"With a clear unsentimental lens on the past, Harp's smart and captivating poems dissect the remnants of time and what grief charges us with daily. Lyrically powerful and unique in their stark American landscape, these vibrating poems serve as ropes that pull us back into the river and out again towards a safer shore. Ada Limón, author of Bright Dead Things: Poems
 "In this poignant collection, the perilous imperative to mark one's life runs up against the expanding blanks of memory and of the language in which we resign ourselves to recover it. Beneath the hum and penance of the imaginable world and the loneliness of the unimaginable one, these poems weather." Kimberly Johnson, author of Uncommon Prayer
"Harp transcribes and translates the world (and the otherworldly) into all its complexity. When he turns his keen attention to the ordinary, it transmutes before our eyes into the miraculous. Spirit Under Construction is beautifully strange and prescient, formally deft and subtle." Eric Pankey, author of Crow-Work

Spirit Under Construction

Literature & Fiction

Harp, Jerry

Poetry

NeoPoiesis Press, LLC

Constant Motion: Ongian Hermeneutics and the Shifting Ground of Early Modern Understanding (Hampton Press Communication)

"Constant Motion" complicates the idea that European consciousness has shifted, from the ancient world to the modern era, from an oral/aural to a largely visualist mode. While not denying the reality of a macro-level shift in the tradition of the schools to a metaphor of knowing as seeing clearly and distinctly, Harp emphasizes that acts of knowing are, like politics, always local. On the local level, cognition must engage with a variety of senses, which exert their force in metaphor. It is only by a rustling and reconfiguring of sense metaphors that human discourse gains any legitimate purchase on actuality. Further, it is only by this constant motion of the senses and their metaphors that the broader shift in consciousness has worked. A singular focus on only one sense leaves cognition too impoverished to be of value. Harp anchors his analysis in the writing of Walter Ong, which he brings up to date with recent work on the complexities of writing and print in the early modern era. Emphasizing the constant motion of sense metaphors of cognition, Harp provides readings of Shakespeare's "Hamlet", Aemilia Lanyer's "Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum", and Descartes' "Meditations on First Philosophy". This study demonstrates that literary and philosophical traditions remain on the move in no small measure because of the shifts of sense metaphors in learned discourse. This work will be of interest to literary scholars and students of the early modern period, as well as scholars of media ecology, communications, and the history of consciousness.

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

Hampton Pr

Constant Motion complicates the idea that European consciousness has shifted, from the ancient world to the modern era, from an oral/aural to a largely visualist mode. While not denying the reality of a macro-level shift in the tradition of the schools to a metaphor of knowing as seeing clearly and distinctly, Harp emphasizes that acts of knowing are, like politics, always local. On the local level, cognition must engage with a variety of senses, which exert their force in metaphor. It is only by a rustling and reconfiguring of sense metaphors that human discourse gains any legitimate purchase on actuality. Further, it is only by this constant motion of the senses and their metaphors that the broader shift in consciousness has worked. A singular focus on only one sense leaves cognition too impoverished to be of value. Harp anchors his analysis in the writing of Walter Ong, which he brings up to date with recent work on the complexities of writing and print in the early modern era. Emphasizing the constant motion of sense metaphors of cognition, Harp provides readings of Shakespeare's ""Hamlet"", Aemilia Lanyer's ""Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum"", and Descartes' ""Meditations on First Philosophy"". This study demonstrates that literary and philosophical traditions remain on the move in no small measure because of the shifts of sense metaphors in learned discourse. This work will be of interest to literary scholars and students of the early modern period, as well as scholars of media ecology, communications, and the history of consciousness.

When Donald Justice wrote in “On a Picture by Burchfield” that “art keeps long hours,” he might have been describing his own life. Although he early on struggled to find a balance between his life and art, the latter became a way of experiencing his life more deeply. He found meaning in human experience by applying traditional religious language to his artistic vocation. Central to his work was the translation of the language of devotion to a learned American vernacular. Art not only provided him with a wealth of intrinsically worthwhile experiences but also granted rich and nuanced ways of experiencing, understanding, and being in the world. For Donald Justice—recipient of some of poetry’s highest laurels, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Bollingen Prize, and the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry—art was a way of life.
Because Jerry Harp was Justice’s student, his personal knowledge of his subject—combined with his deep understanding of Justice’s oeuvre—works to remarkable advantage in For Us, What Music? Harp reads with keen intelligence, placing each poem within the precise historical moment it was written and locating it in the context of the literary tradition within which Justice worked. Throughout the text runs the narrative of Justice’s life, tying together the poems and informing Harp’s interpretation of them. For Us, What Music? grants readers a remarkable understanding of one of America’s greatest poets.

For Us, What Music?: The Life and Poetry of Donald Justice

Humor & Entertainment

University Of Iowa Press

This collection engages with traditional forms and carries out various kinds of experimentation centering on the physical meaning of life. The poems confront issues of cognitive, spiritual and erotic experience, and address longing and desire in the material world. The Creature yearns for new language in which we can all more truly live.

Creature

Salt Pub

"Urban Flowers, Concrete Plains" takes up where Jerry Harp's Creature (Salt Publishing, 2003) left off. These are the poems of the Creature, wandering through the world, seeking meaning he fears he'll never find. These poems experiment with various language and mental states, as well as a variety of poetic forms.

Urban Flowers, Concrete Plains

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Harp, Jerry. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Harp, Jerry

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Harp, Jerry. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Spirit Under Construction

Constant Motion: Ongian Hermeneutics and the Shifting Ground of Early Modern Understanding (Hampton Press Communication)

Constant Motion: Ongian Hermeneutics and the Shifting Ground of Early Modern Understanding (Hampton Press Communication)

For Us, What Music?: The Life and Poetry of Donald Justice

Creature

Urban Flowers, Concrete Plains