Marc Harshman, West Virginia Poet Laureate, shares insights into his poetic roots, his deep connection to the natural world, and the unexpected path  to becoming a celebrated writer, teacher, and advocate for the arts. With warmth and humility, he discusses the stories that shaped him, the value of regional identity, and his commitment to keeping his work fresh and true to the rhythms of lived experience.

Your early volume Turning Out the Stones (1983) appears to set the tone for other books in terms of a longing to be one with nature and the mystery of the natural world. Can you talk about your sense and value of the physical world in your poetry?

Curiously, I’ve never set out to write about the physical world, by which I think is meant the out-of-doors, nature writ green and, to varying degrees, wild. However, I can’t deny its presence in a large number of my poems. I was raised first on a farm and, when the farm was lost, we remained in the countryside where summer work continued to include farm labor of all sorts, like baling hay, shoveling manure, setting fence posts, etc. From the moment I left the house, whether as a boy or later as a teenager, most of this work I did with an open sky and fields all around me

The out-of-doors has always been a familiar place to me, and so perhaps I can count it a gift that I can be comfortable there, unafraid, and yet can at the same time recognize the sheer power of all that is so much more than my single, small, and mortal self. As I’ve said countless times, including in at least one children’s book, I loved those times when I’d sit with my father on the back porch and watch a thunderstorm roll up, watch its spidery lightning shake the darkness into light.

Your journey as a poet has followed a lovely road from theology school to university professor to teacher in a three-room schoolhouse to poet. Talk about that intellectual and creative journey—the different stages, twists and turns that led to your becoming West Virginia’s Poet Laureate.

I usually say that I became a writer because of the good example of my parents. They were not educated beyond high school, but they were avid readers, and our weekly trip to town from the farm for groceries was always, as well, a trip to the library. I learned to read by seeing my parents read. Secondly, I was often sick as a boy, so books kept me company. John McGahern, the wonderful Irish novelist and short story author, once said, “There are no days more special in childhood than those not lived at all, those days lost inside a favorite book.” I had many such lost days, and they shaped me. The third thing which I say with a certain glint in my eye is that a table turned me into an author—a dinner table, not so much my parents’ as my grandparents’. They lived close by, just down the road, and I spent much of my childhood with them. I remember that after the dinner dishes were cleared away from that table, we didn’t all go a million directions at once. For one thing, there was no television—good luck I now realize. Instead, we sat and talked. . . . I’d hear Grandpa talking about how his father had hunted the last wildcat to ever be hunted . . . maybe I’d hear Grandma talk about how her father had killed a black snake so long that when he strung it up over a telephone wire, it touched the ground on either side. I loved those kinds of stories! The award-winning and always impressive African-American children’s writer Virginia Hamilton once said: “All people are storytellers, and the most basic kind of tale-telling is gossip.” She didn’t mean the nasty kind of spiteful whispering, but the kind of talk that can deliver “a delicious story about [our] everyday lives, and when these tales are shaped and polished, passed from one hand to the other, from one generation to the other, they become a kind of folktale,” or as I like to say, simply a good story.

To jump way ahead and arrive at the start of my laureateship, I’ll share this memory. Irene McKinney, my wonderful predecessor, had died in early February 2012. I knew, of course, that someone would be replacing her, but I never dreamt it would be me. And to this day, I don’t know who was behind my selection, nor how it came about. Anyway, I was somewhere in central West Virginia teaching a workshop for young students when my mobile phone rang out with the tune from Indiana Jones. I was still unused to this rudimentary cell phone, a flip phone handed down to me from my teenage daughter. Embarrassed, I immediately “flipped” it off. Later, on my way to another school further downstate on a Friday afternoon, I rang the number left behind to discover it was a secretary for Governor Earl Ray Tomblin asking if I would be the next Poet Laureate of West Virginia! And as only I can do, I asked the polite young woman if I could perhaps think about it over the weekend and get back to her! My wife rightly asked me later what kind of idiot I thought I was, and I had no answer, only that I’ve got an instinctual mistrust of good news. Miraculously, when I called the governor’s office the following Monday and spoke with more enthusiasm and grace than I had previously, they kindly agreed to still let me have the position!

Can you share any additional thoughts about your work as a teacher, a poet, and a speaker/artist for the mountain state—and indeed, what are your thoughts about being the Appalachian Heritage Writer in Residence and 2024 State Common Read Author?

I am first of all deeply humbled to have been chosen as 2024’s Appalachian Heritage Writer and subsequently to see my poetry collection, Following the Silence, named as the adult selection for the One Book One West Virginia Read project. I am thrilled, as well, to see my children’s book co-authored with Anna Egan Smucker, Fallingwater: The Building of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Masterpiece, named as the young readers’ selection for this same project.

As the state’s poet laureate, I have from the beginning tried to support and, where I can, highlight not only our state’s fine poets, but writers of every genre, including most recently a FestivALL Authors Roundtable where I hosted three wonderful and active journalists from both print and electronic media. As time has passed, however, I’ve realized that in this small state I have a unique opportunity to highlight not only the literary arts but all the arts, and this I try to do whenever I have the opportunity, whether it be to salute a musician, a sculptor, a dancer, a painter—anyone who is working hard to express her or himself with and through the arts.

More specifically, as laureate, I have now been the host for many years of the aforementioned Authors Roundtable at FestivALL in Charleston, as well as host of the Poems While You Wait event held the following weekend, where I’ll be joined by a couple of other regional poets in hammering out poems on old manual typewriters. For five years, I’ve also hosted an annual poetry reading at FestivFALL held in October and featuring some of the premier poets from Appalachia, such as Maggie Anderson, Frank X Walker, and Jeff Worley. I also created and served as host for the Wheeling Poetry Series at the Ohio County Public Library. . . .

There is a freshness and originality about your poetry that you’ve been able to retain throughout the duties and demands of serving as West Virginia’s Poet Laureate. How do you keep that freshness intact?

I keep in mind William Stafford’s “Travelling Through the Dark” and do my best to “think hard for us all.”

I do my best to avoid all boxes and labels, including poet, including contemporary, and despite an engaged religious life, I try to avoid labels like spiritual and devout and pious, too. I’d even like to say I’d avoid Appalachian when it’s put in a box, as it sometimes can be, which is, of course, all the trickier as an outlier originally from Indiana. I’ve always thought what Wendell Berry had to say about regionalism was perfect:

“The regionalism I adhere to could be defined simply as local life aware of itself. It would tend to substitute for the myths and stereotypes of a region a particular knowledge of the life of the place one lives in and intends to continue to live in. It pertains to living as much as to writing, and it pertains to living before it pertains to writing. The motive of such regionalism is the awareness that local life is intricately dependent, for its quality but also for its continuance, upon local knowledge.”—from “The Regional Motive” in A Continuous Harmony (HBJ, 1972). I like that, and I would be pleased to see my work associated with that idea. In my best work I truly hope one finds that sense of “local life aware of itself.”

Additionally, I guess what I do and have always done is to do my best to go my own way, to read what I like for pleasure and for enrichment. Reading has always been more than half the key to my creative life, along with intentionally exposing myself to all the other arts, and with that, hoping to complement my own artistry. As for the reading specifically, I have to have a shot of Dickens or George Eliot, Shakespeare or Trollope every year but must have, as well, contemporary works that can jar me into thinking anew. Beyond that, whenever possible, I try to attend performances of live music, whether at the remarkable Wheeling Symphony or the equally remarkable Heritage Blues Festival, also in Wheeling. If I’m further afield, I try always to visit whatever museums I can in whatever city I may find myself in.

I still believe in making my work “new” as I once thought Ezra Pound was urging. The original Chinese from which Pound was borrowing and mis-translating actually meant something more like self-renewal, of which I’m always in need. Here I think of mixed-genre authors like Anne Carson, Jenny Erpenbeck, Tove Ditlevsen, and Kathleen Rooney—I need them, too. And then there are the rest of the arts, rock ‘n’ roll and Mozart, Henry Moore and Berthe Morisot, the Group of Seven, Le Six, Jan Gabarek or Thelonious Monk, and so I could go on listing what makes me not only scribble each day but also makes me want to get up in the morning.

Anything else? Any advice?

There are no bad poems, only poems wishing to be more, to be better, to be made whole. This takes work and the kind of revision that truly is a re-seeing, which may take months or even years. If your heart is called to it, you will get there.