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Shearsman Books
$28.00 (£17.95) / 521 pp / paper
isbn 0-907562-40-X
www.shearsman.com |
Review by Kim Hjelmgaard
"California," as the English poet Lee Harwood puts it in 'Gilded Light,' a poem from his 1998 collection Morning Light, "is a long way away." Yet this distance, geographic as well as metaphoric, hasn't prevented Harwood, a kind of Ashbery of the English Channel, from drinking deeply of a red, white, and blue syntax throughout his 40-plus year career (his first book, title illegible, was published in 1965). Harwood is a poet often associated with the British Poetry Revival, a broad coalition of anti-conservative, pro-modernist poets who, beginning in early 1960s Britain, in keeping with the newly progressive age, attempted to throw off the shackles of societal and literary conformity. It's no accident that the American lyric, inherently more democratic than the British one, with the former more naturally alive to the plethora of high and low talk of the town, featured so heavily in Harwood's early negotiation with this radicalism. American poetry at this juncture more nimbly registered the impact of this new modern world. It still does, arguably.
The publication of Harwood's Collected Poems both confirms and rejects this early influence, however. Confirms it in the characteristically obscure New York School mosaics, playful and irreverent, that comprise the early work, as well as that produced right through to the late 1970s. Rejects it in the gradual tensioning and directness of the line learned from Whitman, Pound, Koch and Ashbery after this point. Thematically Collected makes plain that there has also been a corresponding contraction of the poet's
synthesizing capabilities, or at least a re-focusing. The Harwood poem is notable for its sliding ranginess—a study of geographic beauty becoming whispered pillow talk becoming a camping trip from long ago. But with each passing decade the poet's instinct for his favored method—montage—appears to dull a little. Fault lines whose visibility was once an asset have become a liability. Part of the problem could be that Harwood, against better judgment, and certainly without being fully cognizant of the matter, appears to be trying to re-write the same poem over and over again. It's not wholly a case of evolve or die, but evolve in order to avoid inadvertent pastiche of an earlier self.
Compare this, written 30 years ago:
Paris clambering through the chimney pots of your
dreams
harpsichord slicing eggs
into flowers
flowers into tumbrils
towers bursting from lakes
in remote mountain districts
a peasant walked dazed into the village
a dog couldn't avoid his boots
a hay stack collapsed
crying
when you passed
from "Before Schulz the Kiteman" 1965/1966
with this, written in the late 1990s:
Afternoon light slides through a Paris apartment
The White walls and few furnishings
Simple and bare and elegant
Piano music now
The books the couch
Timeless moment
from "Classicism (Satie, Finlay, et Cie..)" 1996/1998
The quality of awkward disjunction that characterizes the earlier work has clearly evolved, by the 1990s, into a more prosaic everydayness. Of course, whether or not this is a tension permanently lessened is impossible to say. But in this example the above hypothesis holds. While some will disagree with the assertion that pastiche is a result of of this slackening, the continuity of the thematic concerns over a 30-year period is pretty much undeniable. On a less contentious note, Lee Harwood’s Collected Poems obviously gives us access to work that has long lain out of print, including the first six Harwood publications written before the poet was even thirty. These demonstrate that Harwood's early career was an insular place, with joined-up, here's-what-it's-all-about, narrative a correspondingly remote and occasional enterprise. Nevertheless, it's fascinating to think that so much wonderment can come from so much being left open textually. And time and again it is this openness that has drawn readers to Harwood's poetry. Writing in the Times Literary Supplement, Robert Sheppard notes that "it is Harwood's aim to leave the text open, to enable his readers to participate in the creation of meaning."
So what is this meaning? Largely, it's a preoccupation with E. M. Forster's "only connect" set against landscapes of varying beauty and intelligibility. In fact, the preponderance of words such as "moon”,” sun", "mist", "sky", "cloud" and the like in the Harwood lyric is not a casual taking up of the poetic license but a genuine reflection of the poet's abiding interests.
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