West Virginia University - News and Information Services
Scholarly Press Publishes James Harms' New Poetry Collection
James Harms, an associate professor of English in West Virginia University’s Eberly College of Arts and Sciences, has had his third full-length collection of poetry, Quarters, published by the prestigious Carnegie Mellon University Press. His poems, essays, and short stories have appeared in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Antioch Review, Denver Quarterly, The Gettysburg Review, Triquarterly, Ploughshares, The American Poetry Review, and many other literary journals.
"I’ve always written poems, since childhood, and I’ve always found it a necessary activity," said Harms, director of the English Department’s creative writing program.
Quarters, a collection of 25 poems, has been in progress for nearly a decade. Beginning in 1994, Harms spent three years writing the poems for his book, with the first 12 coming in the first three months.
He began writing this collection as an attempt at something new. His wife gave him an old composition tablet, an antique journal used for taking notes in class, that
she found in the basement of a house that she had previously owned. This is where the creative process began.
"I just wanted to do something different in this particular journal, something special. So, I decided to write some still life, poems that didn’t rely on the first person voice that I’d become quite comfortable with," Harms said.
Inspired to write something different, he wrote three still life poems. Then, he noticed a common thread.
"The first three happened to have coins in them, quarters, though this wasn’t intentional," Harms said. "Instead of editing out this repetition, I decided to go with it, exactly the opposite of what I’d normally do."
A few poems later, a concept was born.
"That will probably never happen again, at least I hope not. It’s hard to write poems with even the mildest of blueprints in front of you," Harms said.
Harms has been named a WVU Benedum Distinguished Scholar and the 1999 Professor of the Year for West Virginia by the Carnegie Foundation and the Council for Support and Advancement of Education. Harms is joined on the creative writing faculty by several other writers who have received university, state, and national awards for their teaching and for their writing of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. The English Department offers the state’s only M.F.A. program in creative writing.
Office: (304) 293-6997