Quarterly report

Last night poet James Harms explained why he wrote a series of third-person poems for his 2001 collection Quarters: "I had gotten too conversant with the first person and I was getting lazy," he said. "I thought I should learn something new about writing."

I learned something new about reading over the summer when I read four poetry collections searching for poems to use in my fall classes so my students would have some familiarity with the poems before the poet visited campus. I read quickly, seeking content appropriate for each class, and I had forged ahead five or six poems into Quarters before I noticed some spare change jangling around in each poem, and then I had to go back to the beginning to confirm my suspicion: yes, in a collection of 25 poems titled Quarters, each poem contains the 25-cent coin.

My obliviousness suggests that I ought to have been reading more carefully, but it also indicates how subtly Harms drops the quarters into the poems. Harms gave himself a very strict set of limits, from the number of poems (25) to the point of view (third person) to the number of words in the titles (one) to the necessity of including quarters in the poems, but none of the poems feel forced or artificial. The quarters appear in ordinary places--in a jukebox, on a sidewalk, under a girl's pillow after she loses a tooth--but the anticipation leads us to receive each quarter as a gift, a sparkling coin plinking down on the counter before our eyes.

My favorite Harms poems come from other collections, particularly Freeways and Aqueducts, in which "Elegy as Evening, as Exodus" reminds us that "The Pacific is nothing like its name. / For one thing, there are no silences, / despite the palm trees leaning into stillness." Halfway through that poem an ineffable silence utters itself in the blank space between stanzas when "I heard a name escape its word, // the wind between waves," a moment that takes my breath away to breathe the unspeakable silence.

But despite that, I find myself recommending Quarters to anyone seeking an introduction to Harms. All of his collections are good (and the cumulative effect is greater than the sum of its parts), but reading Quarters is like finding money on the street--no matter how smudged and battered the coin, it's impossible to resist bending over and picking it up.