Poet Roy Lee Harmon died on April 7, 1981, at age 80. The founder of the West Virginia Poetry Society, Harmon was born in Boone County, grew up in Danville, and graduated from Scott District School. He attended Morris Harvey College, which is now the University of Charleston, before becoming a reporter and eventually city editor for the Raleigh Register newspaper in Beckley.
In 1937, Governor Homer Holt appointed Harmon poet laureate of West Virginia. He was succeeded in that role by James Lowell McPherson in 1943 but was reappointed by Governor Clarence Meadows in 1946. He held the post for the next 14 years, when he was replaced by Cabell County’s Vera Andrews Harvey, who served only one year. In 1961, Governor Wally Barron again named Harmon poet laureate. Harmon was given poet laureate emeritus status by Governor Jay Rockefeller in 1979. Overall, he served as the state’s poet laureate for 38 years under four governors.
He also served four intermittent terms in the state legislature. In addition to his writing and political career, Roy Lee Harmon was a television host in Oak Hill during the 1950s.
West Virginia’s poet laureate Marc Harshman won the 20th Annual Blue Lynx Prize. Winning the national poetry competition led to the publication this year of his latest compilation of poetry entitled “Woman in Red Anorak.” Harshman spoke from his home in Wheeling.
Q: What is the Blue Lynx Prize?
The competition has been going on for several decades. I believe the press started in New England. Christopher Howell, a fine American poet himself, is the editor and director of the press and the prize. I submitted this manuscript probably 18 months ago. And the prize was, I think, initially announced late last year and publication and happened this autumn.
Q: Tell us a little bit about “Woman in Red Anorak.”
This has been a very interesting experience, to have this collection of poems come out. As you know, I had a book out from WVU just two years ago, give or take, and my collections usually don’t come this quickly. And I was doing a reading in Charleston from this new book “Woman in Red Anorak” maybe in October, and I realized suddenly, I’d never had this experience. Even though they’re my poems, I’m thinking, ‘Who wrote these? They’re so new.’ Most of the poems in my previous poetry collections have been around a while — I knew them inside and out, and I had read them before. Many of these I’d never read aloud before, and they were still very new to me. On the one hand, quite frankly, it was a little unsettling, on the other hand, it was really exciting.
As I have gotten older, I think I understand the process behind my writing poems. I realized that a certain poet or a couple of poets will get under my skin, and I know they will just drive the writing for weeks and months on end.
If you were to read Tomas Gösta Tranströmer — who’s the Swedish poet who’s been under my skin for a couple of years now, and whose influence I feel in this work — I don’t know if anybody else could tell I was reading Tranströmer. But I know that he inspired at least stylistically, tonally some of these poems. Several of these poems owe a debt — a personal debt anyway — to this great Swedish poet.
Already.mp3
Hear Marc Harshman read "Already" from his book "Woman in Red Anorak."
Q: Can you tell us more about the inspiration of Tranströmer within this poem?
That’s hard. You’re trying to suggest the story but without over telling it. Trying to give the mood. There’s a sense of foreboding in the poem and yet there’s something also light-hearted and delightful. You know something has gone horribly wrong in the human sphere, but for the mice — hey this is a gravy train! Here’s this sill, we chewed in, we’re going to get into the house, there’s abandoned birthday a birthday cake and it’s all ours!
I don’t know what the final resolution is for somebody reading this, but it gave me pleasure.
And I like discovery. I want a poem to be something that makes one make someone go, ‘Oh, that’s curious. That’s interesting.’ And that can that can be to the dark side of things or to the light side of things. Or in this case, maybe even a little of both.
Violets.mp3
BONUS: Listen to Marc Harshman read his poem "Violet" from "Woman in Red Anorak."
Raised in Covington, Virginia, and Hinton West Virginia, Jeff Mann is an author of novels, essays, short fiction, a memoir, and poems.
A significant portion of his work examines the LGBTQ experience, especially as witnessed in Appalachia. He’s won many awards for his work including a Rainbow Award for Purgatory: A Novel of the Civil War, as well as the John Preston Short Fiction Award and many others.
Mann is currently associate professor in creative writing at Virginia Tech.
“There was a vividness of the language, concreteness of detail, lyrical, darkly erotic and compelling poems,” Harshman said of Mann's poetry.
Robert Morgan is a native of the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. Essayist, novelist, teacher, short-story author, poet, and “an unassuming…
Robert Morgan is a native of the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. Essayist, novelist, teacher, short-story author, poet, and “an unassuming gentleman and a friend to artists everywhere,” Harshman said. His novel Gap Creek was a selection of the Oprah Book Club and a New York Times Best Seller.
Featured here:
Blackberries
Plank Road
Blue Ridge
Family
The Flying Snake
These selections are pulled from Groundwork (Gnomon Press, Frankfort, KY, 1979) and from The Strange Attractor: New and Selected Poems (Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 2004).
"He's able to tell a story so well," Marc Harshman said of poet Robert Morgan.
West Virginia Poet Laureate Marc Harshman delivers the poetry of his predecessor in this Poetry Break. Irene McKinney was a remarkable woman, greatly…
West Virginia Poet Laureate Marc Harshman delivers the poetry of his predecessor in this Poetry Break. Irene McKinney was a remarkable woman, greatly admired as a poet and teacher, ” Harshman said. “She was the kind of poet who could accomplish in a few seconds that deep trust with her readers that compel them to follow her words.”
In this Poetry Break we hear three selection s from Vivid Companion,published by Vandalia Press of West Virginia University:
West Virginia University Press is set to publish West Virginia Poet Laureate Marc Harshman’s latest collection of poetry: Believe What You Can in October 2016. And the publishers are looking for help in choosing a cover for the book.
In Believe What You Can Harshman explores the struggle of having an awareness of the eventual death of all living things in four sections, each of which suggests a different coping strategy.
The cover contest includes a choice between three different covers.
Voting will be open until February 15. All three covers were designed by the press’s art director, Than Saffel.
Harshman was born in Indiana and came to West Virginia first to attend Bethany College. He later settled with his wife in the northern panhandle where he was a teacher for many years. He was appointed poet laureate by Governor Earl Ray Tomblin in May 2012 following the death of his predecessor, Irene McKinney, who served as poet laureate for 18 years.
Harshman has published several children’s books, and his last book of poetry, Green-Silver and Silent was well received by fans who found roughly thirty years of his poems under one cover. Harshman is featured on a new podcast from West Virginia Public Broadcasting called the Poetry Break, where he delivers poems of his own as well as other Appalachian poets’ work.