Writer, poet Jim Harrison is a determined ‘outsider’

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• Editor’s Note:

  Jim Harrison died Saturday at the age of 78 at his home in Arizona, his publisher confirmed. Watch our segment above for more on the celebrated author, who wrote "Legends of the Fall," "Dalva" and more than 30 other books in his lifetime.

• JIM LEHRER:

  Finally tonight, ravens, rattlesnakes, poetry, and a writer named Jim Harrison. Jeffrey Brown has our story.

• JEFFREY BROWN:

  Jim Harrison is a walker…

• JIM HARRISON, Poet:

  What are you doing?

• JEFFREY BROWN:

  … these days with his dogs, Zilpha (ph) and Mary. He's also a hunter, a fisherman, a gourmand, and, as he once said, not incidentally, a writer and poet.

• JIM HARRISON:

  Today, the Gods speak in drunk talk, pulling at a heart too old for this walk, a cold, windy day kneeling at the mouth of the snake den where they killed 800 rattlers.

• JEFFREY BROWN:

  Most of Harrison's 32 books, including "Legends of the Fall," "Dalva," and "Returning to Earth," have been set in the sparsely populated areas he knows well: northern Michigan, the sand hills of Nebraska, the Arizona-Mexico border, and here in the beautiful Paradise Valley near Livingston, Montana, where he now lives much of the year.

• JIM HARRISON:

  Other than fishing and a little bird-hunting, all I do is write.

• JEFFREY BROWN:

  Harrison is a determined outsider, in all senses.

• JIM HARRISON:

  You really get a hang of the country, rather than be stuck in what I call the geo-piety of the Eastern Seaboard.

• JEFFREY BROWN:

  Careful, because that's where I am.

• JIM HARRISON:

  I know it, but you deserve it, too. But it does happen.

• JEFFREY BROWN:

  Now 71, Jim Harrison is a Falstaffian figure: blind in his left eye from a childhood accident, chain-smoking his American Spirit cigarettes, part wild man, part cultivated literary lion, who peppers his speech with talk of birds and great poets of the past.

  It's poetry, in fact, that has remained Harrison's first love. His new collection is called "In Search of Small Gods."

• JIM HARRISON:

  You sense those spirits in certain, often remote places, whether it's the spirit of animals, the spirit of trees. So those are the small gods.

• JEFFREY BROWN:

  And they appear throughout these poetry, so it sounds like they're coming from the walks.

• JIM HARRISON:

  I think that's true, you know, because sometimes you have little breakthroughs. I've known this group of ravens for 19 years, for instance, Chihuahuan ravens, Mexican ravens. And last year, several times, they began to take walks with me.

• JEFFREY BROWN:

  But then you put them into poetry?

• JIM HARRISON:

  Yes, then you do. You know, what is it that Blake said? How do we know but that every bird who cuts the airy way is an immense world of delight close to our senses five, that perception? What is possible in the natural world?