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| John Ashbery and Lee Harwood in 1965 |
Lee Harwood’s first book-length
publication in Britain
was The White Room (1968), published
by Fulcrum Books. The section collecting the poems from The Man with Blue Eyes, his award-winning New York publication, which
appeared from Lewis Warsh’s and Anne Waldman’s Angel Hair Books in 1966, opens
with Harwood’s first mature poem, ‘As Your Eyes are Blue’, dating from 1965;
while it is influenced by the New York school of John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara,
a good many of the salient features of Harwood’s subsequent work are also
displayed here. (I analyse
it elsewhere.) In a short piece Harwood recalls the US volume from which the poem came,
and seamlessly moves from outlining influences, including Ashbery, to outlining
his own Ashberyan poetics:
There was Tzara, Dada, shaking language up, piling things up, which I’d
never seen done before. And Borges - where he writes stories which pull you in,
and then he pulls the rug from under your feet. So you’re continually not sure,
and you’re having to think it through yourself, so that you are always involved
in these processes.I had all that to feed into, but I couldn’t use it
effectively in my own writing. And then in the mid-sixties, meeting John
Ashbery, suddenly it clicked into place with his approach to writing: that idea
of creating a text which is meant for other people to use, and where the ‘I’
and ‘you’ and all that, were floating and shifting around. As Ashbery said in
that 1972 interview in the New York
Quarterly: ‘The personal pronouns in my work very often seem to be like
variables in an equation. “You” can be myself or it can be another person,
someone whom I’m addressing, and so can “he” and “she” for that matter and
“we”, sometimes one has to deduce from the rest of the sentence what is being
meant and my point is also that it doesn’t really matter very much, that we are
somehow all aspects of a consciousness giving rise to the poem and the fact of
addressing someone, myself or someone else, is what’s the important thing at
that particular moment rather than the particular person involved. I guess I
don’t have a very strong sense of my own identity and I find it very easy to
move from one person in the sense of a pronoun to another and this again helps
to produce a kind of polyphony in my poetry which I again feel is means toward
greater naturalism.’
‘As Your Eyes
are Blue’ is a love lyric, addressed from a shadowy ‘I’ to an insistently
addressed ‘you’; gender is unspecified, but certain clues suggest the poem is a
covert homoerotic lyric. Hesitancy and textual discontinuity are both evident
in broken utterance and syntactic rupture from the start.
The earlier gay
lyrics in ‘Early Work’, ‘This morning’, for instance, inaugurate a theme of
erotic longing at forced separation that haunts the entire oeuvre: ‘the pain of my leaving/ and my love for you’. This
intensifies in ‘The Man with Blue Eyes’, the second section of The White Room, which heralded Harwood’s
arrival in New York,
thus initiating a transatlantic exchange that continued all of his life. An
erotic liaison with John Ashbery (who he met in Paris in 1965), and a more
general literary engagement with the New York poetry scene, engendered some of
this deeply felt love poetry, including the one I mention above, one of the
finest meditations upon clandestine gayness, erotic obsession and separation,
‘As your eyes are blue’, which Jeremy Reed has described as ‘a love poem as
important to its time as Shakespeare’s androgynously sexed sonnets were to
his’. During ‘its time’ homosexual acts were illegal, of course, something we
are aware of in this 50th anniversary of decriminalisation. Note the
restraint of the gay poems, not just with their lack of gender markers, but in their
focus on detached parts of the body; ‘if only I could touch your naked
shoulder’ could easily be read as non-gender specific, or as heterosexual by
default, although like Polari (Lee was a great fan of Julian and Sandy on Round the Horne) it signifies to those ‘in
the know’.
Harwood’s
output of the 1960s is prodigious; 116 pages of the 500 pages of his Collected Poems were produced before he
turned 30, in 1969. Exercises in extended New York mode suggest Harwood was in danger
of becoming a card-carrying member of an already fading avant-garde. The death
of Frank O’Hara in 1966 might be thought emblematic of its demise, despite the
rise of the genius of the second generation, Ted Berrigan, and – in the 1970s –
Ashbery’s rise to fame. (It’s difficult to remember a time when nobody was
interested: but the 1970 Penguin Modern Poets, with Ashbery, Harwood and Tom
Raworth rubbing shoulders, was a pariah volume in its day!) Harwood mirrors the
insistent jocular name-checking, as well as the casual enjambment, of the
school, but utters a longing for a British precursor, F.T. Prince:
Ted
Berrigan has met Edwin Denby.
I
don’t know anyone who’s met F.T. Prince.
I
wish I could meet F.T. Prince.
Ironically,
it was Prince – a stylish British poet admired by Ashbery – who issued the
warning (when they did meet) that Harwood was ‘pattering on’. Harwood realised
the danger: ‘You get a tone of voice going, and it’s very elegant and witty …
and then it comes out as yards of material which you just reel off.’ This
account is, however, slightly reductive. The best poems in The White Room extend their range beyond standard New York work
into fictions about colonial vanity, military and naval disasters, outback
life, the Wild West, the Muslim East - Harwood has spoken of these as modern
mythologies - and even about the nature of poetry itself. Poets,
characteristically for Harwood, ‘only ever fail, miserably –/ some more
gracefully than others’, which is at least a better credo than the bitter Beckettian
one of failing better, I feel, with the inclusion of that camp ‘grace’.
One later work, The Sinking Colony, is a poem which
offers up those British certainties to a textual disruption so great that they
begin to turn into their opposites, into pastoral or romance, while yet the
terror still pervades the text, the worse for being undefined. It is almost as
although the words are punctuating silence, or scissored page space; it was
influenced specifically by Ashbery’s collage ‘Europe’,
a text which has tended to embarrass critics who want to turn him into a
Wallace Stevens for our time. So in a sense, Lee followed the wrong John
Ashbery.
But I also
remember Lee Harwood being asked at a reading (somebody must have read an
Ashbery poem) why there were narcissi in both poems (from the mid-1960s). Lee
answered, ‘We were looking at the same landscape,’ which suggests the immediacy
of the writing collaboration.
I only met
Ashbery once, and for a brief moment, before a reading was about to begin: I
had barely enough time to clock those blue eyes.
Robert Sheppard
PS This piece is a bitzer put together for the occasion but
Ollie Hazzard has considered the Ashbery-Harwood (and Prince) nexus in more
detail here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2016/12/a-real-though-pleasant-surprise-on-lee-harwood-john-ashbery-ft-prince
My review of Lee Harwood's Collected Poems in two parts here and here. On later works here; on recent works here. And an earlier gift to him here. A later 'Laugh' with Lee Harwood may be read here.
Access obituaries here. And news of the British Library Harwood Archive here. And a piece i.m. here.
My review of Lee Harwood's Collected Poems in two parts here and here. On later works here; on recent works here. And an earlier gift to him here. A later 'Laugh' with Lee Harwood may be read here.
Access obituaries here. And news of the British Library Harwood Archive here. And a piece i.m. here.
