In 1978, Marc Harshman completed an MA in the Department of English, and began a career of teaching, writing, and making West Virginia his home. The feelings are mutual, as Harshman is now the state's seventh Poet Laureate. Having taught middle school for many years—at the Sandy Hill School, a three-room country school—Harshman is very much attuned to the lives and communities surrounding him and his wife, Cheryl Ryan, in Moundsville, W. Va. As Poet Laureate, he teams up with West Virginia Public Radio to host the monthly literary show "The Poetry Break." He's authored over a dozen children's picture books, including the forthcoming Fallingwater, which he wrote with Anna Smucker; illustrated by LeUyam Pham, the book celebrating the famous Western Pennsylvania architectural beauty will be published this fall by Roaring Brook/Macmillan.
To be a public poet means to embrace the daily lives of one's neighbors. And if you're a public poet in wild, wonderful West Virginia, those neighbors include the natural world. In Harshman's second full-length collection of poems, Believe What You Can (Vandalia/WVU, 2016), memories of a childhood in Indiana are superimposed upon an adult life infused with the cardinals "warming up their spring song, / tossing it between the branches of a slender hemlock," as well as "insects big as a pinhead." Being a public poet also means making poetry accessible to those who may be shy about approaching it. Harshman conducts poetry and storytelling workshops for older and younger writers, in school and community settings. "I want to do everything I can to support my fellow writers throughout the state—not just poets, but prose writers as well, both fiction and nonfiction. Also, I feel like it's my duty to spread the net even wider to do what I can to support artists of all kinds throughout the state. Although we are a small state, it's hard for me to imagine any state with a greater pool of accomplished artists—painters, sculptors, musicians, dancers, as well as, of course, writers," Harshman said in an interview with Zach Davis for Fluent Magazine.
Most importantly, Harshman's role as a public poet involves bearing witness: to the natural beauty of mountain life but also to economic struggle; to the stories that threaten to break a person, as well as the stories of possibility. This latter is exemplified in the poem, "Learning to Read," in Believe What You Can:
Learning to Read
Inside the forgotten room, a white sky lifts
its shoulders above craggy promontories
of book-lined shelves. A girl follows a string
of thread between shadows of ink. The clock
has lost its way and the dog sleeps
below an arching forest of mullioned windows.
It is not that anyone still waits.
The story began long ago and what they call adventure
is just this place, this day where the new sky begins
to mist over with tears and the lake's hissing surf
repeats for you, generously, what you already know.
Take heart. This room was once yours,
and you were promised a key. It will be found
and fit both the hand and the lock.
There is no trickery in this. You need only wait.
Perhaps tomorrow this very day will be waiting
for you, and through these same windows,
you will watch orange birds
stitch these green libraries
back into song.
—Ellen McGrath Smith