View the video of Seven Times Salt’s October 2, 2022 concert honoring Scott Harney and his poetry
Watch The Blood of San Gennaro, video by JennyMae Kho, readings of Scott Harney’s poems by Megan Marshall, Alondra Bobadilla, David Stang, Andrea Cohen, Lloyd Schwartz, and Blake Campbel
Megan Marshall and Lloyd Schwartz read Scott Harney’s poems
Salem Athenaeum, January 14, 2021
Scott Harney (1955-2019) was a practicing poet who, aside from a few early publications in the Somerville Community News, did not publish during his lifetime, leaving a significant body of work to be discovered by readers after his death. He grew up in and around Boston, graduating from Charlestown High School and Harvard College. His literary influences include Robert Lowell and Jane Shore, with whom he studied at Harvard in the 1970s, as well as Richard Hugo and Philip Levine.
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Altar boy on Easter Sunday, 1967, 60 Winthrop Street. “My family’s first apartment in Charlestown was on the second floor of a brick building around the corner from Bunker Hill Monument.”
Rebel at Charlestown High, dressed for anti-war demonstration on the Boston Common, ca. 1970, Old Landing Way. “We moved to ‘Charles Newtowne,’ a new federally subsidized housing development built across the street from the old city project. . . . Vandalism and neglect soon brought the area down to its current popular name: the new project.”
On the job with the Somerville Youth Program, early 1980s, East Somerville Community School. “You told them, ‘Be like me.’ / They said, ‘We are.’”
“When Scott Harney died in 2019 at the age of sixty-three, his partner, the biographer Megan Marshall, uncovered a trove of poems that spanned forty years. All but a handful were unpublished. . . . Harney was a startling love poet, working in the vein of Philip Larkin and George Meredith to locate a version of tenderness beyond skepticism . . . the pleasures of private life competing with the pull of the world beyond. Harney chose not to publish most of his poems or to join the academy, working instead in social services and later in law. But his poems have a singularity that will find, in their audience, their full and future measure.” —Heather Treseler, Harvard Review
“‘I love this life because there is no other,’ Scott Harney writes in his first (and posthumous) book. For all their flirtation with transcendence, these luminous poems never relinquish their foothold on the physical world. Turning from them ‘we can face / the bright flat wash of just another day.’” –Blake Campbell, Molecule 3
“A posthumous collection of Harney’s poetry gathers his work — wise, honed, and richly felt — which was almost entirely unpublished during his life; he died, at age 63, last year. The Blood of San Gennaro offers us a body of work that is clear-eyed, melancholic, that vibrates with the mystery under the matter-of-fact.” –Nina MacLaughlin, The Boston Globe
“’Poetry has its own time,’ says Melnyczuk. Sometimes, writers’ works only coalesce after they are gone, and they ‘wind up startling and shocking the whole literary community into awareness. Scott’s poems have the power to do that.’” –from “The Lost Poems of Scott Harney,” by Cordelia Miller, Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, May 10, 2020
“This posthumous poetry collection, gathered by Harney’s partner, Megan Marshall (herself a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer), includes the stark 1981 essay, ‘Getting Along in Charlestown,’ about Boston’s racial divisions. Although Harney ranged widely, local readers will understandably gravitate to what he did poetically with raw material drawn from Somerville and Revere Beach.” –Harvard Magazine
“This precious retrieval of Scott Harney’s voice, like a miraculous liquefaction, brings back what might have been lost; a litany of heartbreak and clear-eyed compassion; perfect words fashioned out of writerly integrity and poetry’s dogged refusal to die.” —James Carroll, author of The Cloister
“Here is that rare thing, a selected poems that is an introduction to the work of a brilliant poet. Harney’s poems in San Gennaro beat with a piercing expansive sense of place, and of the writer finding and losing and finding his place. With passion and cunning, he produced a life-loving heartbreaking body of work.” —Gail Mazur, author of Land’s End: New and Selected Poems
“Just below the surface of these unforgettable and important poems is the sense that everything is allegorical—each poem the outward manifestation of some inner spiritual struggle or adventure. In Scott Harney’s field of vision, there’s always a third dimension. Now we can treasure all their dimensions.” —Lloyd Schwartz, poet and Pulitzer Prize-winning critic
“Harney’s poems unfold with pageantry and restraint, tenderness, grit, and longing. There’s beauty here, in abundance, and it’s no less beautiful for being ruin-bound.” —Andrea Cohen, author of Nightshade
“Scott Harney’s posthumous collection, brilliantly edited and introduced by Megan Marshall, is an entirely unforeseen and beautiful gift. Forty-five years after I read Scott Harney’s first poems as his teacher, this book provides a startling recognition of his original gift—poems passionate, intense, and heartwrenching.” —Jane Shore, author of That Said
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