We launched it, a cast of thousands. Like all Shearsman launches, it was held in the Swedenborg Centre in Central London. In this case, on 10th January, 2023…
Kelvin Corcoran invited a number of poets and publishers and poetry friends to read their favourite Harwood poem(s) – I was going to add ‘from the book’, though there are some poems in the book that nobody had seen!). (See here for more on that: Pages: Lee Harwood New Collected Poems (2023) Some of the new things we found to put in it (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)). Indeed, I told the audience about the new goodies we'd found as Kelvin and I edited the volume and the restoration of poems had Lee removed (at various points, as we discovered.)
It was a well-attended affair with lots of people I hadn't seen for years, even decades. Michael Zand (one of those I'd not seen for years) said it was the kind of event that people definitely will remember for a long time. Our readers were
Andy Brown
Ian Davidson
Carrie Etter
Rafe Harwood
Ric Hool
Maria Jastrzębska
Tony Lopez
John Muckle
Frances Presley (also reading a poem chosen by
Gavin Selerie who couldn't be present)
Elaine Randell
Peter Robinson
Iain Sinclair
Frank Skinner
Simon Smith (and)
Janet Sutherland
Each reader brought something unique to the poems. Iain Sinclair commented on the charm of the reading by Lee's son, Rafe, so it seems appropriate to represent the evening with a photo of him reading. (If you are wondering, the Frank Skinner is the comedian, but he is also a poetry podcaster, and read Lee's 'One, Two, Three' well.) Thank you, all of you. Your spirit of generosity was palpable.
Iain also made an interesting remark. He said he keeps Lee's books in Hastings, because they read differently - the poems themselves change, beside the sea. I so want this to be true, but is this possible?
It doesn’t
seem possible that Cliff Yates is 70! All that tiggerish classroom energy, all
that boundless enthusiasm for the moment of poetry, all that unquenchable curiosity
for life, seem so much the possession of youth that I have to pause and count
the years.
with many poets offering their praise and
their best wishes, from Poetry and Poetics stalwarts from Edge Hill, like Andrew
himself, to Scott Thurston, Matt Fallaize and Angela Keaton, through to the big
wide world poets, like Nick Power, Matt Welton and Kelvin Corcoran, and
other names, like Pam Thompson that are new to me. Even his children are here,
both writers in their own rights. A lot of the poems address Cliff directly,
which seems right. A lot of us have attempted to write what Ian McMillan, in his tribute, calls a ‘Yatesy’ poem. There's also a video of Cliff reading (that wasn't there when I first blogged this!) Have a look at the tributes here: https://cliffyatestribute.blogspot.com/
I was also
asked to write an introduction, which I did. I was pretty pleased with that
too. I think I got it right (I won’t repeat my assessment of Cliff’s work,
because you may read that here:
Cliff was
one of the first poetry people I met when Patricia and I moved up to the North
West in 1996 (oh yes, she’s here too, or at least I think she is, she's written Cliff a poem as though she were a Bulgarian), and I had
seen some of his poems in magazines. Little was I to know that he would become
one of the important members of the original Poetry and Poetics Research Group at Edge
Hill University, which sounds a dull body, but we gave readings (Tate
Gallery no less) and made a CD and generally helped each other as writers to
become more like themselves.
Of course,
Cliff was also a famous teacher of poetry well before I met him. Read
about that here:
AND he
provided me with the word ‘provocation’ to focus my thoughts about writerly
poetics, circa 2007.
Cliff and I are definitely due another meeting
in Birmingham soon I hope.
I wrote that sentence this morning. This afternoon
I came back from a walk to find an answerphone message for Patricia and me.
From Cliff! He says he wants to say thanks and he wants to ‘catch up’. Yes,
indeed, as Sy Oliver used to sing.
Until then, have a lovely mid-winter break (or whatever
it is you wish for this season). Here’s the traditional Christmas banana to
help you get into the spirit!
Those of you who usually receive a New Year's card from Patricia and me: we've not even selected the poem, designed the cover, let alone printed them out and posted them! Not even sure whether they will happen!
I’m sure
both Kelvin and I can ‘hear’ Lee Harwood ‘reading’ whenever we peruse a Harwood
poem, even one we have not actually heard him speak. We can guess how he would have read it. This may be true of any writer, but it has been said before – most notably
by William Rowe – that conversational (and often incomplete) segments are a
kind of prosody in this work. Harwood signals it on the page, but this
signalling cannot quite replace an actual audial, aural, experience of the work.
‘There is
a direct relationship between the compositional processes of a Lee Harwood poem
and the way in which Lee Harwood the poet read his poetry,’ we say in our
introduction to our New Collected Poems (though the words, and the thoughts, are Kelvin’s
here). ‘Both work through an apparent simplicity which is typically intimated
as the almost innocent disguise and disavowal of complexity and
significance.Through collage and
various forms of declared and undeclared incompletion, the reader or listener
is gently taken unknowingly into complex and charged moments of recognition …’
We add: ‘This fundamental feature makes hearing Lee Harwood read important,’
though that’s not anything we can obviously supply in our edition (a CD
included or a set of web connections, a QR code would have been great). ‘Readings
can be found on YouTube of varying technical proficiency.The recordings in the British Library archive
are extensive but not currently available online.’ (But, it is worth adding
here, they will be!) The PennSound collection of readings is a major resource
covering 40 years of Harwood’s poetry, and a guide to where other readings are
available … The calm, measured, unostentatious delivery introduces the ambition
and confidence of the poem. This is not a sort of coyness or false modesty but
rather an acknowledgement of the scope and depth of the lyric as language at
its most intense and meaningful.’
I thought
I’d spell that invitation out, and add my own.
ONE Lee
Harwood and Ange Mlinko reading, St. Mark’s Church,
NY, December 9, 1998
TWO The
Chart Table, Lee Harwood: Poems 1965-2002.
This is
the recording released as Rockdrill CD published by the Contemporary Poetics
Research Centre, Optic Nerve for Birkbeck College, 2004, and indeed the
recordings stretch those years, the first item being from the Steam LP of 1965
and (used without permission, I note) ‘Animal Days’, at least, taken from the tape
magazine 1983, Supranormal Cassettes, which I published in 1976 (a whole
20+ minutes of it). It’s a nice ‘selected poems’ (the texts also stretching
across the years of recording! They are, in order, with tracking:
As Your
Eyes Are Blue (3:47)
The Doomed
Fleet (8:13)
Question
of Geography (2:17)
Linen
(1:52)
The Words (2:25)
Animal
Days (5:55)
Qasida
(3:49)
One, Two,
Three (4:12)
You Essai.
You O.K. (8:42)
Summer
Solstice (3:12)
African
Violets (5:37)
The Rowan
Tree (4:32)
For Paul /
Coming Out of Winter (1:28)
October Night
(3:01)
Czech
Dream (4:39)
Gorgeous
(1:28)
Late
Journeys (1:13)
The Wind
Rises (4:32)
Salt Water
(3:58)
Hampton
Court Shelter (2:46)
THREE Reading
at the Shearsman Reading Series at Swedenborg Hall, London, June 17, 2008
FOUR "Chanson
Tzara" with Lee Harwood by Alexander Baker, 2012
Of course, Lee recorded for the audio resource The Archive of Now. His poems are located here:
This recording was made on 22 August 2005, at Lee's flat in Brighton.
ANOTHER NICE SET IN FOUR VIDS Lee’s quietly
assertive delivery caused some problems with recording, as you will find looking
online elsewhere, particularly with video performances, where the microphone is
positioned where the camera is (i.e. at a distance from Lee). Often one can see
him, but you cannot hear him clearly. BUT the following recordings, from Sound
Eye 2005, in Cork, probably recorded by cris cheek, are clear and entertaining,
and are embedded from YouTube. Each is only a few minutes long.
Part one
begins with ‘As Your Eyes are Blue’ (p. 65)
If you
work your way through these recordings, with our edition to hand, you will
appreciate, I hope, what we have described above.
My
recordings of Lee, made by my friends John Purdy and Tony Parsons in 1976, were
published as 1983 number 2, and I donated the master tapes to the
National Sound Archive in the 1980s, BUT they have never appeared in the
catalogues of the British Library. However, a copy of one of the cassettes
(whose quality must have eroded) appears in the BL’s Cobbing Archive, and may
be digitalised in the future.
John James was – is – one of my favourite poets, but
you might not know it, from my published work, particularly as a critic. As a
reviewer, I once hoisted the banner by ending a review of one of his minimal
1990s volumes with the words, ‘A Collected John James please!’, which was
quoted years later by Simon Perril, introducing the Salt Companion to John
James, when – indeed – there was a Collected Poems (published by
Salt themselves), to which the contributors could make happy reference. This is
latterly supplemented by Sarments,a new and selected
poems from Shearsman.
In my Berlin Bursts there is a poem ‘As Yet
Untitled Poem’, that is dedicated to (is a homage to) John James, written on
the day he was up Edge Hill talking to our students (the night before he’d read
in the Rose Theatre, one of the many readings I organized at Edge Hill.
JJ at Edge Hill, Collected Poems aloft
The more recent Edge Hill connection was through the
anthology of poetry and poetics that James Byrne and I edited in my last year
as a full time wage-slave, Atlantic Drift. We also asked him to read for
us at the launch in the London Review of Books shop in January 2018. There’s a
report here, and a video of most of one of one of his poems (with the missing
words provided as text), shot by poet Jennie Byrne (see her work in some
editions of Tears in the Fence): Pages: John James reading
'Baudelaire at Cebazan' (robertsheppard.blogspot.com).
However, within weeks John was no longer with us, as I
posted at the time, along with the text (and video) of ‘As Yet Untitled Poem’:
Now we have to thank Lyndon Davies for producing an
edition of Junction Box with a feature on the work of James, and I have
to thank him for including my work.
I particularly have to thank him, because I have
two contributions to this feature, a new poem-sequence ‘Swift Songs for
John James,’ and an essay ‘John
James and Poetics: ‘A Theory of
Poetry’. Thanks Lyndon.
Here is a reading of 'Late Advance to Bonheur', the first part (or poem) of the sequence on video.
You will hear that I allude to that last meeting with John, and our walk along
Museum Street, and to the anthology, and its student-interns:
My essay also alludes to that last meeting, or rather, to the occasion
of using John’s poem ‘A Theory of Poetry’, as the poet’s poetics
in this anthology of poetry and poetics, a tricky move as the essay
explores. As I say, ‘This was an inevitable choice for our anthology of poetry
and poetics, since James was not given to statements of poetics,
in the sense I have defined it in a number of places,’ but I’d forgotten about
it, until I’d submitted the poem to Lyndon.
I then revised it (only to find it had been revised before!), top and tailed
it, and presented it in its final (I hope) form. (It could have been part of my
critical volume When Bad Times Made for Good
Poetry. http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2011/02/two-new-books.html.)
Note Andrew Taylor talks about finding an uncollected
poem by James, and Simon Smith provides another.
This is also an issue i.m. Chris Torrance, another
Welsh poet, by adoption, who I had been reading an interview with, while waiting
to have radiotherapy, and it occurred to me that the one with Peter Hodgkiss
hadn’t been seen since the 1970s. I suggested it to Lyndon, and it’s good
to see it here, with a few introductory words from Peter. HERE: Peter Hodgkiss: Interview with Chris Torrance for Poetry Information 1977 – Glasfryn Project
(I’ve also
incidentally been re-reading William Rowe’s Three Lyric Poets, that also
has a good chapter on Torrance’s work.) I only met Chris Torrance once, and
that was at a reading by John James, so this issue of Junction Box seems
‘just right’ for me!
How does
the 2023 New Collected Poems differ from the 2004 one that Lee himself
compiled, some people must be asking (other than the correcting of creeping
errors, etc.)? Of course, it collects poems written later than that date (some
of his best, I think, from Orchid Boat). We have also restored poems removed
from the 2004 edition, and added poems taken out of earlier ‘collecting’ and
‘selecting’ volumes, including from the monumental The White Room of 1968.
Admittedly some of these are weak poems (not all), but the restoration of the
whole of his 1965 pamphlet title illegible turns up some fascinating
poems, not least of all the opening poem-letter to his then literary hero Tristan Tzara. That provides
a bit of a blaster to the collection, a direct hit back to modernism. (Just to confirm: Harwood's translations of Tzara, still in print elsewhere, are not included in our volume.)
At quite a
late stage of editing, a pamphlet slid off the shelf (literally!), an edition
of 12, published by Lee for ‘connoisseurs’, entitled In the Mists, the
same title as his later Slow Dancer pamphlet. I idly thought it an early
version of that; but it isn’t. There are 9 poems not already published and we
have included these in a section entitled ‘Moon Phase’. Oddly, I’d always
remembered the poem of that name, a second elegy to Harwood’s grandmother, and had
long assumed it had been long published alongside ‘African Violets’, a poem Lee
would often read at readings (reading will be the subject of my next
pre-publication blog). In some ways I’ve always preferred this shorter poem,
and it seems apposite to offer it here as a brief taster for the book:
Our
editorial principles were to publish every poem or creative prose Lee published in book and
pamphlet form, but there are two (late) exceptions: a collaboration with John Hall,
called ‘Loose Packed’, a series of texts to print on card, and shuffle, and
read, and his final poem ‘Philatelic Counter’, a homage to the artist Donald
Evans. Kelvin managed to find a fine example of his work as our cover design.
The art of the blurb is not often considered (and I’m
a veteran of writing them. Here’s one I like a lot that I did for Alan Baker’s excellent Riverrun: Pages: Alan Baker's Journal of
Enlightened Panic (and the EUOIA poets) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)).
Iain Sinclair has written one for the New Collected Poems Kelvin
Corcoran and I have edited from the works of Lee Harwood for publication in
January 2023. Unfortunately, we have had to edit Iain’s copy too, in
that it is too long, with Iain’s kind permission, but the whole appears on the
Shearsman website, but I thought it might be interesting to publish it here as
well.
In Edge of Orison Sinclair makes the observation that the portrait of John
Clare below looks like the young Lee Harwood. (You'll see below he looks a bit like the later Harwood!) The thought seems to have percolated
into his sensibility, for now he’s operating with a full-blown, but mysterious,
analogy between the two writers. I have been reading Clare attentively (to
write 14 versions of his sonnets for my ‘English Strain’ project: find one
representative post here: Pages: Robert Sheppard: Four new
versions of John Clare published in Talking About Strawberries (plus videos and
links)) and I have to agree there is something in it.
Lee Harwood and John Clare: they come from such different places and
times, but they share something we can’t explain, a way of making bright and
inevitable a pattern of words, measured sounds, never there before in quite this
way, but now present for us, always. And redeemable too. Their poems affect our
memories like intimate letters from a stranger. Trust is solicited and
willingly given, experience before understanding. Light dances from the white
field of the book in our hands. Visions are offered just as they come. That is
the beautiful illusion, the uncommon gift. Sequences scroll out, playful,
perverse when required, modestly assertive, and in good heart. The captured
history of these serial engagements with consciousness lets us think better of
ourselves.
That stipple engraving of John Clare by Edward
Scriven, a commissioned frontispiece to The
Village Minstrel, taken from the portrait painted by William Hilton, brings
me back, by some unexplained alchemy, to Lee Harwood. To a certain watchful
look, questing beyond occasion, held within the climate of private reverie. Harwood knows he is untouchable in his vulnerability.
There are landscapes and there is scenery, the shared room and the mountains
climbed with friends. Purity of diction must be capable of ‘hazing the
sharpness’ of a familiar horizon.
This new collection is a generously considered
gathering of resistant and supple fragments, hard evidence of a life truly
lived. We are the beneficiaries of these dazzling transfusions of personality
and circumstance. Of remembered and newly encountered detonations of affect.
‘The clarity of such moments,’ Harwood confesses, can never stay still, even
when that seems to be the required task.Love moves and shifts. Through repeated acts of making, it coheres and
continues.
Something profound. ‘Harwood knows he is untouchable in his vulnerability,’
is itself almost a visionary remark. Instead of a blurb we have here a
mini-essay on one view of the essential qualities of Harwood’s work! We, that is Kelvin and
I as editors, and Tony as publisher, would like to thank Iain for this thought-provoking
text.
