lines carry the moaning, the bottom end thumping, in waves. The moans rise and fall, then get punctuated by the horn charts Harrison plays with his last two lines: the hard crunch of "colors" and "cantina," the pierce of "shrieks." All of this collapses on "bullets," where the opening up of the day, in all its sound and possibility—even death—expands outward.

The longest poem in the collection, Suite of Unreason, is broken up into in verses, each on the left hand page throughout the book. Koan-like in their unfolding, they serve as thematic counterpoint to the other poems in the collection. At best, certain stanzas from the suite match the following poem perfectly, giving the reader a deeper insight into both the suite and the other poem. While fine to read by itself (it takes on different shades read alone), the suite's stanzas are best enjoyed as they are presented. It shows Harrison to be one of our best practitioners of the Zen moment.

While Harrison can accept mortality ("Inside are memories of earth: / corn pollen, a bear claw, an umbilical cord. / If they exist they help me ride the dark / heavens of this life. Such fragile wings."), he will also interrogate the great river of being that courses through our cells and calls from the mouths of birds:

The body wins another little argument
with doom. You wake to a crisp, clear morning
and you're definitely not dead. The golden light
flows down the mountain across the creek. A little vodka
and twelve hours of sleep. Nature detonates your mind
with the incalculable freshness of the new day.

Harrison's poems, as all great poems must, contain layers built upon deep inquiry. Songs of Unreason is marked by a plurality of vision that rewards repeated reading. His is not the all-technique-nothing-to-say school of poetry, nor is he interested in experiment for experiment's sake. Instead, we find poems grounded in the poet/seer tradition, the wandering soul recording the struggle for all to read. Where everyone else has chosen the "reasonable" path of cushy academic jobs in Sweet Tit, Kansas to write sinewless verse, or has stood in line to await a pat on the back from the culture of fear, Harrison, no more so than now, has defiantly stood far away from those scenes, carving out life on his own terms. But as Songs of Unreason asks us, how else should we live? From Brutish:

We are parts. What part are you now?
The shit of the world has to be taken
care of every day. You have to choose
your part after you take care of the shit.
I've chosen birds and fish, the creatures
whose logic I wish to learn and live.

Many of our current poets delve into their pasts or psyches to find a unique event to write about. Because they have chosen not to live truly and vividly, these poets must dredge forth a piece of their past and attempt to expand its meaning. In too many cases it takes on a woe-is-me self horror, a false expansion of the event to show individuality. They are like so many others, just screws in a machine they are too afraid to fight and so their writing appears as if they are attempting to prove they actually exist: See! Look at me! Look what happened to me! This accounts for the predominance of confessional/memoiristic poetry today. Unlike them, Harrison shows us what matters most is not the uniqueness of the event but the uniqueness of vision.

In The Witch of Atlas Shelley wrote "Men scarcely know how beautiful fire is-- / Each flame of it as a precious stone / Dissolved in ever-moving light, and this / Belongs to each and all who gaze upon." We will know the beauty of fire better—though we will never understand it—the more we stick our noses in the earth and breath its scent. We will know fire better by taking Jim Harrison's Songs of Unreason with us into the backcountry, or by stuffing it into our glove compartments to take along into the bar. However, the book is not the answer. Rather, it is a clear window into one man's singing. Harrison is well aware of the ever moving light and is bold enough to try to inscribe it for us. Timid poets write of teenage loss and flaccid body parts, great poets create and explore myth. They dance. Harrison dances and explores mightily. It is a mistake to not read Songs of Unreason.

Tonight, I'm going to open my windows, put my stereo speakers in them, turn Canned Heat's Live at Topanga Corral all the way up, go outside and lay back in the night-dew grass with a bourbon and a doobie and boogie to the exhalations of the stars. I'll re-read sections of Songs of Unreason in the moonlight and remember that in the face of intolerable aggression and state fascism singing "songs of unreason" is our last defense.

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