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| Lee Harwood dreaming of Armenia |
‘The Songs for
Those Who Are On The Sea of Glass’ features fragmented accounts of a very literal
assault upon the heart, a heart attack, which ends with the startling sonic
patterning of: ‘sat up in bed in bizarre pyjamas’, (Harwood 2004: 449) which
signals the narrator’s sudden release from the glass sea ‘of being dead and
being brought back into what suddenly seemed like an amazing world’, in
Harwood’s later commentary (he admits to being ‘happy’ with that marvellous
last line too). (Harwood and Corcoran 2008, 94) Between sections which register
the quality of light in the ward and the ‘The ice window’ of death – ‘(that’s a
metaphor)’ (447) a typical parenthesis reminds us, Harwood remains ever-suspicious
of language, even as in another mood (which corresponds to another section) he
quotes Mandelstam’s depiction of the human universe as ‘the happy heaven’.
(446) But the intrusions of involuntary memory whether of ‘Jamaican cigars long
ago’ (446) or of a trip across the literal ice of Esbjerg erupt with hopeful
imaginings: ‘Inland a fox trotted nervously/ across snow-covered fields and
streams’, we read, a scenario that, with titles like Crossing the Frozen River and HMS
Little Fox in Harwood’s back catalogue, let alone all the positive
references to the solitary migratory habits of the fox (contrast that with the wolves we find in Barry MacSweeney!),
suggests a validation of transitory movement from one ‘frame’ to another (to
use William Rowe’s phrase for Harwood’s shiftology). (I stole that word from a
book Patricia is reading; it seems apposite.) ‘“The monster! The monster!”
fleeing villagers yell/ in black and white Transylvania’ is Harwood’s comic way
of mediating ‘a body stitched and wired together’, (448) a reference to the
early (and now unconvincing) Frankenstein
films, and as ever the deflationary kitsch deflection unsettles the tone,
as does his ‘To walk at ease with the ghosts/ (not a club member yet)’, (449) a
late instance of what Geoffrey Ward recognised in early Harwood as ‘an
importation into experience of a tonal innocence which is recognized as true to
life, but which in the new setting of the page must henceforth wear invisible
quotation marks’, though in this poem we are guided by the parentheses. (Ward
2007: 37) As Harwood remarks somewhere, the cliché is only too true. Too true. One section reads simply:
‘Talking in code?’ the question mark deflecting again absolute judgement.
Clichés and metaphors, sections and poems, even fragmented and multifaceted
ones, may be yet speaking in a cipher, and this is a characteristic poetic
questioning of the medium of poetry, on Harwood’s part.
The 50 short sections of
‘Days and Nights’ (some of them single lines, like the self-interrogative one
in ‘The Songs’) reflect Harwood’s brief employment as a museum attendant (they
were ‘written’ in Harwood’s head). They range from single word entries, such as
‘(space)’ (Harwood 2004: 421), which attempts to look outwards, and
‘sullen’ (Harwood 2004: 422) which looks inwards, to meditations on their own
development; one explains Harwood’s frequent preference for gerund forms
throughout his work: they leave the utterance ‘always in the present ing
ing’. (Harwood 2004: 421) There is nothing quite as minimal as this in
Harwood’s work, although he refers to Raworth’s serial composition ‘Stag Skull Mounted’
(1970), from which it quotes, commenting on its own failure of method, or
failure as method: ‘As Tom once wrote
“this trick doesn’t work”.’ (Harwood 2004: 422) ‘The line that says nothing. A
chair creaks,’ in fact says quite a lot about how ‘one thought fills immensity’
as Blake puts it, (419) though ‘stuck in the fact of absence’ doesn’t quite
suggest the zen-like calm of meditation. Structurally, ‘Days and Nights’
testifies to the continuing influences of Ashbery’s ‘Europe’, and to the
miniature box-sculptures of Joseph Cornell, to whom the piece is dedicated, the
constructor of his own ‘poetic enactments’ as Dore Ashton calls his famous boxes.
(Ashton 1974: 1) We are left, as it were, peering into the miniature but
expansive interiors of his assemblages in the final ‘accidental sighting’, as
these texts are subtitled: ‘The white box contains a landscape.’ (423) The
smaller we go: the more the find. Cornell was first excited by the ‘splice of
life of collage’ as Waldrop calls it – he was untrained and could not draw –
when he saw Max Ernst’s work, but it was later with his friend Marcel Duchamp
that he ‘shared … a love for sudden juxtapositions, of perfectly ordinary and
even vulgar objects. But seashells, pressed flowers, and butterflies were in
the final analysis closer to Cornell’s vision than were Duchamp’s ironies’, as
Ashton explains. (Ashton 1974: 77). Cornell preferred what she calls the
bric-a-brac of ‘Victoriana or Americana
A final thought
(after, or rather, during, a late
afternoon walk down the Allerton Road where I bought a novel, The Director’s Cut, by Nicholas Royle, which was priced £1 and
which the charity shop wanted to charge me 29p for – and I refused, giving them
the pound that was already a markdown, but it was an appropriate find, since
Lee is a walk-on character in Nick’s latest novel, First Novel): amid the syntactic and rhythmical restlessness of
Harwood’s work, between the shifting ‘scenes’ of the clusters of fragments in
the narrative, there is a singular voice (that is not to be confused with its variable
‘tone’, as some commentators have noted), a set of concerns and a way of saying
them that is – whatever the formal or narrative guise – immediately
recognisable as ‘Harwood’, and quite unique. It is an undamaged fragility, a
quiet determination to uphold eros
and agape against the forces of
destruction and negativity, a polyphony to undermine the stomping boots of the
military marching song, a bit of camp (or the occasional kitsch ‘bad’ line)
thrown in to unsettle the certainties of received discriminations in life and
in the arts.
One reference of use:
