[This piece continues a strand of posts that were posted in August, beginning here: Pages: How
the British Poetry Revival appears in one history of its times: Dominic
Sandbrook’s White Heat. I am researching towards a paper on the subject to be delivered in December.]
The
British Poetry Revival arose in a period when, as David Porter, taking a
retrospective view, wrote in Arts Alive Merseyside magazine in March
1973: ‘a lot of people who didn’t know they could write poetry met up with a
lot of people who didn’t know they could listen to poetry. Each encouraged the other.’
The central event is sometimes taken to be the poetry incarnation held at the
Albert Hall 11 June 1965, and it is this date, though not just this event, upon
which I want to focus. What started me on this quest was a simple question:
where was Lee Harwood on that eventful evening? I'll come back to that. You
could also ask: where was x y or z from our current roster of major figures?
The answer is that they were mostly very young, perhaps too young, to participate.
(Less generously, one could say the wrong people took part.)
Concentrating
on the date it is interesting to note that two British poets were celebrating
their birthdays: Roy Fisher was 35 and Iain Sinclair was 18, the latter of
interest because he was a prime mover in 1995 of a re gathering of the Royal
Albert Hall energies. Fisher was preoccupied at that time with his job in
teacher education, I believe. His fulsome bibliography assembled by the
redoubtable Derek Slade shows no poems were written between November and June
1965, i.e. until the summer vacation period, when he produced a number of poems
including three of his very best, ‘The Thing about Joe Sullivan’ in July, ‘For Realism’
between June and August, and ‘The Memorial Fountain’ in August. This burst was
prelude to his three-year writing block, of course, but he was busy far away
from the Albert Hall. (Christopher Middleton, one of our finest writers, was
already in a kind of voluntary exile, celebrated his 41st birthday on the 10
June.)
To
complete the birthday honours, it is worth noting that Lee Harwood, the
youngest of this grouping, had passed his 26th birthday less than a
week before the Albert Hall gig, on 6 June, and Allen Ginsberg, the star and
catalyst of the Albert Hall event had celebrated his 39th birthday
by getting drunk (OK) and stripping naked (less OK) at a party and embracing an
embarrassed John Lennon. A few days later he held an impromptu reading at
Better Books, then managed by Barry Miles, and at the same venue a few days
later still the plot was hatched for the Albert Hall gig on 11 June. (I began to review Juha Virtanen’s book Event and Effect whose first chapter is the best account of the gig, though there are others. Pages:
Thoughts on Collaboration 13 or: review of Juha Virtanen, Poetry and
Performance During the British Poetry Revival 1960-1980: Event and Effect. )
Where
was Lee Harwood on 11 June 1965? He was on a train with John Ashbery,
travelling between Paris and Grenoble; his poem ‘Train poem – a collaboration’
was written with Ashbery and it provides place and time. The two lovers (we
assume) were en route to Switzerland with its rivers and mountains that appear
in Ashbery’s 1966 collection Rivers and Mountains and the similar rivers
and mountains of Harwood’s 1966 collection The Man with Blue Eyes. (xix
of Certain Prose). I recall Lee presenting
poems from both books – I forget where – and being asked why both poets refer
to narcissi, and was it symbolic? It was not, Lee replied: they were simply
looking at the same flowers! Tony Lopez in his article, ‘The White Room in the
New York Schoolhouse’ convincingly argues that the Blue Eyes volume is a
‘second generation New York book’ (77), and that the exchange between Harwood
and Ashbery amounts to ‘ a collaborative practise that goes beyond “Train
Poem”’, (80). The result, in other poems, is ‘a construction that does not
eschew narrative but which is nonetheless discontinuous and unable to be assimilated
into a coherent whole’ (82), but he concedes that ‘Train Poem’ is ‘much closer
to French surrealist practise than any of the other poems’ (77), that practice
being, of course, a version of the famous to and fro ‘exquisite corpse’ game.
A
more contemporary formulation, that of Holly A.
Laird, in her study Female Coauthors, states: certain coauthors ‘ “double” the activities of reading and
writing, for both of them read and write each other. They “double” for each
other, mirroring each other’s sameness and differences. And they double back on
each other’s writing, rewriting themselves and the other, making their
text a “polylogue”.’ (204)
This neatly defines the process that produced the poem, and suggests the final
product is a polyphonic lyric. Any
co-authored text makes and leaves a linguistic trail coherent enough to be
regarded as a single discourse. ‘The coming-into-being of the work of art,’
Derek Attridge argues, in terms that fully admit of the complexity of
coauthorship, ‘is both an act and an event: it’s
something the artist does (or a number of artists do in a collaborative
process) and something that happens to the artist (or artists)’. (2015:
220) These words I’ve used before to introduce strictly formalist readings, but
today I’m going to offer a processual reading, courtesy of the British Library
publication Poems in Progress: Drafts from Master Poets, edited by
Alexandra Ault and Laura Walker, to show, in a non-psychological sense, what
happened to Harwood and Ashbery, as artistic acts became an event (even if it
was simply to pass the time and even as the poem, to which I’d not given much
attention until I was co-editing Harwood’s New Collected Poems) is not
the greatest of poems or collaborations.
Ault and
Walker present a manuscript version of the text; they state ‘it is difficult to
distinguish between the handwriting of the two poets’ (94). To my eye, this is
true. At first I thought the whole manuscript is in Harwood’s hand. Perhaps this
is possibly a fair copy, tellingly with no corrections, and one characteristic
Harwood misspelling (‘caress’ with two r’s). Judging from the unevenness of
line, it is evidentially written on a train. Interlinear space decreases to
accommodate the poem on one sheet. On the verso, we’re told, Harwood writes:
‘Both our script – so alike: & this by chance & a real though pleasant
surprise’. (94) He acknowledges coauthorship, shared inscription, the chance
procedure, and his confidence in the poem in one sentence.
He later
types the poem up, adding the title, but first testing ‘jointpoem’ as a title
before rejecting it. He clearly states, ‘by John Ashbery & lee (sic)
Harwood’, though this ascription does not appear in any book reprinting of the
poem. There are scribbles around the title; I think they are the magazines the
poem was submitted to, or published in: Berrigan’s C is struck through. However,
and perhaps oddly, given the fact of this doubling writing producing a
polylogue, Harwood underlines Ashbery’s lines, so we know, simply put, who
wrote what. Auly and Walker state ‘Their poetic exchange is not a simple arrangement
in which each poet wrote a single line before passing pen and paper across to
the other. The authorship switches playfully within lines,’ unlike a classic
exquisite corpse, ‘as the poem, which has a restless, surreal quality, abruptly
shifts grammatically and tonally’ (93). Restless switching and shifting does
seem to describe the feeling of the poem as well as its progress and process, an
act and an event, a formal improvisation with no option of revising its
content, or a formal act-event that leaves little chance of settled content or
meaning. Its form, its recorded ‘forming’, in this case, is its only meaning,
as it gathers semantic and even vaguely referential elements, and then scatters
them in switching doubling creation.
What
follows is a reading, perhaps too fulsome to make an interesting paper, and is
better suited to the page or screen, what I have spontaneously dubbed a
‘processual reading’. Harwood’s title is important. ‘Train poem’ allows a
reader to imagine a point of view travelling: perhaps what we see are things
spotted out the window. If it were simply ‘jointpoem’ we might not allow
ourselves this naturalisation of the text. ‘A collaboration’ affords us a sense
that ‘both of’ the authors ‘read and write each other’, but we have no access
(until now) to the details of this situation, but we cannot ignore it. The dash
between the two parts suggests an equivalence between focus and forming, as it
were. Here’s the poem as it finally appeared:
Train poem – A collaboration
dog
daisies poppies metal knitting
needles snail eyes backward
and then discord the
records-file
prehensile tankers and block
which way the stage perimeter
OK
block again greenhill rears
upward mutinous
‘back!’ So until January
telegraphs twitching north to
so and so
and a handkerchief slowly
chopping heaves
‘ne nous fâchons pas’ so that
the houses
laughing in your eyes nearer
the bang
let a forest caress unlace the
instant
lovecog – did you really
understand what I meant by that?
the farmyard in an uproar of
freed peasants’ cough
drops ah the old dogs at the window
but my love for you outgrew
the shed
tools in disorderly heaps and
wasps
a beam sagging into twisted
visions of nowhere
and at this the small engine
appeared from the siding
to inspect the phantoms and
slowly disappear.
This is how Harwood’s
typescript appears:
Train poem – A collaboration
dog daisies poppies metal
knitting
needles snail eyes backward
and then discord the
records-file
prehensile tankers and block
which way the stage perimeter
OK
block again greenhill rears upward
mutinous
‘back!’ So until January
telegraphs twitching north
to so and so
and a handkerchief slowly chopping
heaves
‘ne nous fachons pas’ so
that the houses
laughing in your eyes nearer
the bang
let a forest carress unlace
the instant
lovecog – did you really
understand what I meant by that?
the farmyard in an uproar of
freed peasants’ cough
drops ah the old dogs at the window
but my love for you outgrew
the shed
tools in disorderly heaps and
wasps
a beam sagging into twisted
visions of nowhere
and at this the small engine
appeared from the siding
to
inspect the phantoms and slowly disappear.
Train poem – A collaboration
The eventual title was
Harwood’s, as we have seen; so were the first few words:
dog daisies poppies
Wildflowers. In fact the first
two lines of the manuscript version of the poem uses space differently (much
like some of Harwood’s later poems in Landscapes):
dog daisies poppies metal knitting
needles snail eyes backward
This might be accidental, but
it separates certain words (and the phantom canine at word one is dismissed)
and provides a prosody of reading, as it were. But let us follow the
collaborative breaks.
metal
Ashbery interjects, disrupting
the bucolic connotations of the floral nouns with the inorganic. Harwood
responds
knitting
and the obvious word
association
needles
is supplied by Ashbery,
perhaps taking us back to metal, but providing continuity with Harwood’s
contribution. At this point in the poem, the exchange is rapid, and
deliberately abrasive, almost adversarial:
needles snail eyes backward
and then discord the
records-file
prehensile tankers and block
‘needles’ segues ‘snail eyes’, perhaps hinting
at protruding ‘snail eyes’ as varieties of needles, but refusing the semantic
hinge with ‘knitting’. The trajectory of the poem is ever-forwards. Indeed,
after this passage, the individual passages become longer, and Ashbery’s contributions
are exclusively at the end of the lines (‘the farmyard in an uproar of freed
peasants’ cough drops ah the old dogs at the window’ is one (very
long) line). This suggests the poets fall into a rhythm (or even that they were
literally playing the exquisite corpse, though no one seems to have folded over
the paper, But before we reach that point we have to negotiate Ashbery’s ‘backward’,
which is bewildering, but is countered by Harwood’s short blast of projective
energy to move us forward, narrative’s favourite device: ‘and then’. And then
what? ‘Discord’ Ashbery replies, as if more chaos were needed at this
point. ‘The records-file’ could be a deliberate rejoinder to chaos, although
the whole line (which is not, remember, the unit of composition) ‘and then discord
the records-file’ seems to suggest disorder or disorderliness rather than order.
‘Prehensile’ could allow order to appear, be grasped even, though a
hanging adjective, which is what Ashbery leaves here, is an obvious invitation
to not state the obvious (claws, hands, etc,) but to provide a surreal non-sequitur:
‘tankers’. (The name of the game ‘exquisite corpse’ is based on the creation of
a similarly incongruous noun phrase during collaboration, I believe.) Whatever
the tankers are, and whether or not Harwood spotted one of its varieties out of
the train window, the notion that they are prehensile, i.e., animate, or, as
earlier, organic, suggests the kind of nightmarish science fiction cyborg scenario
that is immediately blocked by the next phrase that the coauthors produce
together:
and
block
which way
though the full cluster of
words
which way the stage perimeter
OK
block again
suggests that it is the
spatial that is blocked this time (Harwood echoing Ashbery’s use of the word). A
‘stage’ as a performance space must have a ‘perimeter (OK?)’ we might
rewrite the line. Edges block, the poem that seems to refuse the notion of
boundaries and edges, seems also to be saying (or is made to say?). Or the
readers, naturalising until they scream or steam with frustration, pieces it
together to ‘say’:
greenhill rears upward
mutinous
‘back!’
This similarly presents a
possibly observed eruption, via the train’s movement, of a green hill into view
(‘greenhill’ is a very Beat collocation, infrequently evidenced in Harwood’s
writing by the mid-1960s, as in ‘jointpoem’) ‘upward’ in Ashbery’s initial
conformational word-choice, deflated by the ‘mutinous’ reversal that
Harwood continues: ‘back’! This first quotation or speech in the piece is quite
dramatic. Grammar has been loose until this point, but Ashbery reads the
exclamation mark as not just a mark of exclamation but as a grammatical
boundary, a fullstop, and he takes the opportunity for a new sentence, indeed,
an emphatically new narrative perspective, however temporarily held. Again
Harwood and Ashbery initially work in narrative cohesiveness, in a narrational
tone:
So
until January
telegraphs twitching north
to so and so
The ‘so’ is subtly brought
back into use, but telegraphs (those along the railway line, presumably, for
this is a ‘train poem’) may twitch, but not northwards. (To remain with
the writerly situation, the two poets are travelling south, and January, from
the point of view of June was months away. The poem (in its annotated version)
moves into a visibly to-and froing pattern, and with it an increasing sense of
disruption, what we might be forgiven for calling ‘block’ and ‘discord’, to use
words already encountered.
and a handkerchief slowly chopping
heaves
‘ne
nous fachons pas’ so that the houses
laughing in your eyes nearer the
bang
let a forest carress unlace
the instant
lovecog – did you really
understand what I meant by that?
A
truncated observation: ‘and a handkerchief slowly’ leaves its adverb hanging to
catch Ashbery’s adjective + noun as it arrives: chopping heaves. ‘A handkerchief slowly chopping heaves’
suggests a convulsive action, the ‘slowly’ jarring against the unlikely
chopping and heaving. Of course, faced with a literal exercise in surrealism,
with the clash of imagery, not unlike Lautréamont’s famous ‘chance meeting of
an umbrella and a sewing-machine on an operating table’, we cannot resolve the
imagery, and occasionally the grammar works towards indeterminacy. (The problem
of a lot of ‘surrealist’ poetry is that it does not formally disrupt the
conventions of language but simply presents sharp representations of visual
surrealist juxtapositions. As Harwood was to write in 1975: ‘The awkwardness,
and failure, of the earlier British Surrealists of the 1930s and 1940s, David
Gascoyne and others, is only too obvious.’ ‘A handkerchief slowly chopping
heaves’ is not completely non-visual, but the linguistic contradiction
within it, frustrates the visual imagination, as well as inciting it.
The
following line is linguistic in a different way, being partly in French (though
the circumflex accent is missing): ‘ “ne nous fachons pas” so that the
houses’. The French means ‘Let’s not get angry’, the ‘so’ (again)
suggesting a grammatical connection with what follows that does not materialise
(a feature of Dada more than surrealism, one could argue). Unless the French is
a reference to the police comedy film due to be released the following year,
the
phrase seems to be demotic, perhaps
even colloquial, possibly overheard on the train; it is minatory, as was the
other instance of direct speech: ‘back!’.
‘ne nous fachons pas’ so
that the houses
laughing in your eyes nearer
the bang
At this point, the rhythm of
mutual detournement is established: this game of one ‘player’ tripping up the
other (involvement in such collaborations inform my readings here). Is Ashbery
working from a source now, perhaps leafing through a book? Possibly his parts
of the lines
So
until January
telegraphs twitching north
to so and so
and a handkerchief slowly chopping
heaves
‘ne nous fachons pas’ so
that the houses
sound like dis-contiguous
excerpts from another discourse, decontextualised found text. Imagine a
possible context for just one of the phrases: ‘The landlords relinquished
control so that the houses might be made available to the populace.’ The same
might be said of other phrases of Ashbery, in particular, but this reading is
merely conjectural. ‘Laughing in your eyes’ is ambiguous. Is it an equivalent
of ‘laughter in your eyes’, or ‘laughing eyes’ in which case it becomes (or
could be read as) an address to Ashbury, after all, the ‘man with blue eyes’?
‘Nearer the bang’ also has sexual connotations, though vague, of intimacy and
orgasm. ‘Let a forest carress’ (sic), while being a faint echo of ‘Let’s not
get angry’, introduces a pathetic fallacy landscape. This is answered by
another phrase ‘unlace the instant’ which combines intimacy (the archaic
but teasing feminised dis-habilitation of unlacing, combined with the
suddenness of the actual moment of travelling, the actual moment of writing.
This only applies if we read ‘the instant’ as a noun. We have seen that the
line is no unit of composition or comprehension in this poem and, as we read
on, the word operates, in the unfolding of the temporality of the
poem-production, as an adjective modifying Harwood’s neologism: ‘lovecog’. This
colocation is the central pivot of the poem. Throughout the text there are
references (e.g. ‘prehensile tankers’) to mechanical-organic hybrids. This is
yet another, the ultimate abstract noun combined with the essential component
part of any mobile mechanism. (A friend, Michael Egan, suggests it’s simply the
heart.) ‘Cog’ feels very physical, a single syllable suggestively combined with
another. Love makes the world go round; so do cogs, answers the materialist. ‘Instant/
lovecog’ suggests a swift ‘quickie’.
Previously,
in another article on collaboration, I derided Wayne Kostenbaum’s homoerotic
contention that: ‘When two men write together, they indulge in double talk …
engage in metaphorical sexual intercourse,’(Moussin 4) However, in this single
example, I concur that this seems so; the lines read as a textual ‘come on’,
rebuffed by Ashbery’s uncharacteristically lengthy, and prosaic riposte: ‘did
you really understand what I meant by that? (It is the longest sentence in
the text.) It suggests that Ashbery really did understand what Harwood meant by
that. It is almost spoken through the 4th wall of the stage of the poem,
ventriloquising the lovecogist , while deflecting his approach.
The question – a challenge –is unanswered as Harwood
responds with a complete change of ‘scene’. The rural environment of the’
farmyard’ is animated by its ‘uproar of freed peasants’. It is a scene of
successful rebellion, or even revolution, sliding the discourse onto the level
of the socio-political, reminding us
perhaps of the final invocation of Harwood’s ‘Cable St.’ of the year before:’
‘O Prince your days are done/the Revolution’s come.’ (P55)
Ashbery will have none of this. One of the poets, I’m
guessing Ashbery, from inspecting the manuscript, provided an apostrophe to the
word ‘peasants’ to prevent the poem from
escaping into this politicised scenario (later Harwood poems would offer
such narrative fragments, glimpses of imagined lives), one more example of
collaborative twisting and turning.
the farmyard in an uproar of
freed peasants’ cough
drops
is an abrupt switch from
Harwood’s proletarian-peasant perspective, one is tempted to say, to Ashbery’s
more patrician point of view. Of course, the peasantry will be diseased with
cough- related illnesses, and surrealist medicine is delivered imaginatively
through a surrealist poesis! I am aware this is a desperate overreading of the
two poets’ politics, but Harwood then contributes the brief ejaculation ‘ah’ –
the shortest utterance in the verbal exchange – which suggests mild surprise or
deep disappointment, as though he’s defeated, or deflated (after all, his
‘lovecog’ has been deflected). To reanimate the flow we find ‘the old dogs
at the window’, furtively threatening in their unlocatable specificity. But
Lee Harwood has not got the message, for he responds with a nakedly
confessional praise, that might easily appear in other love poems from The Man
with Blue Eyes, such as ‘Rain journal: London: June 65’.
but my love for you outgrew
the shed
tools in disorderly heaps and
wasps
a beam sagging into twisted
visions of nowhere
How less erotic to say ‘but my
love for you outgrew the shed’, than, for example, ‘but my love for you
envelops my heart like a warm tide’ which is what one might have read here.
Again, one suspects, but can never prove, this derives from glances through the
train window, but anything might have stood in to deflect a passionate
approach, and to present a surprising juxtaposition, but how unsexy seems that
shed! The notion of outgrowing the shed again combines the organic (growth)
with the constructed (shed), unless one reads it in the sense of obsolescence,
as when a child, perhaps, outgrows a plaything or activity as a stage in its
development.
Harwood understands the institution of the shed, as a
former monumental mason’s mate, and he offers the phrase ‘tools in disorderly
heaps’ to concretize the image of the shed’s interior. ‘And wasps’ quips Ashbery,
suddenly recalling, or experiencing, an unpleasantness of summer. Ashbery’s
poems often use his memories or bits of experience which then filter into the
poems as though he himself were a kind of organic surrealist collage. ‘A beam
sagging’ might be thought as a further reference to the shed, on Harwood's
part, but sheds don't characteristically have beams, as a barn might, but the
riposte Ashbery supplies suggests that sagging motions torque into twisting,
but the line is not unlike a quotation from a translation of a bad surrealist
poem, in the context utterly appropriate:
a beam sagging into twisted
visions of nowhere
The combination of the
specific and concrete ‘beam’ with the abstract and negative unlocatable
‘visions’ is peculiarly affective, and suggestive. It is also near-conclusive in
tone as the poets progress towards the end of their poem, possibly agreeing
that the single side of the sheet of paper reproduced by Ault and Walker is the
physical constraint of the text.
I
suspect they feel the end of this collaboration approaching (as I feel this
overblown, literal -minded close reading approaching its end): I also suspect
they agreed to write one complete last line each. They need to bring the train
(poem) into the station (possibly literally, as their journey ends). Indeed,
this analogy is apposite since Harwood delivers his final full line, and writes
‘and at this the small engine appeared from the siding’, It's clearly, or seems
to be, derived from sense data from the journey, which probably lasted over 3
hours. (Sidings are characteristically near, but not in, stations.) It is an
insignificant ‘side’ event, perhaps one observed simultaneously with its
writing.
Ashbery knows, as the writer of the final line, it
behoves him to provide poetic closure, or to avoid it: ‘to inspect the
phantoms and slowly disappear.’ Inspection might well be the activity in
the siding, but here grammatically the engine itself appears to deliver its own
inspection, although it is inspecting the phantasmal, an eruption of the weird
and uncanny. This final line provides a curtain call which is also a phantasmic
dissolution of the scene (their train journey) and the text (their
collaboration); it significantly provides the single conclusive full stop of
the collaboration.
This reading contains more naturalisation than I usually
allow myself. I have found little to note formally about the poem, particularly
in terms of structure, which seems to derive from the rhythm of collaboration
and its interruptions, and possibly from the constraint of the poets filling a
single sheet of paper. But my straying from my customary formalism is not a
matter of providing a text with a context, but of exploring the recordable
material conditions of its actual production, its ‘forming’ if you like, accounted
for in the title of the poem and in the dating and placing of the poem at its
end. This seems more significant than what is normally implied by the word context
and it needs a new concept to describe its operations, possibly something like ‘in-text’,
but perhaps that is for a different occasion.
Works Cited
Attridge, Derek, The Work
of Literature (Oxford: OUP: 2015)
Ault, Alexandra, and Laura
Walker, eds., Poems in Progress: Drafts from Master Poets (London: British
Library, 2022.)
Holly A. Laird, Female
Coauthors (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000), p. 269,
fn 1.
Andrew Mossin, Male
Subjectivity and Poetic Form in ‘New American’ Poetry (New York: Macmillan
Palgrave, 2010), p. 4.
Pattison, Neil, Reitha
Pattison, and Luke Roberts, Certain Prose of The English Intelligencer.
(Cambridge: Mountain, 2012)
Porter, David, in arts
alive merseyside free magazine March 1973.
In addition to the important link at the head of this post, here are other posts on the BPR:
An original set of posts on the British Poetry Revival begin here:
Pages:
Robert Sheppard: A History of the Other: Part two. This
feeds off my book The Poetry of Saying which in turn fed off my PhD.
I revisited the subject to write ‘The British Poetry Revival,
1960-1978’, in Görtschacher and Malcolm, eds. A Companion to British and
Irish Poetry, 1960-2015, Hoboken and Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2021:
235-243, here: Pages:
Robert Sheppard: Return to the British Poetry Revival 1960-78
And reflect on it here: Pages: My
two pieces (British Poetry Revival & Harwood) & editorial exhibit in
CONTEMPORARY BRITISH AND IRISH POETRY, 1960 – 2015 Edited by Görtschacher and
Malcolm
_book_cover.jpeg)
