Robert Sheppard (Ed.)

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Biographical note:  Robert Sheppard was born on the South Coast of England in 1955. Between 1989 and 2000 he worked on a long network of texts called Twentieth Century Blues, of which this volume is the largest showing. Previous books from the project include Empty Diaries (1998) and The Lores (2003). His work is anthologised in Other and the recent OUP Anthology of British and Irish Poetry, in which he is described as being ‘at the forefront of (the) movement sometimes called linguistically innovative poetry’. He is currently Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Edge Hill College of Higher Education.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844710775
ISBN:  9781844710775
Author:  Robert Sheppard
Title:  The Salt Companion to Lee Harwood
Series:  Salt Companions to Poetry
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CSBH
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  20-Dec-07
Extent:  252pp
Height:  228 mm
Width:  152 mm
Thickness:  14 mm
Weight:  378 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 14.99
Price:  USD 21.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  This is the first book to offer a comprehensive overview of the work of important British poet Lee Harwood, from his earliest writing as a follower of French Surrealism and New York poetry, when he was a leading light of the ‘Underground’ poetry of the 1960s, through to his long work The Long Black Veil and his major work since. It examines his work in terms of influence, poetics, gender, sexuality, eco-politics, as well as evidence of the spatial turn in contemporary culture. It also assesses his work in prose. The writers are drawn from a wide-range of literary backgrounds and approaches, but the editor draws these together in his introduction, which is followed by his own account of the story of Harwood’s development, as well as the text of an unpublished interview with him. The book contains a useful bibliography of Harwood’s work.

More generally, it demonstrates how various schools of criticism may be used to illumine a single topic, and how these may be compared. The writers include some of the major critics of British alternative poetry as well as some newcomers who offer a fresh view of this much-loved work.

Table of contents:
Acknowledgements
Editor’s Introduction
So It Shifts: An interview with Lee Harwood
Robert Sheppard: It’s a Long Road: The Works and Days
Geoff Ward: Lee Harwood’s Guaranteed Fine Weather Suitcase
Will Rowe: Lee Harwood Tristan Tzara
Tony Lopez: The White Room in the New York Schoolhouse
Nick Selby: Transatlantic Poetics in H.M.S. Little Fox and Boston—Brighton
Alice Entwistle: ‘"and … / not or": Gender and Relationship
Mari Hughes-Edwards: The Sexual Politics of Lee Harwood’s work
Jacqueline Phillips: The Prose Narratives: ‘Dream Quilt’ and the Short, Short Story
Andy Brown: Echoes of the oikos: an ecocritical reading
Ian Davidson: Nowhere Else – The Later Poems
Aodhán McCardle: Visuality: The Visual Condition; An Other Articulacy Of Knowing; trying to speech the unsayable, the inlanguageable.
Alan Halsey: ‘What’s Remarkable….’

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Introduction

This introduction originally began with an account of its subject’s life and works, as is customary, but this grew beyond its own wordage, swallowed the allotted span of my own proposed contribution, and stands now as a separate chapter, ‘It’s a Long Road’, serving the function of outlining the career of Lee Harwood as I see it. The publication of Collected Poems in 2004 served as the occasion for this re-assessment, and, by its act of consolidation, has doubtless influenced many of the contributors here. (It is the standard edition referred to throughout the volume as Harwood 2004.)

It has certainly had an effect on Harwood himself. His account of the creative paralysis caused by the overwhelming sense of the bulk of the work is one of the surprises of the interview in the pages that immediately follow this introduction. Although prompted by my questions and my concerns, the interview allows Harwood to speak to his own past statements of poetics in his own voice, as it were, before his commentators begin their work. He elaborates on his poetics, at times assertively, but at other times hesitantly, as when the impossibility of defining what the ‘countryside’ means to him is of such a magnitude that he literally does not know where to begin, unlike two of our contributors later in this volume who take this issue as axiomatic to a reading of his work.

The interview recovers a little of Harwood’s astonishment at his early literary discoveries, and the debt to Dada and Surrealism and the effect of the transatlantic passage to literary New York (and North America generally) are taken up by the next four contributions. (My ordering of the pieces reflects a compromise between chronological and thematic arrangement.)

In a wide-ranging essay, ‘Lee Harwood’s Guaranteed Fine Weather Suitcase’, Geoff Ward takes a longer view than my chapter does and puts Harwood in a larger context than that of his own development. This involves a comparison of the two generations of English Surrealism. The first was supposedly ended by the Second World War but it continued (underground) to fructify the second, whether that was manifest in the lyrical work of John Lennon or in the ‘White Room’ poems of Lee Harwood himself. The shadow of militarism hung over both men; they also inhabited a world dedicated to the recovery of childhood innocence even as it embraced a druggy paranoia. Ward reminds us of the suitability of Harwood’s surprising walk-on part in the novelisation of the 1960s cult classic, The Prisoner. Ward constructs a longer and local view of English (not British) surrealism that preserves something of the radical power of English Romanticism, and he compares an elegy by the first generation Surrealist David Gascoyne with Harwood’s own elegy for his friend Paul Evans, which he judges an effective release from nostalgia, an escape from the seductions of the surreal.

Both Gascoyne and Harwood have translated the work of the French poet Tristan Tzara, but Harwood was not aware of his predecessor when he first discovered this work in the early 1960s, partly due to the narrowing of culture in Britain under the shadow of that war, as Ward suggests, and partly due to the ascendant poetic orthodoxy of the early 1960s, the Movement, as Will Rowe points out in his contribution.

Rowe’s ‘Harwood Tzara’ traces Harwood’s fascination with what was not available in that native tradition: an inheritance from European modernism (that Harwood theorises, as late as 1981, as a politicised energy that is capable of continual renewal in the present). Tzara’s inclusion of the arbitrary in his poetry was important: the poet becomes a voice, experience becomes syntax and parataxis, and language is foregrounded, while montage is the favoured method of assemblage. Paramount is the effect this will have upon an individual reader.

What is surprising and original in Rowe’s piece is the way in which his examination of Tzara’s practice (through Harwood’s translations) sheds light on an area of Harwood’s own work not often discussed, that is, its prosody, or rather Harwood’s use of non-prosodic speech elements as rhythmic entities, particularly in the interplay of visual lines and, often incomplete, verbal clusters, which involves a reader in the prosodic adventure. Harwood’s translations – and this essay is the first detailed assessment of them – are praised by Rowe for recognising that, for Tzara, the poem’s voice and the materials of the world speak with a consonant rhythm. How this influence plays out in Harwood’s own work is not straightforward, as Rowe shows. The early poems often attempt to mime the surface of Tzara’s work but it is not until Harwood reaches maturity with The White Room that surreal juxtaposition is replaced by fragmented narrative, hinting towards the ‘New York’ influence that is the subject of the following essay.

Despite the title, in ‘The White Room in the New York Schoolhouse’, Tony Lopez concentrates upon the 1966 pamphlet The Man With Blue Eyes, which indeed – with corrections – became part of The White Room (and is, of course, present in the Collected Poems, with some elisions and exclusions). This volume was published in New York and Lopez sees the book as Harwood’s entrée into the vibrant scene of the New York Poets, constellated around Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery. Lopez’s essay is the only one in this volume to have been previously published but it has an important presence in Harwood studies since it was the first to speak of aspects of Harwood’s private life as they are made manifest in the work, thus inaugurating an openness about sexuality and persons referred to in the work that is taken up as a permission by several other contributors. The pamphlet, which opens with one of Harwood’s finest poems, ‘As Your Eyes are Blue’, narrates a love affair between Harwood and the poet John Ashbery in a style sometimes still owing to Tzara’s surrealism, but also owing to Ashbery’s own practice, which Lopez proves, somewhat unconventionally, but no less convincingly for that, in a piece of creative-criticism, a collage of the two poets’ work. More conventionally, he reads a distinct European longing in the work, one which reaches back to the predictable Tzara, but also to the presence of T.S. Eliot in the work. Once Harwood was freed from the ‘schoolhouse’ of New York, Lopez says, he took lessons from other Americans, often mediating that lesson through the tutelage of the chief poet-critic of the British Poetry Revival, Eric Mottram.

Although Nick Selby does not mention Mottram (or other British open field poets of the 1970s), in his ‘Transatlantic Poetics in H.M.S. Little Fox and Boston—Brighton’, he traces the influence of Charles Olson. He does not read Harwood as a slavish member of the Black Mountain school, and indeed, sees Harwood’s enduring fascination with America in more general cultural terms. Harwood’s poetry of the 1970s often concerns itself with transatlantic exchange of various kinds, and the politics that results. Structurally this is best examined in the partitioned book Boston-Brighton, a structure visible in the hyphenation of its very title. Characters are lost in an estrangement with which they are also delighted, particularly in the love poems. Concepts both of ‘home’ and ‘polis’ are disrupted by an openness and mutability of perception and poetics. Ironically, when it borrows most from Olson, in writings about the English South Coast, Harwood’s work is burdened with a meditative hesitancy which is entirely alien to Olson’s voice. Harwood’s own metaphor of ‘triangulation’ is used by Selby to read troubling themes of pastoral and sexual possession (and invasion) and dynamic heterosexual relationship in Harwood’s longest work, the open field notebook The Long Black Veil.

Alice Entwistle also focuses upon The Long Black Veil in her ‘ “and … / not or”: Gender and Relationship’, whose title is partly a quotation from a passage in that poem that she takes as central to the themes she also identifies in her title. Harwood amends Jung’s essay on marriage, and argues that gendered relationships should be ideally conducted between equals who operate both as the ‘container’ and the ‘contained’ (against Jung who argues for the divisive ‘or’ in gender roles). The Long Black Veil foregrounds sexual encounter as creative mutuality, with the female figure divested of her familiar role as Muse. The male lover self-effacingly loses egoic substantiality in the process of love-making; the pervasive sense of ‘process’ that others have seen as evidence of Olson’s influence, in Entwistle’s subtle readings, becomes a way of uniting this gender politics and the intertextual gestures of the poem, particularly the use of Egyptian mythology, which acknowledges female creative power. That this is no abstraction, in Entwistle’s view, is emphasised in her account of poems dedicated to particular named women artist-figures, both lovers and friends. What she uncovers, across many poems addressed to different women, is a similar discourse in which the relationship between speaker and subject is figured as that of container and contained; the women are realised as creative partners. Poems addressed to fellow poets, like Anne Stevenson, speak of a modest approval of their poetics of exactitude. Crossing over as it does into autobiography – much of the detail comes from an unpublished and private interview very different to the public one published in this volume, although recorded the following lunch-time – the essay opens with an extended reading of ‘African Violets’, Harwood’s elegy to his grandmother Pansy, which identifies her as the primary source of Harwood’s identification of certain strong women as beacons of creativity and strength.

Mari Hughes-Edwards, on the other hand, finds the sexual politics of Harwood’s work vexing. Many readers must have noticed what she calls the ‘serial monogamy’ of the texts: a procession of lovers is addressed (sometimes in quite similar terms), and Hughes-Edwards’ quest is to itemise the commonalities and examine the ways in which each sexual encounter is predicated on previous encounters and presages its own demise. While theorising the bisexuality of the poetry, of more importance to her are aspects such as the fragmentary representations of the desired body, as well as the all-consuming, world-devouring nature of sexual obsession. Like Entwistle, she is interested in loss and elegy, although the former is figured as related to the inevitable grief of serial monogamy, while elegy is a mode largely reserved for commemorating friendship. While lust and love are fragile, grief provides poetic opportunity for a more resilient devotion.

In ‘The Prose Narratives: “Dream Quilt” and the Short, Short Story,’ Jacqueline Phillips outlines what, at first, seems an absurd notion, that Harwood is a writer, not just of prose pieces and poems with narrative elements, but of actual short stories, as it were. Beginning with an excursion into the recent development of the ‘short, short story’ and an account of theories of compression, omission, and strategies of minimum exposition in the poetics of major practitioners, Phillips turns to the role of the implicit in the short story form more generally, drawn from the work of Marcella Bertuccelli. She then examines Harwood’s most consistent work of short narratives (to use V.S. Pritchett’s term): Dream Quilt: 30 Assorted Stories. In this work Phillips taxonomises a variety of narrative modes: distanced, impersonal, fantastic, anti-realist, fable-like, fragmented and open ended; many of them display a freedom from temporal and spatial constraints that she identifies as a constituent of the short, short story (which is, of course, a term coined and popularised since Harwood wrote his pieces, which were published in 1985). Although Harwood expresses an admiration for many prose writers, from Carlos Fuentes to Philip Roth, the short fictions of Borges were an early and enduring interest and – as Phillips proves – influence. She finds the most pronounced Borgesian blurring of fact and fiction and a borrowing of essay-style in a prose piece by Harwood outside of Dream Quilt, but in that book there is a direct reference to Borges, in a story that demonstrates many of Bertuccelli’s subsidiary forms of implicitness. Phillips reports that Harwood suffers from the inferiority complex that afflicts many short story writers, their mistaken envy for the pantechnicon of the novel form, but she also reminds us of the essential connection between Harwood’s prose and poetry, and points to the joint Modernist heritage that modern poetry and the modern story owes to imagist theory.

Theory of a different, and more contemporary, kind is appealed to in Andy Brown’s ‘Echoes of the oikos: an ecocritical reading’, in which externalism – an emergent philosophy that holds that mental states are hybrid ones affected by the external world and environment – is used to analyse some of the most prevalent tropes in Harwood’s work, that of mountains and of the walled garden, the walked and the walled environment, as it were. Processes that ecology identifies in the environment are seen by Brown as reflected in the textual contract Harwood offers his readers in his complex collage work: of ecologically-modelled intermingledness rather than of isolate statement. His thematics of mind and body dualism are found to mirror his other themes of the lure of the countryside and the attraction to the city, a striving in the self and the world to balance the claims of the natural and the cultural. This is the significance of the recurrent sanctified garden, with its historical leanings towards the paradisal, and also a place of erotic exchange, which is never far away in these scenarios, particularly in The Long Black Veil. Yet the sanctified is always held at some distance in Harwood’s non-Christian humanism, which remains aware of decay as a significant process in all the ecological realms, including that of the original ‘oikos’, the home, where belonging always relates to a longing for elsewhere and elsewhat.

The spaces of Lee Harwood’s poems are worked over in a different way by Ian Davidson, in his ‘Nowhere Else – the Later Poems’. Davidson turns over some of the postmodern theories of place and space which doubt whether there can be resistance to the global at the local level, that spatialisation as a correlative of commodified globalisation results in a diminution of place as a locus of value. It is exactly that kind of local value that Davidson detects a yearning for, in Harwood’s verse, particularly in its sensual and bodily particularity, or ‘presence’ as he puts it. Harwood’s exploration of place and places is in no way naïve – as Brown has proved – and Davidson pursues what he takes to be a materialist ethics that problematises subject-positions within the poems and reading strategies outside of them. In all sorts of ways, Harwood’s poems will not stay still, and within their desire for place there is a restless yearning for the elsewhere as well, the equivalent of the theorist’s ‘spatial’. The thinking of Lefebvre acts as a corollary to Harwood’s grasping rootedness with its insistence upon the connectivity between place as thing and space as abstraction. The elsewhere contained in memory, or in the act of drafting the poems itself, operate as complex indicators of complexity. The self that appears in the text is also a desire for ‘presence’ in the phenomenal world, not to be confused with Lefebvre’s ‘present’, which is a distanciating simulation of presence, although that is also the space, as it were, of the inscription of Harwood’s often painfully self-consciously artificial poems. Rooted in place, he reaches out into space, which is where reading will occur. The focus on poems of the last twenty years reminds us of the continuing development of Harwood’s work, and many of the poems Davidson refers to have not been the subject of critical scrutiny hitherto.

Aodhán McCardle’s research question is a simple one, and like all simple questions, it exfoliates into complex arguments. Many of Harwood’s poems are concerned with the most literal aspects of visuality, with seeing, whether that is in terms of landscape – in both the topological and the painterly senses – or in terms of more general reactions to space and colour, for example. But the poems are forced, nevertheless, to mediate their contents in language. While this is true of any content – any ‘theme’, for example – this is particularly complex and radical in the case of rendering the primarily visual through the sign system of language, in that it might seem to claim an equal primacy, particularly with respect to the language art of poetry. And when processes of memory and temporality, as well as questions of knowledge and doubt are added to the language that Harwood habitually and relentlessly interrogates, the resultant discourse is constantly gesturing beyond logic and logos, ‘inlanguageable’ in McCardle’s neologism. Ashbery and Harwood are compared, to show how Ashbery indicates, but does not inhabit, these problems, while Harwood’s poetry does, particularly in the way the reader is situated in relation to questions of seeing.

This volume ends with a brief fanfare from Alan Halsey, who expresses well the ill-ease that a contemporary ironist faces before the often bracing and brashly innocent language Harwood often employs, and which serves as one proof of his uniqueness. This piece previously appeared in the celebratory volume Patricia Farrell and I edited and published in 1999 as a surprise for Lee Harwood’s sixtieth birthday, Birthday Boy (Liverpool: Ship of Fools), which was a book of praises and celebrations. While the present volume is also a celebration of Harwood’s forty year journey, it attenuates praise in favour of the varied, detailed and critical accounts that the celebration alone suggests is timely. I have called on a wide range of contributors, some long-known as critical commentators on Harwood’s work, but others are newcomers to the task and to the debates it raises. It has been a privilege to gather everybody’s fresh insights together in one volume.

Robert Sheppard

Unpublished endorsement :  Lee Harwood is a poet of floating translucent landscape (much of it out there, underwater,  a distance we can’t quite reach). Some of the detail is as fine as the hairs on the back of our hands. Now we have individual and overlapping maps by fellow poets, critics, close-readers, to draw us in, reminding us of white spaces we must experience but never exhaust. A valuable document.

Iain Sinclair