Primitive

Janice N. Harrington writes poetry and children's books. She grew up in Alabama and Nebraska, and both those settings, especially rural Alabama, figure largely in her writing. Her first book of poetry, Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone (2007), won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize from BOA Editions and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She is also the author of The Hands of Strangers: Poems from the Nursing Home (BOA Editions, 2011). Her children's books, The Chicken Chasing Queen of Lamar County (2007) and Going North (2004), both from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, have won many awards and citations, including a listing among TIME Magazine's top 10 children's books of 2007 and the Ezra Jack Keats Award from the New York Public Library in 2005. A Cave Canem Fellow, she is also the winner of a 2007 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship for Poetry. Harrington's poetry appears regularly in American literary magazines. She has worked as a public librarian and as a professional storyteller, performing at festivals around the country, including the National Storytelling Festival. She currently teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

"In her innovative and incisive third book of poems, Primitive, Janice N. Harrington shows us the great revelations possible in the intersections of history and poetry. These elegantly-crafted poems explore the aftermath of war, Jim Crow America, and American visual art through the life and art of the painter Horace H. Pippin. This collection is both a historical reflection and an ekphrastic object, masterfully rendered from found texts, paintings, notebooks, and the ephemera surrounding the painter and his work. It is through Pippin's pictures and pigments, both paint and skin, that we see the complex beauty of the artist--a beauty that announces itself in bold colors in spite of the bigger machines of oppression that so often worked in opposition to his artistry." --Adrian Matejka "In Primitive, the artist Horace H. Pippin is less a lens and more a prism through which Janice N. Harrington watches humanity with a careful eye. Harrington's skill with image is undeniable, and her ability to intertwine ekphrasis, biography, history, and interior landscape results in a text that is much more than a book of poems without ever ceasing to be a moving and radiant example of one." --Jamaal May "This collection not only recalls specific paintings by Pippin but returns to the ideas of satisfaction emerging in the process of painting, and painting exactly what he saw. These two recurring ideas lend weight to his experiences as a veteran during the Jim Crow era. Harrington gracefully honors Pippin's words and work through her spare lines, strong sense of narrative, and subtle sonic repetitions." -- Publishers Weekly

• I Now Why Do I Want to Get Up So High1Picture of the Poet and Horace H. Pippin Before the Perigee2II If a Man Knows Nothing But Hard Times 3A Primitive Portrait 4III I’ve Seen Men Die 6Like This, Like That 7Night March, 369th Infantry 8A Canel 9Finding the Words 10Shrapnel11The Speller12Form and Shapes13Fire16Hard17Horace Pippin’s Red18IV War Brought Out All the Art in Me 20Tell My Heart21Losing the Way, 193022Prophet23Surface Decoration24The Subtlety of Blue 25V You Have Requested an Explanation of the Picturr26Domino Players, 194327The Satisfactions of a Limited View28Topoanalysis29Victorian Interior, 1945 31193932The Trapper Returning Home, 1941 33Lilies, 194134In a Painted Room35Why, Oh Why, the Doily?36White Flesh41The Warped Table, a Still Life, 194042Birmingham Meeting House43Harmonizing44Contemplation, the Art of46Newly Discovered Portrait of America’s First Black President 48by Horace H. Pippin (1888-1946) VI Now I Know How You Feel Alone49Erotica50Definitions51Commitment54My Wife Is Not Home at This Time55VII Then a Hand Lightly Layed on Me. Then a Still Voice56Blessing57Notes58Acknowledgements 64