Necessary.

Joy Williams remembers Harrison ...

This eye, the poor one, the bad one that rolled in its milky socket like a moon, was accomplice to his visions of commanding dreams as well as the dreams he dreamed awake. It’s a good eye to have for a poet. Necessary in fact, though many don’t have it and can’t perceive the loss.

Jim described his poems as “flowers for the void,” writing them made him “soar along a foot / from the ground.” The super-masculine tough-guy selves, the reckless gourmands and intellectual wild men of the woods and prairies who populated his famous fictions were only a feather’s breadth remove from the genuinely bold, larger-than-life article. So it is that there is still amazement among his readers that he wrote poetry, that he felt that only in poetry had he found “the right pen” to write what he wanted to say.