I gave Tony Frazer a hand with the proofreading of this new book,
but it was more of a minor editorial job when we faced dilemmas like these. I
wrote to Tony:
p. 18
The paragraph/verse beginning
In the morning we go for a drive…
This looks like prose in the Oasis, but it appears lineated
in Collected, as verse. I believe this latter is wrong and that it is actually
prose, or should be. We’d need a look at the manuscript to decide this, but see
what you think! It could be either, though the tone is closer to the texture of
the prose, AND very little of the verse is punctuated in the poem. Only the
prose. As this passage is. (Compare to the ‘At night… passage on p. 16 on the
Oasis.)
p. 22; those two lines ‘…we finally begin to fall asleep…’ I
think that’s prose too, if you look at Oasis p. 19, not lineated (or it is by
accident of reaching the right margin…) Again it is punctuated.
Tony has made the good decision to stay close to the original
publication, but has corrected obvious mistakes, typos, etc.
You can buy the book here. £9.99
You can buy the book here. £9.99
A Reading of Complexity: Lee Harwood's The Long Black Veil from his volume HMS Little Fox
‘Harwood knows the uses of discontinuity,
of partial description, of tangents whose vector energies can be gripped by the
imagination, working to cohere information and feeling out of an interior
coherence of the poetic action,’ writes Eric Mottram, of Lee Harwood’s work of
the 1970s, and this description is particularly apt to the 12 part ‘notebook’
written between 1970 and 1972, The Long Black Veil, which Harwood described as ‘the end-product,
the “flower” of my work to date’, and which is the opening poem of the newly
republished HMS Little Fox.
With its Olsonian notation – actually, it well exceeds Maximus in its notational sparseness, what
Harwood called his ‘puritan’ side – and its appropriation of the ideogrammic
method of juxtaposition, it is Harwood’s longest meditation upon erotic
obsession, yet it is also a quest for the ‘comprehension of process’, to quote
the poem’s epigraph from Ezra Pound. Such process is another Olsonian
inheritance (reaching back to the philosophy of Whitehead). It is a quest
enacted through memory (‘What have we left/from all this?’);
Harwood explains the temporal organization of his poem: ‘One actuality in time
set by (beside) another, causing waves to go between the two’. Yet
the image he proffers of memory, in this most self-contradictory of his poems –
he describes it as both process and product – contradicts the possibility of
that comforting simultaneity. The image, borrowed from Borges, of a pile of
coins, each representing a memory of the preceding memory, shows ‘how our
memory distorts and simplifies events the further we move from them’.
two years
passed ‘Oh Jung’
the
cycles not repeated
only
the insistence
This distinction between vital insistence
and dead repetition exists in a tense relationship with actual memory. The
questor figure from earlier texts has learnt that memory is not just a series
of surprising recollections but is both contained and refracted through process
and mutability. Memory is paradoxical, cannot be resolved into the singularity
of narrative. There is a strong desire to feel ‘totally in one place’, though
this is undercut: ‘the dream echoed again and again ... in many places’.
The
‘Oh Jung’ above is itself a reiterated insistence carried over from a quotation
in the immediately preceding passage.
‘Concepts
promise protection
from
experience.
The spirit does
not
dwell in concepts. Oh Jung.’
(Joanne Kyger - DESECHEO NOTEBOOK)
There can be no sheltering from experience
in conceptualisations, in intellectual systems of knowledge, even in this, the
most allusive and literary of Harwood’s works, despite it being the most
trenchantly unpoetic, in its lack of euphony, metaphor, or other elements of
poetic artifice and content. The ‘Preface’ ends:
But what of the essence
of this? ‘Oh Jung's’ insistences. The Sufi story of the famous River that tried
to cross the desert, but only crossed the sands as water ‘in the arms of the wind’, nameless
but
The Sufi parable, truncated so abruptly,
demonstrates that movement or process always involves surprising
metamorphoses. Repetitions also undergo
metamorphosis at their reappearances; this involves a continual
defamiliarization. The theme turns
rather than re-turns. The repetitions
are both structuring the text and yet decentring it thematically as it
progresses, in a dialectic of repetition and surprise.
Book
One plays with the distance between word and thing, unhappy nominalism a
reflector of existential distance. ‘How
I ache now’ is equivalent to the ‘endless skies/ that ache too much’ that
appear several lines later. Despite the
alienation, nature is suffused with longing.
The text is hesitant, constantly revising itself. ‘It’s light/ I mean your body’. But the body
also is the constant referent of Book One amid the general failure of reference
(‘the words? how can they...’) and the
‘distance’ between lover and lover, and the ‘unbearable distance’ of the
‘endless skies’. ‘Your body, yes I'm
talking about it/ at last I mean this
is the discovery.’ Yet there can be no purposeful inventory of bodily
elements. The book ends:
dawn - light - body - words
- raven - skies - ache- distance - valley - sun - silos - farms - ridges - creek - each other - birds - wind
The
Flight - BA 591
These are the nouns of the first half of
the section - an alienating inventory of what is irrecoverably lost. The flight number is yet another sign of the
reality of distance. What survives this
distance, as always in Harwood’s poetry, is an enigmatic impression, a moment
from a love-affair that has been frustrated: a cinematic sequence, frozen in
the frame.
you
stop and half turn
to
tell me...
that
doesn't matter
but
your look
and
this picture I have
and
at this distance
This
is one version of what Harwood calls ‘the dream’: ‘anything that goes on in my
head, whether it be thoughts or imaginings, day-dreams or sleep dreams. They all give pictures of “the possible”, and
that is exactly their value.’ The ‘dream’, though, is only articulated in this
poem through the mediation of the transcriptions of real events, most
importantly the recording of the events of a precarious love affair and its
aftermath and memories. ‘I hold you to
me in a small room - the night air so heavy.
Inside “the dream”...’ And, as we
have seen, the ‘dream’ recurs again and again in different locations, linking
them by paradigmatic connection.
One
possible version of ‘the dream’ harks back to, is nostalgic for, the fictions
of his earlier work in The White Room, yet they are now unnecessary
evasions of the real that is emphatically celebrated in the notebook (mostly in
journal-like passages which depict travels with the lover around North America,
and which I will be passing over in this piece in the interests of economy) and
in its new-found ‘straight-talking’ diction. Unlike the early fictions,
There’s
no steamer bringing you to me
up-river
at the hill-station
No
long white dress on the verandah
It
is...
I
hold you. isn’t this enough?
The landscape becomes prey to the pathetic
fallacy, as in his earliest successful poem, ‘As Your Eyes Are Blue’, is ‘only
a description of my love for you’. The reiterated depictions of the lover’s
body turns upon both her presence and her absence, affected by the complexities
of the situation: the poem’s title, a haunting country and western song by
Lefty Frizzell (which I used to play and sing!), weirdly narrated from the
point of view of an executed man, hints that the relationship is adulterous (he
is framed for a murder but will not proffer as his defence the fact he was with
‘his best friend’s wife’). In fact, the woman of the poem was Bobbie Louise
Hawkins, the novelist with whom Harwood did in fact live with for some years in
the 1980s. (In the parallel with the song, the ‘best friend’ would have been
Robert Creeley, as Creeley himself told me, much to my surprise when I was
interviewing him. I left that bit out of the printed interview.) But that lies in
the future of this poem, as it were. (Also it is worth noting that the
notational style was not one that Harwood would return to in such detail ever
again. The ‘failure’, as Harwood thought it, of his ‘Notes of a Post Office
Clerk’, the follow-up to this poem, would confirm that.)
In Book Six - mid-way
through the text - ‘the questions of complexity’ are dealt with most fully. Harwood
quotes E.M. Forster’s obituary for Andre Gide which praises Gide for
transmitting much of ‘life’s complexity, and the delight, the duty of
registering that complexity and of conveying it’. Complexity is the
twentieth-century existential condition. It is in using Jung's essay ‘Marriage
as a Psychological Relationship’ that Harwood develops both a theory for a
constantly decentring process in his work which suggested a structural homology
for the ‘comprehension of process’, and a model for human relationships.
The distinctions
‘Oh, Jung’ (1875-1961) on ‘Marriage...’
(1925)
The container and the contained
not
or
one within the other
a continual shifting and that both ways
- more a flow - from the simplicity to the
complexity,
‘unconscious’ to conscious,
and then back again?
and the move always with difficulty, and
pain a pleasure
In Jung's theory of marriage, the
container is a complex character, the contained simple and psychologically
dependent upon the other. There are pleasurable but also painful resolutions
between them as the container looks in vain for his or her level of complexity
in the partner, whose simplicity is also disrupted by the search. The
contained, however, comes to accept his or her position and becomes acutely
aware of the necessity for self-fulfilment. Harwood subverts the underlying
submissive-dominant polarity of Jung’s essay, with his emphatic ‘and’
which suggests that the roles are interchangeable, dynamic and discontinuous.
The relationship in the poem, it must be recalled, is also far from a ‘marriage’
in conventional terms.
With such mutability,
process is both a mode of consciousness and a mode of communication:
not so
much a repetition
but a moving around a point, a line
- like a backbone - and that too moving
(on)
Part of the function of the ‘backbone’
moving around a (moving) point is that there should be no single point of view,
that it should be ‘complex’. The
‘straight-talking’ of certain parts of the poem do not contradict the elaborate
but not poetic artifice of others. They
are, to have recourse to the concepts of quantum physics, complementarities:
mutually exclusive positions that support one another, echoed later in the
text: ‘Yes and No’. Yet the most explicit model of this ‘moving/ (on)’ in the
poem is
yang
and yin
light
and dark
which is accompanied by a drawing of the
‘yang and yin’ Taoist emblem.
add
At one level this is a re-statement of the
passage above on marriage where the two partners are in a dialectical but
equitable harmony. Yet the earnest unities of Taoism are undercut -
complemented - by an all-too worldly, weary, quotation from Stendhal in which
Julien Sorel's love, and by implication, our narrator’s, is described as ‘still
another name for ambition’.
The
poem offers multiple models of experience, many ways of approaching complexity;
the instability of the lover and the erotic becomes the paradoxical centre of
the poem as he is balanced between love and ambition, and marriage and
adultery..
Jung
furnished the introduction to Wilhelm's translation of the I Ching, from
which Harwood quotes, incompletely, in Book Six.
BEFORE
COMPLETION Wei Chi/64
But
if the little fox, after nearly completing the crossing,
Gets
his tail in the water,
There
is nothing that would further.
‘This hexagram,’ the commentary to the I
Ching explains, predicts a ‘hopeful outlook’; it ‘indicates a time when the
transition from disorder to order is not yet completed’. (It also explains
where the title of the volume comes from, though this fact does not explain its
meaning.)
The
poem continues with a not entirely convincing image of the transformation of
the lover. ‘Complexity’ includes a
transformative, as well as merely linear, process, catalysis, to use Harwood’s metaphor
in other poems.
in the half light ...
A
minotaur? a cat? tiger? Her
face
a
metamorphosis seen at once
many times.
Our
powers generating...
‘Book Twelve: California Journal’
brings about a full ravelling of the complexities of earlier books, yet focuses
upon the lover. It is ironic to centre oneself in decentring, abandoned to the
openness of the ‘dream’ that evokes possibility, but constantly returns to the
lover, to pitch one time against another, only to find the farthest memories
metamorphosed in the vagaries of recollection. When the continual shifting of
place and movement, of change and exchange, and of dream and the here and now,
come to fulfilment in an extraordinarily powerful piece of prose, it is not a
resolution.
Making love, the final
blocks clear. My body taken into her
body completely, and then her body into my body....
She anoints my wrists
the anointment a ritual
like the sweetening of the body before burial, before our parting. My not realising the completeness of this
until now....
The ritual of - repeated again - No. We make love
- to each other - in
turn. The body glowing, dizzy,... walking through clouds. The faces transformed again.
She puts the bead
bracelet around my wrist
The ritual is a necessary insistence, not
a casual repetition, which involves characteristic transformation and
metamorphosis. As in a near-contemporary
poem, ‘One, Two, Three’ there is a ritual exchange. ‘She accepts the objects -
the stone, the orange blossom./She gives the objects - the whittled twig, the
dried seed pod.’ The love-making is complete in both the sense that it has
reached a certain stage of intensity; but it may also be a final act with its
funereal equation of ‘before burial’ and ‘before our parting’: so the
‘completeness’ of the anointing is not comprehended at the time. The poem ends with what might be a simple
imperative or the fragment of a larger utterance, ‘lie naked upon the bed’,
which returns to the unstable, dynamic insistence of human sexual
relationships. But the pervasive ‘dream’ and its echoes ensure that the story
will never be a simple one, that the text's end will never be definitively
conclusive.
In the face
of ‘a multiplicity of approaches’, as Harwood puts it, there can only be a
relativistic discourse, the polyphonizing of a lyric impulse and the dispersal
of narrative energies. ‘The Long Black Veil’, the longest poem in HMS Little
Fox, is an act of such dispersal, a recognition that ‘each of us lives at
the intersection of many of these... language elements.’ The 12 ‘books’ are,
with their Poundian precision and erotic uncertainty, Harwood’s mutability
cantos. Out of these elements, like postmodern science, it is ‘producing not
the known, but the unknown’, as Lyotard puts it; like a lover, it always
returns to the known, to find it changed, even in memory or language.
And news of the British Library Harwood Archive here.
HMS Little Fox reappears, with some updated corrections in New Collected Poems : see Pages: Lee Harwood New Collected
Poems: the best audio and video recordings (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)
