“How do you know what to say before you know how to say it?”

I’ve read most of Harrison’s 21st century output, and loved it all – aside from Empty Space, which I DNFed at 60%, and resulted in a fairly lengthy analysis that might interest you if you’re interested in theorizing about literature, genre, deconstruction and science fiction.

I always mean to read something of his 20th century work – his debut appeared in 1971 – but he keeps on publishing new titles. This new book is new indeed: formally inventive. Part memoir, part short fiction, part poetics – with a focus on the latter.

Wish I Was Here contains lucid thoughts about the nature of writing, our culture at large and the function of speculative fiction; but also sharp ruminations on life, growing older and memory, amongst other things. It’s a wonderfully mixed and varied reading experience that frustrated me at times, but which is always imbued with a depth that seems bottomless, steeped in the experience of a life both centered and at the edge of things.

Harrison’s prose is not always easy, but whenever I reread a part I did not get at first, it turned out that I was to blame: there’s nothing in these pages that concentration can’t handle. Moreover, in each case, it turned out that Harrison had found an elegant combination of words to tentatively express something which is hard to express to begin with. Part of Wish I Was Here is about the ineffable – the mystery of life and existence – but not the ineffable as some storified narrative, not the miracle as some event in a causal chain.

So – I’m not ashamed to admit I didn’t get everything, but that doesn’t seem necessary, and I don’t mean this in the way some readers still enjoy certain poems while they don’t get them either. I think that would be the easy way out: approach parts of Wish I Was Here as prose poems. That’s not it. Harrison chiseled his latest from the tremendous amount of notes he made during his life, and it is obvious that some of these notes are private and as such incomprehensible to others – it does not make them poems, even though they are just as composed, contain metaphors too and sound A-okay when read out loud.

All and all, when I turned the final pages, the book had floored me – even though I hadn’t been aware that there was a fight going on. Not that Harrison is a boxer, a chess player or an existential wrestler. But it is about getting grip – grip while you sit, breathe and read, grip on a bunch of words that signal something.

After the jump, some more.

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