(2019) was selected from nearly 1000 poems that Harrison wrote. Harrison was aware that his poetry did not have mass appeal. He wrote that to draw attention to poetry "you would have to immolate a volunteer poet in an 751 BMW". He hoped that by choosing a small press like Copper Canyon Press, his poetry collections would stay in print. Dead Man's Float (2016), his final book of poetry, was published the year of his death. Influences Harrison began his study of poetry as a teenager and, as a young man, thought of himself as "a poet and nothing else". His earliest influences included Arthur Rimbaud, Richard Wright, and Walt Whitman. Harrison studied a multitude of English speaking poets including W.B. Yeats, Dylan Thomas, Robert Bly, and Robert Duncan. Harrison also cited a diverse set of influences from world poetry including: French Symbolist poetry; the Russian poets Georgy Ivanov and Vladimir Mayakovsky; the German poet Rainier Maria Rilke; and Chinese T'ang Dynasty poetry. He felt a particular affinity for the French poet Rene Char and the Russian poet Sergei Yesenin as they both came "from humble beginnings out in the country". Harrison's sequence of prose poems Letters to Yesenin (1973) was inspired by Yesenin. Harrison's practice of Zen Buddhism was important to his poetry, in part because it kept his "head from flying off". He became aware of Zen inspired poetry "by way of poets like Clayton Eshleman and Cid Corman, and most powerfully of all through Gary Snyder". He wrote that his long poem The Theory and Practice of Rivers (1986) was "basically Zennist". His sequence of 57 poems After Ikkyū (1996) is entitled after the Zen monk Ikkyū and was occasioned by his study of the Zen sages Tung-shan and Yunmen. Nature poetry Harrison's poetry often concerns itself with the natural world. Nonhuman creatures, especially birds and dogs, populate his poetry and wild, uncivilized places are frequent settings. Harrison's poetry "returns us to some level of understanding about our relationship to other life on the planet". Harrison wrote that his "intimacy with the natural world has been a substitute for religion, or a religion of another sort." The River, one of Harrison's later poems, is illustrative: Harrison biographies and interviews In 2009, University of Nebraska Press published Jim Harrison: A Comprehensive Bibliography, 1964-2008, an illustrated guide to Harrison’s published works, edited by Gregg Orr and Beef Torrey, with