Ganny sat i’ th’ corner, caad as owt.
Meg cam ower ti show ‘er hor latest drawin’. It woz a pickchor ov an egg, on end, beginnin’ ti brick, an’ a large muscle-man emergin’, leastways hiz heed an’ airm.
Ganny chuckled. It myed hor think o’ the renewal o’ strength – that she needed partickler, hor, at hor age. Meg woz an aud-farrant bairn, she thot, not like hor scatty-brained Mam. She puu’d th’ rug tighter roond hor, an’ leuked toward th’ winder – the fire seemed to gie nae heat, and the sun little leet the day, which meant –
‘How, Ganny,’ sed Albie as he waaked in, huggin’ a canny bundle o’ peat wi’ him. Albie woz Ellen’s man, her daughter, but most times she felt closer to him nor hor. It woz a matter o’ respeck – that gorl had nyen, nae mense at aal!
‘Heor’s some peat’ll keep us waam, eh?’
‘Ye’ve nut ti hoy ower-much on, it’ll aal be te redee later, ye knaa.’
‘Oh, aye. Ye’ll hev ti ax Ellen aboot that noo,’ he sed, gently.
They exchanged a gliff o’ th’ ee.
‘Is it fire-neet?’ axed Meg.
‘Why noo, Mowsie, whee telt thoo?’ said her Dad, ‘Naebody, on’y Aa’m aad enuf ti hilp, Aa am!’
‘Thor’ll be nae clartin’-on the neet; thee Mam’ll nut stand fer it.’
‘Clartin’-on!’ sed Ganny, sounding reet scunner’d. ‘Th’ bairn’ll dee better fer ye than that Ellen. Nae mense at aal!’
‘Noo then, Ganny, ye knaa what Ellen thinks o’ aal this superstishun. It’s hor hyem noo – it’s aal wors – an she’s wark enuf wi’oot us makkin’ mare.’
Ganny changed th’ subjeck. ‘Hev ye sarra the hens, wor Meg?’ Mebbies she leuked fer a werd wi’ Albie in private.
But – ‘Aye. An’ ye knaa, Ganny, the clockers wor aal huddled in a heap, it woz that caad.’
‘Aye caad it is,’ the aud wife agreed.
‘Aa’ll seun hev th’ fire fettled,’ sed Albie, gerring on his knees to kittle the gleamin’ peat. ‘The fire’ll nut born reet, nut the day. Thor’ll be nae heat fra that airt.’
Albie filled th’ kettle an’ set in on the fire.
‘A cuppa’s what ye need. What we aal need. It’s that bitter, ootbye. Are ye nut frozzen, wor Mowsie?’
Mowsie rubbed her hands afore the fire; answer enuf.
‘En Ellen’ll be fetchin’ the supper, jus’ noo…’
Ganny felt her consarn risin’ wi’ this hyemly crack – cud they nut see the fire’d nut tak, the femmer yeller leet o’ th’ deh, aal wrang, aal wrang…
She storred horsell ti’ mak a bonny protest, when Ellen waak’d in.
‘Lo luv’ said Albie, gie’in hor a kiss. ‘Caad ootbye?’
‘As if ye need ask! Meg, where’s your warm socks an’ jumper? Ganny, will you not come nearer the fire?’
She set a pile of shoppin’ doon on th’ kitchen counter, an’ began riddin’ things th’ way she liked them.
‘Mowsie, fetch thee gansy,’ prompted her Dad.
‘Is the tea not mashed yet?’ axed Ellen, openin’ packages an’ stowin’ them aal-wheers.
‘Ah dunno,’ said Albie, ‘it dizzent seem ti want ti’ boil…’
‘It’ll nut,’ commented Ganny, seein’ an openin’. ‘Ellen…’
‘Not now, Granma. I’ve the sausages to defrost.’ Mebbies she knew weel enuf what Ganny would start on aboot, se she myed great business o’ puu’in’ apart the frozzen sticks o’ sausage an’ arrangin’ them i’ the microwave. Then thor woz frozzen beans ti tackle. ‘Albie, haven’t ye finished with the fire yet?’
Thor wos nae gas laid on wheer they lived, se the fire hed ti dee its share o’ ceukin’. Ellen’d nut hev a kitchen range; she hed nae tyest fer aud-farrant ways.
But eftor a bit she hed to admit defeat. ‘These sausages are nut even thawed,’ she said, sittin’ doon wi’ a sigh. ‘Maybe it’s time we moved to somewhere civilised…’
The farm was Ellen’s by reet, but nyen o’ them thot she really wanted rid ov it. It woz a canny livin’, i’ th’ sommer!
‘Aye, an’ gerra farm in Jamaica,’ sed Albie, funnin’.
‘Bishop Aucklan’s canny,’ ventured Ganny.
‘Aye,’ sed Ellen; ‘it’s not your fault were stuck here. If we could only get planning permission for the land…’
‘It’ll sarve fer years yet,’ Albie reassured hor. ‘an’ then Meg’ll graa up an’ finnd a fine young man that’ll dee aal me wark fer us, an’ Aa’ll com n sit i’ th’ neuk wi’ Ganny.’
‘An’ what about me?’ protested Ellen.
‘Whey, ye’ll hev sailed te New York an’ started a consultancy bus’ness.’
‘They do have aeroplanes, now.’
‘An’ ye’ll send us a poke o’ peat nows an’ thens, te show ye’ve nut forgetten us.’
‘I’ll send you tickets to join me, you mad thing. If I could…’
It seemed th’ caad woz getten intiv iverything. The kettle’d nut raise steam, so they settled for waamin’ up some milk an myed a crowdie wi’ breed-crumbs n oatmeal.
It was later that Ganny started getting’ restless, yance Meg hed went ti bed.
“What is it mother?” axed Ellen, not unkindly.
“Me sticks, me sticks,” the aud wife seemed to mutter, then pu’in hersell tegither: “Ellen, hinny, Aa knaa thee an me dizzent agree ower aud matters, but ye mun fetch me sticks fer the need-fire, less’n ye’ll dee the job theesell.”
“Oh mother – you shouldn’t be worrying yourself over these silly superstitions. The sun’ll come up tomorrow. Spring-time’ll return just like always. And a bonny mess we’ll find ourselves in, what with Bush invading Iraq!”
“Bugger President Bush! Aa’m taakin’ of what’s serious, gorl. The sun gans weak; the fire losses its heat – it alwez diz, this back-end o’ th’ year. Even yor ‘lectric’s nae orthly use. That’ hoo it is. An’ alwez it needs wor help, that’s for what we rekindle the fire, to fetch it back again, to strength. Ye mun put the fire oot, an’ hilp me get riddy to start it again. Please.”
“You should be in a museum, really!”
“Oh Albie, insense her ov it, will ye?”
Albie, catched in the middle, picked his werds careful-like. “Weel, me fadder elwiz re-lit the fire aboot this time, but Aa wez nivvor tewed te dee it mesell.”
“Ellen, hinny, humour me – it canna dee ony haam.”
“Why I think it should – at your age! The cold’ld kill you, if we let the fire out. Albie, cannot we mend that electric fire? It’s the cold giving her these fancies. Why, I’m cold myself, just talking about it.”
Albie muttered summat aboot nut bein’ ower good wi’ ‘lectrix. In the end, they fetched extra blankets – fer Ganny wez ower aud to clamber up stairs these days – and myed hor bed as near the fire as they dared.
And wi’ a kiss from Ellen and a hug from Albie, they clamb up ti bed, an’ left the aud wife in th’ on’y heated room i’ th’ hoose.
Ganny could not sleep. A year back, she would’ve handled the matter horsell’, nae problem. But it hed been a sorry year fer hor, an noo she could hardlies waak wivoot hilp. But sit up and get up she did. Forst, she fussed at the fire, nudgin’ the top peat away with the poker, then brikkin up the glowy bits underneath. It’d seun gan oot, that way.
Then wi’ a match, she lit hor candle – poor leet that it woz – an’ myed hor way slaa-ly ower te the kist i’ th’ neuk. Thor she fand hor matrix, hor spindle, an hor bow. The bow torned the spindle in the matrix, te kindle – what? She looked aroond fer cottonwool or the like, but fand nyen. Pyeper hankies ‘ld dee. An wi scissors she cut bits oot o’ hor hankychief. Mare smaa sticks she needed, but myed dee wi’ cereal packets an newspapers.
By when it woz that caad, she woz tempted ti gan strite back ti bed. It woz a shyem Meg wazzint let hilp her; or Ellen horsell. Mebbies a match would be bettor nor aal this carry-on – but ye cud nut be ower-careful when it cam ti matters ov import, like.
Se she settled horsell bi the hearth, takkin time to twist the bow just-se roond the spindle. Weeny bits o’ pyeper she set roond the matrix, an lange twists fer when th’ flame catched. anither piece wood capped the spindle, an it woz time to wark th’ need-fire. But hor elbers woz awful bad, an she felt that dwalmy as she set the bow movin’, she dooted she’d not manage.
Aal she cud dee woz cry oot as she fell ower, torpled aza stot.
It woz Albie hord hor caal oot.
He wakkened Ellen, an tegither they cam doon ti check.
They lifted Ganny back onti the bed, but she wazzint breathin’.
“Oh Mam,” cried Ellen, “ye’d not be telled!”
Meg cam doon, wakkened be the stour. “Is Ganny aareet?” she axed, but Ellen’s sobbing telled hor otherwise.
Poor Ganny!
Meg took up the spindle, an began ti lake wi’ it, roond n roond.
The silly soond o’ wood on wood roused Ellen. “Don’t fool about!” she thundered, an’ clickin’ up the spindle, brokk it in twee haaves, an cast it on the deed fire.
Mowsie Meg gasped.
Thor woz nowt she cud dee ti save them eftor that.
Phew. If that hasn’t completely chilled you, then there is one further Ghost Story from Bill Griffiths next month.
Page 497
Wednesday, February 22, 2006
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
Kai Fierle-Hedrick : Some Poems and a Reading
KAI FIERLE-HEDRICK
is a mixed media writer interested in locational/interdisciplinary/collaborative practices. Since 2003-4, when she earned an MPhil in Architecture & the Moving Image from Cambridge University, she has mainly been exploring combinations of text and digital media. Documentation of her work is available on her website. Bad Press published a pamphlet.
Bombazine
this body pulls armfuls of shade less lashes, each blue iris —
in its small privacy haggles terror for a gut plot
less combat, more hope diseased
gone bed-ridden & fugitive, peers oblique
through curtains to grieve
a surfeit logic so moving no news
could cave to sleep — which is to say each collar bone
sternum, spine aches through sans rest
to bank slaughter like care, mass or pittance
there can be no helmet for this
too many, too soon precious bits, sky-blown scraps
& slabs of pink flung wide as queer
silage for a public eye once uneager to water
when angst spawns empathy, a quivered light
London, UK; July 2005
still 11
and impervious to seams this
feat of entirety
that this season I am
so beatific and
bound by air become chords
of soft molecules
their thronged pause sticky
as the pant of hours; this, how
[in the lethargy
of an exhaled lung]
a gal breaks light with gestures
meant for spring
Auto-portrait with news and text
this petite waiver, sly and tabloid, fuels digression from
and into the articulation of a true space, its mass
gray / I've handled colour as man should behave,
with trained and sensitive eyes / lot of politics grabs
front-page status [site, mock context], a papal election
made pretty blurb, made print / you can recognize this
double behaviour / how I love that Albers loves
red, our want of sincerity or ode / of colour
a mother, stabbed, displaces popes — another day,
the pope returns, a jewel in his hat, its would-be good
[i.e., net worth] retracting zilch / and from all this you may
conclude that I consider ethics and aesthetics as one
* italics signify lines pulled from an interview with Josef Albers conducted by Katherine Kuh
Postscript, Cafe Ouky Douky
Manipulation in particular seems to play a significant role as a strategy of dealing
with the world and assumed reality. [...] Manipulations and deceptions become guidelines
in a pursuit of communication and a proper place — but first of all — they are instruments
to investigate never-too-near-approached phenomenon of truth.
* Adam Budnek, for the 2005 International Biennale of Contemporary Art in Prague
the contemporary interior here short-circuits
alienation sums Prague as this woman or
that woman browsing packaged hours i.e., tram times
to plot arrivals how this man quotes tourism
as asymmetric opportunity their lives in ochre
chapped by the same, pale city or costume
change a time of day, say 6pm, undressing
its turnover with the command to ponder
regularlity substance some moving thing
or metronome their conversation, rhythm poaching
the page like other countries, interrupting
as spectacle made norm by the universal
of cafe culture junctured, caffeinated, common
grounds, the rhythm of human digits drilling
and dwelling swigging, twiddling their high-
strung ways as a taut boredom the preferred
mantra an elastic gainsaying i.e., how she overhears
'I was just traipsin' streets when...' and waxes
meaningful falls prey to another sham
mayhem as stained glass lamps bearing fruit
indeed might break her foreign prerogative
to evade even cross-cultural ruts by any
means the vital act to fictionalise the local
as events let loose the abstract, fatten
narrative, exaggerate, befuddle, fuck up
the line we love this, she and I, for its schizophrenic
stealth we, double-time, risk ethics through
meddling spurn talk as ornament and aim
for the blunt and dusted buildings, their striations
and back-lighting by proxy mark observation as a misfit
stalker interlopers as postcards by Durex quoting
condoms as flying saucers the clatter of wind-chimes
of panes of glass reflective proving our patronage
or my tiger of a t-shirt and foreign cheek bones
bunk presence as witness a sigh of bloody
eureka and scribbling nicks the place
Page 496
is a mixed media writer interested in locational/interdisciplinary/collaborative practices. Since 2003-4, when she earned an MPhil in Architecture & the Moving Image from Cambridge University, she has mainly been exploring combinations of text and digital media. Documentation of her work is available on her website. Bad Press published a pamphlet.
Bombazine
this body pulls armfuls of shade less lashes, each blue iris —
in its small privacy haggles terror for a gut plot
less combat, more hope diseased
gone bed-ridden & fugitive, peers oblique
through curtains to grieve
a surfeit logic so moving no news
could cave to sleep — which is to say each collar bone
sternum, spine aches through sans rest
to bank slaughter like care, mass or pittance
there can be no helmet for this
too many, too soon precious bits, sky-blown scraps
& slabs of pink flung wide as queer
silage for a public eye once uneager to water
when angst spawns empathy, a quivered light
London, UK; July 2005
still 11
and impervious to seams this
feat of entirety
that this season I am
so beatific and
bound by air become chords
of soft molecules
their thronged pause sticky
as the pant of hours; this, how
[in the lethargy
of an exhaled lung]
a gal breaks light with gestures
meant for spring
Auto-portrait with news and text
this petite waiver, sly and tabloid, fuels digression from
and into the articulation of a true space, its mass
gray / I've handled colour as man should behave,
with trained and sensitive eyes / lot of politics grabs
front-page status [site, mock context], a papal election
made pretty blurb, made print / you can recognize this
double behaviour / how I love that Albers loves
red, our want of sincerity or ode / of colour
a mother, stabbed, displaces popes — another day,
the pope returns, a jewel in his hat, its would-be good
[i.e., net worth] retracting zilch / and from all this you may
conclude that I consider ethics and aesthetics as one
* italics signify lines pulled from an interview with Josef Albers conducted by Katherine Kuh
Postscript, Cafe Ouky Douky
Manipulation in particular seems to play a significant role as a strategy of dealing
with the world and assumed reality. [...] Manipulations and deceptions become guidelines
in a pursuit of communication and a proper place — but first of all — they are instruments
to investigate never-too-near-approached phenomenon of truth.
* Adam Budnek, for the 2005 International Biennale of Contemporary Art in Prague
the contemporary interior here short-circuits
alienation sums Prague as this woman or
that woman browsing packaged hours i.e., tram times
to plot arrivals how this man quotes tourism
as asymmetric opportunity their lives in ochre
chapped by the same, pale city or costume
change a time of day, say 6pm, undressing
its turnover with the command to ponder
regularlity substance some moving thing
or metronome their conversation, rhythm poaching
the page like other countries, interrupting
as spectacle made norm by the universal
of cafe culture junctured, caffeinated, common
grounds, the rhythm of human digits drilling
and dwelling swigging, twiddling their high-
strung ways as a taut boredom the preferred
mantra an elastic gainsaying i.e., how she overhears
'I was just traipsin' streets when...' and waxes
meaningful falls prey to another sham
mayhem as stained glass lamps bearing fruit
indeed might break her foreign prerogative
to evade even cross-cultural ruts by any
means the vital act to fictionalise the local
as events let loose the abstract, fatten
narrative, exaggerate, befuddle, fuck up
the line we love this, she and I, for its schizophrenic
stealth we, double-time, risk ethics through
meddling spurn talk as ornament and aim
for the blunt and dusted buildings, their striations
and back-lighting by proxy mark observation as a misfit
stalker interlopers as postcards by Durex quoting
condoms as flying saucers the clatter of wind-chimes
of panes of glass reflective proving our patronage
or my tiger of a t-shirt and foreign cheek bones
bunk presence as witness a sigh of bloody
eureka and scribbling nicks the place
Page 496
Tuesday, January 31, 2006
Bill Griffiths (Ghost Story 4): On Friday Morn
She was quite good, professionally speaking. She could take an average rumour, a bit of council flap-about, and make it sound quite convincing. After all, that was what was important wasn’t it? – not the pretend-cult of the pseudo and academic objective, the twisty-trail of flippant truth, but the ability to promote the issues, bestow the unspoken attention that assisted the flight of the political arrow. How else was she expected to access material at all? Dead-pan and objective, financial advantage, personal vendetta and tiny alert were handled with the same apparently harmless gloss. It meant a leasing of the soul, perhaps, but how else should one thrive?
It seemed an infallible recipe for a long career.
Ah yes, here she is, tipping and tapping away on a major project that will reveal a historic co-operation between Parish, Police and Property Developers: in which they will all – basically – swop premises, release land, make (who would even notice the assumption?) a better environment for everyone to live in. It takes talent.
“Aa nivvor was inclined te wryte p’rose ona Fryda morn, messel,” said a bass voice, over her shoulder.
A round-headed councillor had come through the gap in the counter to spy on her. Or so she supposed. Either they came to share information, or to extract it.
“I didn’t know you wrote.”
He was a link that could be (had been) useful, a sort of yesterday asset, or she would have ordered him straight back into the public quarter. Doubtless he had the same liberal view of her function, or he would not have approached.
“Oh aye, in the Yunyon en thet. Reports, letters, wor newsletters, press releases. But we wor telled nut te dee that wark ova Fryda morn. Unlucky, they allus sed.”
She smiled. Unlucky, to her, meant not getting a news story finished on time.
“Sounds more like slacking than superstition. Or did you work twice as hard of a Friday afternoon?”
Well, she wouldn’t be telled, that was obvious. Probably thought computers cancelled the laws of luck.
“Fryda post-noon? Na, we spent that in the betty-shop.”
Ha! He really was a dinosaur. What could she say? Euro-grants weren’t won in betting shops, that was for sure. She ignored him.
“That yor piece on the polliss HQ?”
She absently nodded. He could contribute or go and tew someone else.
“Any thing new to add?”
She was a hard women, he thought. No time for polite talk at all. Well, let her do without.
“Na,” he said, and shifted his weight onto the other buttock.
…looks set to succeed. The present accommodation is recognised as too far from… a more compact, central operation, said a spokesman… but historical… ideal… firmly intends… and if all goes according to plan, the Council are asking for… sometime this year… an imaginative solution… the police are looking to vacate… we look forward to… the community will be involved in… more in our next issue…
And lots of photos. That was the popular touch. Loans from the Developers of suitable images would certainly back their case. Looks good. The pen-sketch future. They’ll be voting in the streets to get the policy approved. She picked up the phone to check… There was a terrible whistling sound on the line. ‘Yaaarrgh!’ – she distanced the handset. A shadow flicked over the street window, leaving her looking grey and shabby for a moment. A snatch of song filtered in from the street. …and the ship not far from land!
She had heard that song before. Something to do with Friday, she guessed. Was it that dodo of a councillor come back? But no one entered the street-shop premises of this sub-
station journalesque. Just one of those passing impressions. “It was,” she reflected, “a good idea to know when to be silent.”
How many historic buildings had fall’n victim to the wreckers’ slam without even a mention? – without so much as a prayer over their dismantled carcasses! Some things must not stand in the way of progress. A plaque – she ruminated – on the side of the telephone box where the great gothic hospital once stood; a shrubbery to mark the spot where that sweet old dene had succumbed to housing encroachment. No, not in her brief. Her editor backed her on that one: leave the campaigns to the environmentalists, he advised. No need for us to get involved.
She was uncertain whether he was being consciously ironic or not in suggesting this. He might not know, to be fair, what everyone else knew, that the local environmental society was run by current and retired County Council employees, whose silence on aggravating topics was a miracle of tact. Ah, silence, that wonderful word (she reflected) – as another raucous line or two filtered in from the street…
…then three times round… then three times round went she…
Might almost be me twirling around in my chair, she thought, as she super-sped another remarkable article to the head office in Kidderluck through the internet. She stuck her head out of the door. Reassuringly, the new executive select houses stood shiny and brave on the brow over the dene, like Red Indians on the skyline, waiting to charge down on the cowering misery of the valley wagon-train. As it were. Always inspiration in Nature, she reflected.
…and sank to the bottom of the sea, the sea, the sea…
Who was that singing? She could see no one who could possibly be the minstrel. Not that old lady, wondering hopelessly round searching for some long-gone launderette. Not the egg-taggle of youths at the far corner, without a tash or bass voice between them. Cabin-boys, she mused grimly, as she imagined them sucked into a vortex of screaming water. Just then, the secretary at the Town Council came hurrying out of her door, making a bee-line for the newspaper office.
She pulled our threshold reporter inside, shut the door, and set away.
“It’s awful. You haven’t heard?”
“What?”
“Oh my dear – Councillor Crosp. Dead!”
“Crosp?”
“Just an hour back. Heart attack.”
“He was in here. You know, lurking about.”
“And he came to us. Aggravated he seemed. Sommick about someone singing. Unlucky he called it. Went home. Then sudden attack. The heart, you know.”
“No chance?”
“Dead on arrival. So sudden.”
Yes, they reflected. His great booming voice…
“Wasn’t he due to…”
“Yes, this very evening. To sing at the charity do. Such a lovely voice. And seasongs. As a young man that was. Why, he used to charm us lasses…”
“I’m sure,” she said, feeling a little gaunt and tired.
‘And all man’s work’s the grave,’ she reflected.
Now many a decade has filed by. The devious plans of this or that policy group have hardly left a trace. The backhanders have been pocketed, the money spent, and the car or present it bought, long rusted through. The only positive result of time has proved the filling in of the docks, and the construction of a sea-platform to act as a heliport and small-plane drome. A few aeronautical shops, one storey max, are tucked away near the dene. Everyone else has gone. Bits of former houses have tumbled down the dene and blocked the stream at the bottom.
Page 495
There will be another uncanny excursion into local government necromancy in next month’s Pages from Dr Griffiths.
It seemed an infallible recipe for a long career.
Ah yes, here she is, tipping and tapping away on a major project that will reveal a historic co-operation between Parish, Police and Property Developers: in which they will all – basically – swop premises, release land, make (who would even notice the assumption?) a better environment for everyone to live in. It takes talent.
“Aa nivvor was inclined te wryte p’rose ona Fryda morn, messel,” said a bass voice, over her shoulder.
A round-headed councillor had come through the gap in the counter to spy on her. Or so she supposed. Either they came to share information, or to extract it.
“I didn’t know you wrote.”
He was a link that could be (had been) useful, a sort of yesterday asset, or she would have ordered him straight back into the public quarter. Doubtless he had the same liberal view of her function, or he would not have approached.
“Oh aye, in the Yunyon en thet. Reports, letters, wor newsletters, press releases. But we wor telled nut te dee that wark ova Fryda morn. Unlucky, they allus sed.”
She smiled. Unlucky, to her, meant not getting a news story finished on time.
“Sounds more like slacking than superstition. Or did you work twice as hard of a Friday afternoon?”
Well, she wouldn’t be telled, that was obvious. Probably thought computers cancelled the laws of luck.
“Fryda post-noon? Na, we spent that in the betty-shop.”
Ha! He really was a dinosaur. What could she say? Euro-grants weren’t won in betting shops, that was for sure. She ignored him.
“That yor piece on the polliss HQ?”
She absently nodded. He could contribute or go and tew someone else.
“Any thing new to add?”
She was a hard women, he thought. No time for polite talk at all. Well, let her do without.
“Na,” he said, and shifted his weight onto the other buttock.
…looks set to succeed. The present accommodation is recognised as too far from… a more compact, central operation, said a spokesman… but historical… ideal… firmly intends… and if all goes according to plan, the Council are asking for… sometime this year… an imaginative solution… the police are looking to vacate… we look forward to… the community will be involved in… more in our next issue…
And lots of photos. That was the popular touch. Loans from the Developers of suitable images would certainly back their case. Looks good. The pen-sketch future. They’ll be voting in the streets to get the policy approved. She picked up the phone to check… There was a terrible whistling sound on the line. ‘Yaaarrgh!’ – she distanced the handset. A shadow flicked over the street window, leaving her looking grey and shabby for a moment. A snatch of song filtered in from the street. …and the ship not far from land!
She had heard that song before. Something to do with Friday, she guessed. Was it that dodo of a councillor come back? But no one entered the street-shop premises of this sub-
station journalesque. Just one of those passing impressions. “It was,” she reflected, “a good idea to know when to be silent.”
How many historic buildings had fall’n victim to the wreckers’ slam without even a mention? – without so much as a prayer over their dismantled carcasses! Some things must not stand in the way of progress. A plaque – she ruminated – on the side of the telephone box where the great gothic hospital once stood; a shrubbery to mark the spot where that sweet old dene had succumbed to housing encroachment. No, not in her brief. Her editor backed her on that one: leave the campaigns to the environmentalists, he advised. No need for us to get involved.
She was uncertain whether he was being consciously ironic or not in suggesting this. He might not know, to be fair, what everyone else knew, that the local environmental society was run by current and retired County Council employees, whose silence on aggravating topics was a miracle of tact. Ah, silence, that wonderful word (she reflected) – as another raucous line or two filtered in from the street…
…then three times round… then three times round went she…
Might almost be me twirling around in my chair, she thought, as she super-sped another remarkable article to the head office in Kidderluck through the internet. She stuck her head out of the door. Reassuringly, the new executive select houses stood shiny and brave on the brow over the dene, like Red Indians on the skyline, waiting to charge down on the cowering misery of the valley wagon-train. As it were. Always inspiration in Nature, she reflected.
…and sank to the bottom of the sea, the sea, the sea…
Who was that singing? She could see no one who could possibly be the minstrel. Not that old lady, wondering hopelessly round searching for some long-gone launderette. Not the egg-taggle of youths at the far corner, without a tash or bass voice between them. Cabin-boys, she mused grimly, as she imagined them sucked into a vortex of screaming water. Just then, the secretary at the Town Council came hurrying out of her door, making a bee-line for the newspaper office.
She pulled our threshold reporter inside, shut the door, and set away.
“It’s awful. You haven’t heard?”
“What?”
“Oh my dear – Councillor Crosp. Dead!”
“Crosp?”
“Just an hour back. Heart attack.”
“He was in here. You know, lurking about.”
“And he came to us. Aggravated he seemed. Sommick about someone singing. Unlucky he called it. Went home. Then sudden attack. The heart, you know.”
“No chance?”
“Dead on arrival. So sudden.”
Yes, they reflected. His great booming voice…
“Wasn’t he due to…”
“Yes, this very evening. To sing at the charity do. Such a lovely voice. And seasongs. As a young man that was. Why, he used to charm us lasses…”
“I’m sure,” she said, feeling a little gaunt and tired.
‘And all man’s work’s the grave,’ she reflected.
Now many a decade has filed by. The devious plans of this or that policy group have hardly left a trace. The backhanders have been pocketed, the money spent, and the car or present it bought, long rusted through. The only positive result of time has proved the filling in of the docks, and the construction of a sea-platform to act as a heliport and small-plane drome. A few aeronautical shops, one storey max, are tucked away near the dene. Everyone else has gone. Bits of former houses have tumbled down the dene and blocked the stream at the bottom.
Page 495
There will be another uncanny excursion into local government necromancy in next month’s Pages from Dr Griffiths.
Wednesday, January 25, 2006
Robert Sheppard: Review of Harwood's Collected Poems (part two)
It’s a Long Road: Part Two. The first part was posted on Pages in December, here
About half way through his Collected Poems we see the emergence of the mature Lee Harwood. It is worth remembering that 300 pages (of 522) of the Collected were written by the time he was 40. From this date, 1979, the work, while continuing to record the vicissitudes of personal relationships and thematic obsessions, and while emphatically insisting that it is making art from these materials, demonstrates a stylistic assurance that can use whatever expressive mode is at hand. While ‘Old Bosham Bird Watch’ (a text I examined last month from the late 1970s) may have re-kindled Harwood’s interest in prose, this confidence may have been reinforced by participating in two collaborative projects, which provided him with two new prose forms.
The first one, ‘Wine Tales (1979-81)’, a work written mostly in prose with Ric Caddell, and published under that title by Peter Hodgkiss’s Galloping Dog Press in 1984, makes open play with the conventions of the short story or the fictionalised vignette. The text’s conceit is a version of the game played by Raymond Rousell: imagining oneself disappearing into labels on wine bottles (though the collaborators eschew Rousell's punning); the labels that Caddel and Harwood use are reproduced in the original publication. Caddel's texts and responses as well as Harwood's are generously included in the Collected. In ‘Claret’, which Harwood published separately (and is printed here also in the ‘All the wrong notes’ section!), he imagines the ‘large grey chateau’ on the wine label as ‘A Gestapo Headquarters – interrogation rooms and cells- ’, but reminds us that ‘this in my imagination in a sun-filled kitchen in the early afternoon in September’, a place ‘where such interrogations could equally happen’ between ‘husband and wife’. (CP 260 and 304) Block prose paragraphs allow for multiple connections to be laid out, precisely juxtaposed, as each new paragraph signals a change of ‘scene’ quite literally (from Gestapo HQ to kitchen, to windows and rooms in South London (‘Step into that room’) to a noisy children’s cinema. (CP 260 and 304). The poem ends, jokingly, but menacingly, for the ordinary harbours such acts of micro-fascism: ‘If we sit quiet and still we will be allowed to see the rest of Sabu the Elelphant Boy with French subtitles’. (CP 261 and 304).
‘Wish You were here: six postcards’ originally published with Antony Lopez’ replies (by Paul Brown’s Transgravity in 1979), here forms the opening work of the section ‘All the wrong notes 1976-1983’. Again, as its title suggests, it uses visual materials as stimulus, which is a common method of composition from this time. More generally, it also makes use of one of Jack Spicer’s forms, which Harwood has made his own: a lyric fragment juxtaposed with a prose statement or apposed fictional passage at the foot of the page, a flexible mode of combining text and commentary, and perhaps of reversing them. While ignoring Spicer’s more teasing and sometimes contradictory use of this form, it would prove useful to Harwood in other of the poems collected in ‘All the wrong notes (1976-1983)’, the long section of the Collected reprinting Monster Masks of 1985 which had itself absorbed the texts of All the wrong notes (1981), but not the original photographs by Jud Walker of Brighton streets, hills, alleyways and littorals. Both books were published by Caddel's Pig Press.
Most notable around this time is Harwood’s development of the long sequence, mixing modes as he sees fit, and juxtaposing longer passages (often in Spicer’s double voiced discourse), as a gentler form of the collage and cut up procedures developed earlier, as in the excessively entitled ‘Faded ribbons around the lost bundle now being devoured by moths’, which mixes lyric, prose, fiction, fact, and emphasises imaginative methods of transformation. Cavalier fictionalising often raises ‘the question of where vanity and obsession meet or divide or…’ (CP 312), while the natural world offers the seductions of simple enumeration, as well as subtle ‘distinctions’:
blackbird’s song
skylark’s trill
cuckoo’s call (CP 313)
But the desire to link aesthetic and sensual experiences (as they are in their etymologies, of course) haunts the piece: ‘A 13th century ceiling meets Schubert meets/a glass of chilled white wine and a ripe peach’. (313) This ‘meeting’, this deliberate juxtaposition, offers the hope for an imaginative interinanimation of various cultural artefacts and sensuous experiences.
While aesthetically the assurance of the later pieces is a success, there is no doubting the negative aspect of Harwood’s imaginative restlessness, where ‘meeting’ can degenerate into slippage, and even evasion. He himself, writing in 1993, suggests that such stylistic restlessness – rapid changes of direction and attitude - may indeed at least partly derive from a personal disposition. (Although the metaphor used here is of an earlier civil conflict in English history, there is a clear echo of the ‘puritan-cavalier routine’, examined last month, and of the way that that stylistic formulation echoed emotional and sexual vicissitudes.)
'I almost feel there’s nothing I can trust except the mountains and the countryside, and possibly the writing. I certainly don’t trust myself but continually doubt my ability to hold one idea or emotion without it suddenly sliding away from me, beside me, whatever. I feel like one of the earls in the Wars of the Roses. I set my standard up but as quickly leave the battlefield when most needed or even go over to the other side. I know I can be trusted when navigating in cloud on a mountainside but certainly not when trying to navigate sexual and some emotional "clouds" (though I wish I could).' (p. 150 Lee Harwood, Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, Volume 19, pp. 135-153, at 151.)
A revitalised juxtaposition of ever more discrete and larger fragments occurs in ‘Dream Quilt, 30 Assorted stories 1983-1984’, a text written after Harwood had split up with Jud Walker in 1983 and had moved to the artists’ colony of Bolinas, California, where lived with, and was directly influenced by, the fiction writer Bobbie Louise Hawkins for a year and a quarter. This work draws out Harwood’s tendency towards the short story that had been growing over a number of years. Harwood’s reading had always included prose, from the oblique fictions of Borges, to the sensually exuberant autobiographies of Jocelyn Brooke, but what he was not influenced by was the emerging form of British literary fiction, whether Amis or McEwan, Carter or Winterson, which may explain the slight archaic feel to their written surface. These ‘stories’, ‘flashbacks’, ‘fairy tales’, 'odes', 'hommages' 'dreams’, ‘announcements’ (to cluster several generic indices from their titles) are arguably ‘short short stories’. However, reading them today in the era of the 50 word short story, or slash fiction, or alongside a 'novel' such as Dan Rhodes’ neo-Oulipean 101 101 word chapters, Anthropology (2000), they seem almost prolix by comparison. He plays on his own history and those of friends (Caddell and Mottram, among others), he elaborately details his 45th birthday. He incorporates written narratives by his young children, as well as disappearing into his dreaming imagination. Various texts travel from the sublime to the ridiculous, and the sublimity of the ordinary, but never loose a gentle self-mockery when Harwood represents himself as a slightly bemused and stilted figure in a landscape. One fiction ends, ‘(Imagine all of the above.)’ as though the words, as ever, will be never quite enough, unless some total readerly engagement is enacted by such parenthetical prompts.
Back in Brighton in 1984, and returned to his post office job, in his poems of the two next sections, ‘Rope Boy to the Rescue 1983-1987’ and ‘In the Mists 1988-1993’, Harwood increasingly refers to his passion for mountain climbing, and country walking, examples of the forces he says he can ‘trust’. Rope Boy to the Rescue, which was also published as a separate volume in 1988, by North and South, run by Peterjon and Yasmin Skelt, contains poems which, while exemplifying the gains of the previous few years, sometimes fail to satisfy. For example, ‘The Unfinished Opera for Marian’ (O’Dwyer) is a prolix exercise in romantic operatic pastiche: ‘I have loved you for twenty stumbling years,’ is a desperate admission amid the camp excess of Albanian hussars and pangolins! (CP 386) This contrasts with the tightness of the first of several love poems dedicated to Sandy Berrigan (who was married to poet Ted), ‘Gyögy Kurtág meets Sandy Berrigan’. The title reminds us of Harwood’s strong sense of ‘meeting’; the poem is a ‘song cycle’ that fully deserves its lyrical aspirations towards music through the naming of the composer in its title. It risks unashamed tinges of narcissism: ‘But in love with being in love,/with feeling precious.’ (CP 372)
Although Harwood was to wait until 2004 for the Collected Poems occasioning this review, a selected poems, Crossing the Frozen River, a title which yet again foregrounds the sense of precarious travel, appeared in 1988, and was generally well received. Published by Paladin alongside the anthology The New British Poetry, which also contained his work, both were instigated by of the unsung general editor of both volumes (and more), John Muckle. (See some recent poems by Muckle as the last posting from Pages.)
‘In the Mists (1988- 1993)’ is subtitled ‘mountain poems’, and appeared as a pamphlet of that title from John Harvey's Slow Dancer in 1993. The deliberately clumsy title, ‘If you think this is just descriptions, it isn’t’, reminds the reader that considered enumeration, in writing about the natural environment, may be considered evocation, another ‘meeting’, this time of man and nature, culture and the environment. Another poem records one notable historical failure of this perspective: ‘"I see Nature bothers him" Maddox Brown noted of Rosetti.’ (CP 400) There are poems to Harry Guest (a poet-friend since 1963, and probably the dedicatee of the early erotic reverie of ‘This Morning’) that flirt ambivalently with the numinous religiosity of his older Anglican friend. ‘Gilded White’, a second ‘Sandy Berrigan’ poem, in lyric form again (prose has more or less temporarily vanished from Harwood’s repertoire) is a triumph of hesitant lyricism, where Harwood (whose early New York casualness of line generally gave way to phrasal lineation) pays particular attention to the aesthetics of line breaks. A gift becomes the focus of a connecting ‘wrapping’ not just of itself but of memory, experience and place, a locus of time and space, although the local (‘Sussex’) is distanced by such a ‘meeting’:
Japan is a long way away Italy is a long way away
California is a long way away Sussex is a long way away
but all gently wrapped together in this moment
your gift (CP 414)
These aesthetic delights – these are just a few - are overshadowed by the death of Harwood's friend, Paul Evans, whom he had known since 1965, while climbing with Harwood on Crib-y-ddysgl, Snowdon, in 1991. There are a number of moving elegies to him, ranging from the starkly notational ‘On the Ledge’, which narrates the incidents of the fatal accident, even to ‘a final thudding stillness’, (CP 406), through to ‘For Paul/Coming out of Winter’, an attempt at redemptive imaginative recovery and a reprise of a subject dealt with both in Harwood’s own earlier poem which recalled walking the seashore with Evans, ‘You essai. You o.k.’, and Evans’ own reciprocal ‘It’s No Good Lee’, which concludes, ‘it can’t be done’; that is, to describe the variety of the sea in words. Harwood’s elegy ends with a restatement of the two poets’ agreed humility in the face of the inadequacy of language to reach whatever it is that is not ‘just descriptions’:
How many times we discussed the sea’s colours
all beyond description words a mere hint
of what’s before our eyes then and now (CP 407)
In 1992 Harwood co-edited and published, from his own Skylark Press, The Empty Hill: memories and praises of Paul Evans which contains memoirs, critical articles, and poems by, and to, Evans. (Evans’ The Manual for the Perfect Organisation of Tourneys, Oasis Books, London, 1979, I have long regarded as one of the forgotten masterpieces of the British Poetry Revival.)
The trauma of this event, problems with employment, and a bout of bad health probably explain why between 1989 and 1996, years represented by the ‘Morning Light’ section of Collected Poems, there are fewer poems than one might expect. They were first published in the Slow Dancer volume Morning Light of 1998. However, there are three outstanding long sequences. ‘The Songs for Those Who Are On The Sea of Glass’ is an account of a heart attack, ending with the startlingly rare sonic patterning of ‘sat up in bed in bizarre pyjamas’, which signals some release from the glass sea of illness. ‘Dreams of Armenia’ presents the history of a nearly-forgotten genocide (a mode of ethnic cleansing contemporaneously revived in the Balkans and in Rwanda). Lyric inter-cuts are truncated by ‘informations’. For me, the most resonant lines in the whole of Harwood’s oeuvre are the chilling but tender: ‘They would do this to you, my love,/and to our son,’ (CP 444) which it forces against – how could we assume the positivity of ‘meets’? – grim enumerations of ‘Massacres. shootings, bayoneting, hacking….’ (CP 444) The 50 short sections of ‘Days and Nights’ came out of Harwood’s short period of employment as a museum attendant (they were ‘written’ in Harwood’s head). It ranges from single word entries, such as ‘(space)’ (CP 421), which attempts to look outwards, and ‘sullen’ (CP 422) which looks inwards, to meditations on its own temporal development (and in confirmation of Harwood’s attachment to his frequent use of gerund forms of verbs): ‘always in the present ing ing’. (CP 421) There is nothing quite as minimal as this in Harwood's work, although it reminds one of Raworth's serial composition ‘Stag Skull Mounted’ (1970), to which it refers, and from which it quotes, commenting on its failure of method, or failure as method: ‘As Tom once wrote “this trick doesn’t work”’. (CP 422) Structurally, ‘Days and Nights’ testifies to the belated and repeated influence of Ashbery’s ‘Europe’, and there is a further precedent in the delicate miniature boxes of Joseph Cornell, to whom the piece is dedicated (and to whose work Harwood has compared his more stylised fictions).
‘Late Journeys (1996-1998)’, the final section of Morning Light (but here extended with a further poem), is dominated by love poems (one dedicated to Penny (Bailey)) in a variety of lyric modes, recording a variety of states, from exultation to self-pitying dejection. But even where the inadequacy of language is referred to again, these poems can be refreshingly detailed, and mysteriously erotic: ‘Cobwebs stretch from rust patina. Still water/in a sexual scoop’. (CP 460)
The early years of the twenty first century have seen the collected volumes of a number of Harwood’s nearest contemporaries; for example, Tom Raworth and John James both published Collected Poems in 2002. The need for a Lee Harwood Collected Poems did not pass by Tony Frazer of Shearsman Books, and he proposed the publication of this handsome and extensive volume, which appeared in 2004. Such a welcome request to a poet often interrupts the usual accumulation of work towards the poet’s next volume, and the section ‘Evening Star 1998-2003’ may well have been (or still be) the beginning of a further book (it was a pamphlet from the Leafe Press in 2004). This section is overwhelmed, rather than overshadowed, by another death, this time of a daughter, Joey Peirce/Harwood, at three days, in 1997, and the three elegies to her brief ‘Morning Star’ are deeply moving: ‘The sun rises three times/The sun sets three times’ (CP 480). But Harwood returns the reader to the world ‘going about its usual business’, (CP 481), and to other children, and the indivisible and inexhaustible continuum of human interaction: ‘The children running on the dyke bank/absorbed in the world.’ (CP 482) The most beautiful of the ‘Sandy Berrigan’ poems so far, ‘The wind rises: Istvan Martha meets Sandy Berrigan’, muses on the effects of ageing, as the long road progresses:
is this what getting old is?
Learning to live like this – that strength
increasingly needed. Or sink into gaga? (CP 487)
All of these contrast with ‘Five pieces for five photos’ which, via the stimulus of photographs as part of an abandoned commission, returns Harwood’s writing practice to history, to a restless multiplicity, after so much lyric, as in this teasing reaction to a photograph of an OK Sauce factory taken just after the First World War:
All those self-appointed spiritual officials, gurus, shamans. Who needs them and their elaborate power games? their prohibitions and idiot explanations? We should gloop OK sauce over them when they’re in full flight. (CP 495)
(I take it this isn’t an example of product placement. If Mr Harwood entertains with too many sauce bottles on the table, we’ll know why!) For a few years before he reached retirement age in 2004, Harwood had taken up a new occupation as a train guard, which he relished for its social usefulness. ‘You’re working on the railways? You must be joking,”/said the grand lady, before returning to her Kent “estate”’. (CP 496) This ‘Alternatively’ couplet from the end of one of the ‘five pieces’, ‘View of Site Workers from Above’, records the hurt of such an attitude to ordinary, dignified, and necessary, labour, more in sadness than anger; it contrasts with the more openly politicised Harwood of the mid-1970s, for whom work was represented as alienated labour. The poem, to which this is an alternative ending, concludes with a rapturous ode to the dignity of labour: ‘The railwayman. The social worker./ “honouring their world” is the phrase.’ (CP 496)
As though this poem, with its alternative ending were a hint, Collected Poems is deliberately left open, remains as unfinished as possible, at its end, given the authoritative imprimatur of its title and its definitive temporal limits: ‘1964-2004’. The final section of the book, ‘Take A Card, Any Card: An Ikonostasis’ (2003-2004), is a series of poems which may be read in any order, ‘52 pieces to be shuffled as you will’, as the title page invokes, suggesting that its eventual (or ideal) publication may be as loose-leaf cards, like one of Joseph Cornell’s ‘dosiers’. (CP 505) It is as though questions of sequencing, which have hitherto involved aesthetic choices of the greatest importance, have found their most radical answer, as if the role of the reader has developed beyond a respectful co-creation, into the primary role of operator of the cards. Leaving aside theories of computer games, cybertexts or ergogic literature, Harwood has produced what Umberto Eco long ago called ‘a work in movement,’ one ‘literally “unfinished”: the author seems to hand them to the performer more or less like the components of a construction kit.’ However, the openness of the gesture of ‘Take a Card, Any Card’, a stage magician's invitation to participate in a trick, contrasts with the religiosity and stasis, the sense of meditation, evoked by the concept of the ikonstasis. (‘We all in our homes often have a wall where we put our favourite pictures,’ Harwood explains, domesticating this religious device. Many of the ‘cards’ were stimulated by Harwood’s own array of images above his writing desk.) One part directly considers the function of the religious Ikon: ‘The pure virgin, immaculate mother/ of myth or mistranslation’. (CP 514). The idea of a misunderstanding of the word we translate as ‘virgin’ unsettles the Ikon’s entire purpose and undermines religious idolatory. One section, in its entirety, confesses: ‘I don’t know the connections,’ presumably between its parts, including those potential ones caused by the juxtapositions of the shuffling and selection of the ‘cards’. (CP 571) But another conjures up memories of an erotic encounter, of ‘making love with you among the apple trees./Decades ago, but still here set in my head.’ (CP 520) Language will inevitably fail the experience, however inevitable the memory seems: ‘like a…? I don’t know what./It’s there just like my bones are there.’ (CP 520) The reader, shuffling between the cards, is nevertheless not invited into the text of the card – unlike the similar ‘breakdown’ of simile in the late 1960s poem ‘Linen’ – but must meditate outside the frame, and then immediately mediate between the other cards in one’s hand.
‘Take A Card’ is also unfinished in a more literal sense. Collected Poems only supplies the first 26 of the pack.
So far.
So good. It’s still a long road.
Page 495
I am currently editing the Salt Companion to Lee Harwood.
(2014: Some more on 1990s sequences here. See a review of Harwood's 2014 book The Orchid Boat here. 2015: i.m.)
About half way through his Collected Poems we see the emergence of the mature Lee Harwood. It is worth remembering that 300 pages (of 522) of the Collected were written by the time he was 40. From this date, 1979, the work, while continuing to record the vicissitudes of personal relationships and thematic obsessions, and while emphatically insisting that it is making art from these materials, demonstrates a stylistic assurance that can use whatever expressive mode is at hand. While ‘Old Bosham Bird Watch’ (a text I examined last month from the late 1970s) may have re-kindled Harwood’s interest in prose, this confidence may have been reinforced by participating in two collaborative projects, which provided him with two new prose forms.
The first one, ‘Wine Tales (1979-81)’, a work written mostly in prose with Ric Caddell, and published under that title by Peter Hodgkiss’s Galloping Dog Press in 1984, makes open play with the conventions of the short story or the fictionalised vignette. The text’s conceit is a version of the game played by Raymond Rousell: imagining oneself disappearing into labels on wine bottles (though the collaborators eschew Rousell's punning); the labels that Caddel and Harwood use are reproduced in the original publication. Caddel's texts and responses as well as Harwood's are generously included in the Collected. In ‘Claret’, which Harwood published separately (and is printed here also in the ‘All the wrong notes’ section!), he imagines the ‘large grey chateau’ on the wine label as ‘A Gestapo Headquarters – interrogation rooms and cells- ’, but reminds us that ‘this in my imagination in a sun-filled kitchen in the early afternoon in September’, a place ‘where such interrogations could equally happen’ between ‘husband and wife’. (CP 260 and 304) Block prose paragraphs allow for multiple connections to be laid out, precisely juxtaposed, as each new paragraph signals a change of ‘scene’ quite literally (from Gestapo HQ to kitchen, to windows and rooms in South London (‘Step into that room’) to a noisy children’s cinema. (CP 260 and 304). The poem ends, jokingly, but menacingly, for the ordinary harbours such acts of micro-fascism: ‘If we sit quiet and still we will be allowed to see the rest of Sabu the Elelphant Boy with French subtitles’. (CP 261 and 304).
‘Wish You were here: six postcards’ originally published with Antony Lopez’ replies (by Paul Brown’s Transgravity in 1979), here forms the opening work of the section ‘All the wrong notes 1976-1983’. Again, as its title suggests, it uses visual materials as stimulus, which is a common method of composition from this time. More generally, it also makes use of one of Jack Spicer’s forms, which Harwood has made his own: a lyric fragment juxtaposed with a prose statement or apposed fictional passage at the foot of the page, a flexible mode of combining text and commentary, and perhaps of reversing them. While ignoring Spicer’s more teasing and sometimes contradictory use of this form, it would prove useful to Harwood in other of the poems collected in ‘All the wrong notes (1976-1983)’, the long section of the Collected reprinting Monster Masks of 1985 which had itself absorbed the texts of All the wrong notes (1981), but not the original photographs by Jud Walker of Brighton streets, hills, alleyways and littorals. Both books were published by Caddel's Pig Press.
Most notable around this time is Harwood’s development of the long sequence, mixing modes as he sees fit, and juxtaposing longer passages (often in Spicer’s double voiced discourse), as a gentler form of the collage and cut up procedures developed earlier, as in the excessively entitled ‘Faded ribbons around the lost bundle now being devoured by moths’, which mixes lyric, prose, fiction, fact, and emphasises imaginative methods of transformation. Cavalier fictionalising often raises ‘the question of where vanity and obsession meet or divide or…’ (CP 312), while the natural world offers the seductions of simple enumeration, as well as subtle ‘distinctions’:
blackbird’s song
skylark’s trill
cuckoo’s call (CP 313)
But the desire to link aesthetic and sensual experiences (as they are in their etymologies, of course) haunts the piece: ‘A 13th century ceiling meets Schubert meets/a glass of chilled white wine and a ripe peach’. (313) This ‘meeting’, this deliberate juxtaposition, offers the hope for an imaginative interinanimation of various cultural artefacts and sensuous experiences.
While aesthetically the assurance of the later pieces is a success, there is no doubting the negative aspect of Harwood’s imaginative restlessness, where ‘meeting’ can degenerate into slippage, and even evasion. He himself, writing in 1993, suggests that such stylistic restlessness – rapid changes of direction and attitude - may indeed at least partly derive from a personal disposition. (Although the metaphor used here is of an earlier civil conflict in English history, there is a clear echo of the ‘puritan-cavalier routine’, examined last month, and of the way that that stylistic formulation echoed emotional and sexual vicissitudes.)
'I almost feel there’s nothing I can trust except the mountains and the countryside, and possibly the writing. I certainly don’t trust myself but continually doubt my ability to hold one idea or emotion without it suddenly sliding away from me, beside me, whatever. I feel like one of the earls in the Wars of the Roses. I set my standard up but as quickly leave the battlefield when most needed or even go over to the other side. I know I can be trusted when navigating in cloud on a mountainside but certainly not when trying to navigate sexual and some emotional "clouds" (though I wish I could).' (p. 150 Lee Harwood, Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, Volume 19, pp. 135-153, at 151.)
A revitalised juxtaposition of ever more discrete and larger fragments occurs in ‘Dream Quilt, 30 Assorted stories 1983-1984’, a text written after Harwood had split up with Jud Walker in 1983 and had moved to the artists’ colony of Bolinas, California, where lived with, and was directly influenced by, the fiction writer Bobbie Louise Hawkins for a year and a quarter. This work draws out Harwood’s tendency towards the short story that had been growing over a number of years. Harwood’s reading had always included prose, from the oblique fictions of Borges, to the sensually exuberant autobiographies of Jocelyn Brooke, but what he was not influenced by was the emerging form of British literary fiction, whether Amis or McEwan, Carter or Winterson, which may explain the slight archaic feel to their written surface. These ‘stories’, ‘flashbacks’, ‘fairy tales’, 'odes', 'hommages' 'dreams’, ‘announcements’ (to cluster several generic indices from their titles) are arguably ‘short short stories’. However, reading them today in the era of the 50 word short story, or slash fiction, or alongside a 'novel' such as Dan Rhodes’ neo-Oulipean 101 101 word chapters, Anthropology (2000), they seem almost prolix by comparison. He plays on his own history and those of friends (Caddell and Mottram, among others), he elaborately details his 45th birthday. He incorporates written narratives by his young children, as well as disappearing into his dreaming imagination. Various texts travel from the sublime to the ridiculous, and the sublimity of the ordinary, but never loose a gentle self-mockery when Harwood represents himself as a slightly bemused and stilted figure in a landscape. One fiction ends, ‘(Imagine all of the above.)’ as though the words, as ever, will be never quite enough, unless some total readerly engagement is enacted by such parenthetical prompts.
Back in Brighton in 1984, and returned to his post office job, in his poems of the two next sections, ‘Rope Boy to the Rescue 1983-1987’ and ‘In the Mists 1988-1993’, Harwood increasingly refers to his passion for mountain climbing, and country walking, examples of the forces he says he can ‘trust’. Rope Boy to the Rescue, which was also published as a separate volume in 1988, by North and South, run by Peterjon and Yasmin Skelt, contains poems which, while exemplifying the gains of the previous few years, sometimes fail to satisfy. For example, ‘The Unfinished Opera for Marian’ (O’Dwyer) is a prolix exercise in romantic operatic pastiche: ‘I have loved you for twenty stumbling years,’ is a desperate admission amid the camp excess of Albanian hussars and pangolins! (CP 386) This contrasts with the tightness of the first of several love poems dedicated to Sandy Berrigan (who was married to poet Ted), ‘Gyögy Kurtág meets Sandy Berrigan’. The title reminds us of Harwood’s strong sense of ‘meeting’; the poem is a ‘song cycle’ that fully deserves its lyrical aspirations towards music through the naming of the composer in its title. It risks unashamed tinges of narcissism: ‘But in love with being in love,/with feeling precious.’ (CP 372)
Although Harwood was to wait until 2004 for the Collected Poems occasioning this review, a selected poems, Crossing the Frozen River, a title which yet again foregrounds the sense of precarious travel, appeared in 1988, and was generally well received. Published by Paladin alongside the anthology The New British Poetry, which also contained his work, both were instigated by of the unsung general editor of both volumes (and more), John Muckle. (See some recent poems by Muckle as the last posting from Pages.)
‘In the Mists (1988- 1993)’ is subtitled ‘mountain poems’, and appeared as a pamphlet of that title from John Harvey's Slow Dancer in 1993. The deliberately clumsy title, ‘If you think this is just descriptions, it isn’t’, reminds the reader that considered enumeration, in writing about the natural environment, may be considered evocation, another ‘meeting’, this time of man and nature, culture and the environment. Another poem records one notable historical failure of this perspective: ‘"I see Nature bothers him" Maddox Brown noted of Rosetti.’ (CP 400) There are poems to Harry Guest (a poet-friend since 1963, and probably the dedicatee of the early erotic reverie of ‘This Morning’) that flirt ambivalently with the numinous religiosity of his older Anglican friend. ‘Gilded White’, a second ‘Sandy Berrigan’ poem, in lyric form again (prose has more or less temporarily vanished from Harwood’s repertoire) is a triumph of hesitant lyricism, where Harwood (whose early New York casualness of line generally gave way to phrasal lineation) pays particular attention to the aesthetics of line breaks. A gift becomes the focus of a connecting ‘wrapping’ not just of itself but of memory, experience and place, a locus of time and space, although the local (‘Sussex’) is distanced by such a ‘meeting’:
Japan is a long way away Italy is a long way away
California is a long way away Sussex is a long way away
but all gently wrapped together in this moment
your gift (CP 414)
These aesthetic delights – these are just a few - are overshadowed by the death of Harwood's friend, Paul Evans, whom he had known since 1965, while climbing with Harwood on Crib-y-ddysgl, Snowdon, in 1991. There are a number of moving elegies to him, ranging from the starkly notational ‘On the Ledge’, which narrates the incidents of the fatal accident, even to ‘a final thudding stillness’, (CP 406), through to ‘For Paul/Coming out of Winter’, an attempt at redemptive imaginative recovery and a reprise of a subject dealt with both in Harwood’s own earlier poem which recalled walking the seashore with Evans, ‘You essai. You o.k.’, and Evans’ own reciprocal ‘It’s No Good Lee’, which concludes, ‘it can’t be done’; that is, to describe the variety of the sea in words. Harwood’s elegy ends with a restatement of the two poets’ agreed humility in the face of the inadequacy of language to reach whatever it is that is not ‘just descriptions’:
How many times we discussed the sea’s colours
all beyond description words a mere hint
of what’s before our eyes then and now (CP 407)
In 1992 Harwood co-edited and published, from his own Skylark Press, The Empty Hill: memories and praises of Paul Evans which contains memoirs, critical articles, and poems by, and to, Evans. (Evans’ The Manual for the Perfect Organisation of Tourneys, Oasis Books, London, 1979, I have long regarded as one of the forgotten masterpieces of the British Poetry Revival.)
The trauma of this event, problems with employment, and a bout of bad health probably explain why between 1989 and 1996, years represented by the ‘Morning Light’ section of Collected Poems, there are fewer poems than one might expect. They were first published in the Slow Dancer volume Morning Light of 1998. However, there are three outstanding long sequences. ‘The Songs for Those Who Are On The Sea of Glass’ is an account of a heart attack, ending with the startlingly rare sonic patterning of ‘sat up in bed in bizarre pyjamas’, which signals some release from the glass sea of illness. ‘Dreams of Armenia’ presents the history of a nearly-forgotten genocide (a mode of ethnic cleansing contemporaneously revived in the Balkans and in Rwanda). Lyric inter-cuts are truncated by ‘informations’. For me, the most resonant lines in the whole of Harwood’s oeuvre are the chilling but tender: ‘They would do this to you, my love,/and to our son,’ (CP 444) which it forces against – how could we assume the positivity of ‘meets’? – grim enumerations of ‘Massacres. shootings, bayoneting, hacking….’ (CP 444) The 50 short sections of ‘Days and Nights’ came out of Harwood’s short period of employment as a museum attendant (they were ‘written’ in Harwood’s head). It ranges from single word entries, such as ‘(space)’ (CP 421), which attempts to look outwards, and ‘sullen’ (CP 422) which looks inwards, to meditations on its own temporal development (and in confirmation of Harwood’s attachment to his frequent use of gerund forms of verbs): ‘always in the present ing ing’. (CP 421) There is nothing quite as minimal as this in Harwood's work, although it reminds one of Raworth's serial composition ‘Stag Skull Mounted’ (1970), to which it refers, and from which it quotes, commenting on its failure of method, or failure as method: ‘As Tom once wrote “this trick doesn’t work”’. (CP 422) Structurally, ‘Days and Nights’ testifies to the belated and repeated influence of Ashbery’s ‘Europe’, and there is a further precedent in the delicate miniature boxes of Joseph Cornell, to whom the piece is dedicated (and to whose work Harwood has compared his more stylised fictions).
‘Late Journeys (1996-1998)’, the final section of Morning Light (but here extended with a further poem), is dominated by love poems (one dedicated to Penny (Bailey)) in a variety of lyric modes, recording a variety of states, from exultation to self-pitying dejection. But even where the inadequacy of language is referred to again, these poems can be refreshingly detailed, and mysteriously erotic: ‘Cobwebs stretch from rust patina. Still water/in a sexual scoop’. (CP 460)
The early years of the twenty first century have seen the collected volumes of a number of Harwood’s nearest contemporaries; for example, Tom Raworth and John James both published Collected Poems in 2002. The need for a Lee Harwood Collected Poems did not pass by Tony Frazer of Shearsman Books, and he proposed the publication of this handsome and extensive volume, which appeared in 2004. Such a welcome request to a poet often interrupts the usual accumulation of work towards the poet’s next volume, and the section ‘Evening Star 1998-2003’ may well have been (or still be) the beginning of a further book (it was a pamphlet from the Leafe Press in 2004). This section is overwhelmed, rather than overshadowed, by another death, this time of a daughter, Joey Peirce/Harwood, at three days, in 1997, and the three elegies to her brief ‘Morning Star’ are deeply moving: ‘The sun rises three times/The sun sets three times’ (CP 480). But Harwood returns the reader to the world ‘going about its usual business’, (CP 481), and to other children, and the indivisible and inexhaustible continuum of human interaction: ‘The children running on the dyke bank/absorbed in the world.’ (CP 482) The most beautiful of the ‘Sandy Berrigan’ poems so far, ‘The wind rises: Istvan Martha meets Sandy Berrigan’, muses on the effects of ageing, as the long road progresses:
is this what getting old is?
Learning to live like this – that strength
increasingly needed. Or sink into gaga? (CP 487)
All of these contrast with ‘Five pieces for five photos’ which, via the stimulus of photographs as part of an abandoned commission, returns Harwood’s writing practice to history, to a restless multiplicity, after so much lyric, as in this teasing reaction to a photograph of an OK Sauce factory taken just after the First World War:
All those self-appointed spiritual officials, gurus, shamans. Who needs them and their elaborate power games? their prohibitions and idiot explanations? We should gloop OK sauce over them when they’re in full flight. (CP 495)
(I take it this isn’t an example of product placement. If Mr Harwood entertains with too many sauce bottles on the table, we’ll know why!) For a few years before he reached retirement age in 2004, Harwood had taken up a new occupation as a train guard, which he relished for its social usefulness. ‘You’re working on the railways? You must be joking,”/said the grand lady, before returning to her Kent “estate”’. (CP 496) This ‘Alternatively’ couplet from the end of one of the ‘five pieces’, ‘View of Site Workers from Above’, records the hurt of such an attitude to ordinary, dignified, and necessary, labour, more in sadness than anger; it contrasts with the more openly politicised Harwood of the mid-1970s, for whom work was represented as alienated labour. The poem, to which this is an alternative ending, concludes with a rapturous ode to the dignity of labour: ‘The railwayman. The social worker./ “honouring their world” is the phrase.’ (CP 496)
As though this poem, with its alternative ending were a hint, Collected Poems is deliberately left open, remains as unfinished as possible, at its end, given the authoritative imprimatur of its title and its definitive temporal limits: ‘1964-2004’. The final section of the book, ‘Take A Card, Any Card: An Ikonostasis’ (2003-2004), is a series of poems which may be read in any order, ‘52 pieces to be shuffled as you will’, as the title page invokes, suggesting that its eventual (or ideal) publication may be as loose-leaf cards, like one of Joseph Cornell’s ‘dosiers’. (CP 505) It is as though questions of sequencing, which have hitherto involved aesthetic choices of the greatest importance, have found their most radical answer, as if the role of the reader has developed beyond a respectful co-creation, into the primary role of operator of the cards. Leaving aside theories of computer games, cybertexts or ergogic literature, Harwood has produced what Umberto Eco long ago called ‘a work in movement,’ one ‘literally “unfinished”: the author seems to hand them to the performer more or less like the components of a construction kit.’ However, the openness of the gesture of ‘Take a Card, Any Card’, a stage magician's invitation to participate in a trick, contrasts with the religiosity and stasis, the sense of meditation, evoked by the concept of the ikonstasis. (‘We all in our homes often have a wall where we put our favourite pictures,’ Harwood explains, domesticating this religious device. Many of the ‘cards’ were stimulated by Harwood’s own array of images above his writing desk.) One part directly considers the function of the religious Ikon: ‘The pure virgin, immaculate mother/ of myth or mistranslation’. (CP 514). The idea of a misunderstanding of the word we translate as ‘virgin’ unsettles the Ikon’s entire purpose and undermines religious idolatory. One section, in its entirety, confesses: ‘I don’t know the connections,’ presumably between its parts, including those potential ones caused by the juxtapositions of the shuffling and selection of the ‘cards’. (CP 571) But another conjures up memories of an erotic encounter, of ‘making love with you among the apple trees./Decades ago, but still here set in my head.’ (CP 520) Language will inevitably fail the experience, however inevitable the memory seems: ‘like a…? I don’t know what./It’s there just like my bones are there.’ (CP 520) The reader, shuffling between the cards, is nevertheless not invited into the text of the card – unlike the similar ‘breakdown’ of simile in the late 1960s poem ‘Linen’ – but must meditate outside the frame, and then immediately mediate between the other cards in one’s hand.
‘Take A Card’ is also unfinished in a more literal sense. Collected Poems only supplies the first 26 of the pack.
So far.
So good. It’s still a long road.
Page 495
I am currently editing the Salt Companion to Lee Harwood.
(2014: Some more on 1990s sequences here. See a review of Harwood's 2014 book The Orchid Boat here. 2015: i.m.)
Tuesday, December 20, 2005
Robert Sheppard: Review of Harwood's Collected Poems
It’s a Long Road: a journey through Lee Harwood’s Collected Poems
Part One
Lee Harwood’s Collected Poems – references to it marked CP in the text - takes the reader through varying landscapes, and changing obsessions, personal relationships, artistic passions. The metaphor of travel is apposite for a major characteristic of Harwood’s writing, that is, its restlessness, and one he repeatedly uses himself. On page 229 (about half way through this forty year accretion of work) we are warned to expect ‘a long road’; reaching the penultimate page we are reminded still ‘it’s a long road’ (p. 521). It is a journey, characterised not just by mutability and variety, but by what Harwood calls an ‘insistence’ (p. 168). It is
not so much a repetition
but a moving around a point, a line
- like a backbone – and that too moving
(on) (CP 177)
For example, the effect of the numerous times the reader is reminded of the inadequacy of language, particularly to evoke the emotive charge of erotic adventure, is cumulative. ‘You’ – followed by half a page width of silent space – ‘I hardly begin to say’ is emblematic of dozens of such insistences, limit-cases, crisis-points, breakdowns. (CP 463) The confessions of faltering, stumbling words, ‘moving around a point’, or the dozens of literally unfinished declarations of love or wonder, suggest that Harwood has snatched such anti-rhetorical ‘failure’ from the jaws of his greatest triumphs, his wounded poems.
Reading this oeuvre is also a stylistic adventure, a pageant of literary forms, with its readerly delights and surprises. Harwood knows this too. When he writes, ‘My heart weeps,’ and then comments, ‘Who would ever have thought I’d write that?/ “My heart weeps”?’ – he not only presents the troubling sentence twice, he presents its repetition in his frequently used and estranging quotes to defuse the subterranean romanticism – but he also knows he can rely upon a readership of whom he can ask such a question, who have followed his progressive ‘movings-on’ (CP 182), who have become accustomed to the interrogative assumption behind his ‘voice’, indeed recognise this self-conscious, knowing hesitancy as his voice (to play up to that doubtful metaphor).
The stages of this long – unfinished - journey are represented by the sections of the Collected Poems, published by Tony Fraser’s Shearsman Books in 2004. They broadly correspond to previously published books or to sections of those books. Very few poems have been omitted from what is now effectively the canon of Harwood’s work, and these are stylistically weak texts, mostly plucked from the company of poems in the first 96 pages of this 522 page publication.1 More positively, a number of uncollected poems have been added, mostly from the 1970s and the early 1980s, along with some previously unpublished recent work (to which I will return next month).
The White Room ( Fulcrum Press, 1967), Harwood’s first large volume, was already a kind of early collected poems, and began, as does this new book, with early work, called here ‘title illegible/early work 1964-1965’. Most of this was originally published in Harwood’s first pamphlet, with its characteristically self-evasive title: title illegible (1965). A regular attendee at Bob Cobbing’s Writers Forum workshop (and he was later, in 1967, to follow Cobbing as manager of Better Books, an important subcultural London venue throughout the sixties), Harwood was also published by Cobbing’s press. Little of this Writers Forum pamphlet survives the editorial process; this section of early work is dominated by ‘Cable Street’, a flawed but necessary poem, and important for Harwood’s subsequent development in that it is a long text in lyric fragments and prose. It is not unlike Roy Fisher’s near contemporary City (1960), or, only a little more distantly, the later books of William Carlos Williams’ Paterson. (It also encouraged others, such as Iain Sinclair, to begin to explore the little histories of London.) The text deals with Harwood's day to day life in the East End (where he lived until 1967, with his first wife, Jenny Goodgame, whom he married in 1961, and their son, Blake, born the following year), balancing the everyday with - to take one central example - the Battle of Cable Street between the fascists and communists, which was played out on the same turf 30 years before. The young Harwood applauds Lenin and eulogises the coming revolution: ‘O Prince your days are done/The Revolution’s come’. (CP 22)
The labour Harwood expended in the mid and late 1960s on translating from the French a representative selection of the ex-Dadaist and Surrealist Tristan Tzara possibly steered him from continuing to use this work as a direct model in his own writing (only a few early exercises in surreal mode are included). He met Tzara in 1963, not long before his death, and Tzara approved certain of the early translations. This body of work also is excluded from the Collected Poems, but several volumes have gathered these translations and its introductions, including Chanson Dada in 1987, for which he wrote a new introduction, and which is due to be republished soon. He also published a Tzara bibliography in 1974. As a part of the burgeoning literary underground Harwood was also a publisher of occasional magazines, (Night Scene, Soho, Horde) whose name changed with each issue, but one was an act of pure homage and assumed lineage: Tzrarad. There was even a subsequent anthology of that name. In his recent In the Sixties, Barry Miles explains: ‘We published Darazt, an anthology featuring a long poem by Lee Harwood, and named after his mimeo magazine, Tzarad (Darazt being Tzarad backwards). Lee was particularly fond of Tristan Tzara. There were some collages by me, inspired by Max Ernst, some photographs of Gala Mitchell naked by Hoppy, inspired by Bill Brandt, and a three-column text by William Burroughs.’ (Barry Miles, p. 64) 'Hoppy' was John Hopkins, who also ran the UFO Club, the centre of underground musical culture, with which Harwood also had some contact. Along with Pete Brown, Spike Hawkins and others, Miles tells us, Harwood read at the first ‘Spontaneous Underground’ event at the Marquee Club in January 1966, on an anarchic bill that included Donovan and Graham Bond, with most of the performers and audience in fancy dress. (When read this passage recently over the phone, Mr Harwood denied remembering any of it, proving, I suppose, that if you can remember the sixties then you weren’t blah blah blah. Or possibly the shame of being on the same bill as Donovan provokes amnesia. (The other day there was a horrible scream from downstairs. I went down there. I asked Patricia what the matter was. She said that Donovan was on Midweek. Why? I asked with incredulity. Cashing in on the Dylan revival, she explained. Again? sez I!). There's also the question of the relationship of Harwood's The White Room with the Cream song of the same title, written by Pete Brown.)
The brief gay lyrics early in the Collected, ‘This morning' for instance, open a theme of erotic longing at forced separation that haunts the entire oeuvre: ‘the pain of my leaving/and my love for you’. (CP, 23) This intensifies in ‘The Man with Blue Eyes’, a section of both Collected Poems and The White Room. This also appeared, under that title, as a separate volume, published by Lewis Walsh and Anne Waldman’s Angel Hair Books in 1966. It won the Frank O'Hara Prize, and heralded Harwood’s arrival in New York and inaugurated a transatlantic exchange that continues to this day. An erotic liaison with John Ashbery (whom he had met in Paris in 1965), and a more general literary engagement with the New York poetry scene at its height, engendered some deeply felt love poetry, including 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.’ In those days homosexuality was still illegal. In comparison, the straight love poem, ‘Summer’, demonstrates a similar erotic anxiety, though it can afford to be more graphic (though anatomically questionable, ‘length’ surely a masculinist measure of eroticism):
The damp heat
and discomfort of clothes, a tongue passing the length
of her clitoris … and back again …
erections in the musty pavilion. ( CP 41).
Indeed the explicitness is arguably an over-compensation for the restraint of the, otherwise better written, gay poems with their lack of gender markers, and their focus on detached parts of the body; ‘if only I could touch your naked shoulder’ could easily be read as non-gender specific. (CP 29)
The final ‘Blue Eyes’ poem, 'Landscape with 3 People’, while signalling separation and loss as much as earlier poems, is the first poem to adopt the more obvious narrative, even allegorical, mode that dominates the ‘The White Room (1966-67)’, replete with the mysterious menace that ghosts so many of Harwood’s fictions:
I loved him and I loved her
and no understanding was offered
to the first citizen
when the ricks were burnt (CP 50)
This large section reminds us that Harwood’s sheer output of the later 1960s and early 1970s is staggering. (One hundred and sixteen of the 500 pages were produced before he was 30.) More obvious exercises in a New York mode suggest Harwood was in danger of becoming a card-carrying member of an already fading avant-garde. The tragic death of O'Hara in 1966 might be thought emblematic of its demise, despite the rise of the genius of the second generation, Ted Berrigan. Harwood mirrors the insistent jocular name-checking and casual enjambment of the two poets:
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;
maybe I will one day, but it will have to be soon
as he must be getting old. (CP 58)
Ironically, it was Prince – a stylish British poet much admired by Ashbery, and who Harwood did subsequently meet! – who issued the salutary warning that Harwood was ‘pattering on’. This led Harwood to realise the dangers of sheer production: ‘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’. (PI p 13) The best poems in The White Room show an opening of this range beyond standard second generation 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 our modern mythologies - and even about the nature of poetry itself. He matches an adherence to New York grace, while characteristically focusing on linguistic failure:
PLATO was right to banish
poets from the Republic. Once they try to go beyond the
colours and shapes, they only ever fail, miserably –
some more gracefully than others. (CP 96)
The influence of Borges’ strange narratives is evident too. Even some of these poems are rather long, and the danger of 'pattering on' was sharply dealt with by the next Fulcrum book, Landscapes (1969). Again the change of style or emphasis is prefigured by a single poem in the earlier volume, this time ‘When the Geography was Fixed’, which was originally featured in The White Room, as well as in Landscapes.
The section ‘Landscapes 1967’ is actually best read as (if not originally conceived of) as a sequence of eight poems that meditates dreamily upon the doubleness of its title: a landscape is a geographical term as well as the name of its artistic representation. The role of artifice is obvious in this interplay of nature and culture, erotic encounter and erotic representation. ‘When the Geography was Fixed’ plays on the conceit that ‘one woman in the gallery… liked the picture and somehow the delicate/ hues of her complexion were reflected in it’ (CP 100). This creates an ontological uncertainty, a sort of palimpsest world, which is an analogue for the mechanisms of consciousness and memory. (It may owe to O’Hara’s own poem of the erased canvas, ‘Oranges’.)
- you paint over the picture and start on
the new one but all the same it’s still there
beneath the fresh plains of colour (CP 108)
‘Landscapes’ is one of Harwood's finest achievements. In contrast, ‘The Picture Book 1968’ is a mixed bag. Its obsession with love and colonialism points towards the thematics of The Sinking Colony, while ‘The Coast 1968’, which was the final part of the Landscapes volume, points towards the stylistic fragmentation of that next Fulcrum book. Half lines and caesurae attempt a new semantic simplicity, while notions of heterosexual love as atomised body parts and the specifics of coastal geography merge to create stylistic complexity.
The whole outline called ‘geography’
meeting at a set of erotic points
lips shoulders breasts stomach
the town dissolves sex thighs legs (CP 125)
‘The Coast’ also announces Harwood’s partial removal to the actual coast, at Brighton, where he worked initially at Bill Butler’s underground Unicorn bookshop, though during these years he led a peripatetic life, taking on various temporary jobs from librarianship to forestry, between Brighton, London, Exeter, and Gloucestershire. His first marriage had broken up by this time.
The poems in ‘HMS Little Fox 1967-1968’ had to wait until 1975 for a larger volume (of that title) to appear. The closure of the important Fulcrum Press in 1973 by its founders, Stuart and Deirdre Montgomery (Stuart is a dedicatee of one poem), meant these poems appear displaced in Harwood’s publishing history. While this at once attests to the prodigious output of these years, the delay in publication may also derive from the fact that the poems obliquely record the ‘morbid masochism’ of the heroin addiction that had overtaken Harwood in these years. (CP 139) It was not just the geography that was ‘fixed’, to use a pun he opens up in the pointedly entitled and barely encoded ‘Chemical Days’:
‘The fix’ can only mean
the man with two blue flags who stands all day
on the cliff top. (CP 133)
His attempt to escape this ‘fix’ is charted most poignantly in ‘Love in the Organ Loft’, a poem dedicated to Marian (O’Dwyer). ‘Watching over my’ sleeping ‘love’ like one of Picasso’s minotaurs, the narrator fights not just the drug as he
double(s) my usual intake
to feel without compassion my brain wince
under chemical blows,
but the disjointed fictionalising that this evokes, or produces through confusion or hallucination:
I mean what is happening? – NOW! Do you see
what I mean? – like does the cathedral nestle
in the sky’s warm lap?....
This parable can be used for most things – think of a river … (CP 138)
This ‘almost indefinitely transferable allegory of “feeling”’ (to use Prynne’s term for this aspect of Harwood’s work) contrasts so much with the coterminous poems of ‘The Coast 1968’ that one must note this as the beginning of what Harwood later called a routine: ‘I can see my work does seem to swing this way; it’s a sort of puritan-cavalier routine. I suddenly wanted to cut the crap, and stop being a tap-dancer, and try to talk straight’ (PI p. 13), a stylistic oscillation between plainness and baroqueness, notational realism and elaborate fictiveness, a battle between the influence of Creeley and Olson on one hand, and Ashbery and Borges on the other. ‘Love in the Organ Loft’ explicitly equates the plain style with health and artifice with addiction, abjection, and evasion. More generally, there is another dichotomy at work within the ‘routine’. It is difficult not to see it sexualised as a dialectic between ‘straight’ talk (which, remember, is Harwood’s own word) and Ashberyean gay camp. Harwood’s term ‘swing this way’ echoes the (admittedly inaccurate) demotic marker of bisexuality: to swing both ways. Even amid the most baroque fiction, a telling line of straight talking has it: ‘I loved him and I loved her’ (CP 50). But then Harwood’s work is full of collapsing binaries. As he confesses in a recent interview, reversing the polarities of his writerly ‘routine’: ‘At times the personal is the fiction and the elaborate stories … are the real thing.’ These are not be the only times that one can observe a personal dimension behind what is represented by Harwood as stylistic preferences.
Despite the establishment of the puritan-cavalier oscillation, The Sinking Colony (the final Fulcrum book of 1971) experiments further with fragmentation, again resulting in one of Harwood’s great (but admittedly not characteristic) poems, ‘Animal Days’, another narrative of colonialism and erotic obsession. It is pared down, but not straight talking exactly, because it is a variety of cut up. Despite the inevitable nod towards the techniques of William Burroughs evoked by the term (and although Tzrara is often cited as the originator of this brutal form of collage) the model actually was Ashbery's collage poem ‘Europe’ from the controversial 1962 volume, The Tennis Court Oath, which has one section reading in its entirety: ‘I’m on my way to Hull/ grinned the girl.’ (135) Harwood's poem seems located anywhere but Europe, let alone Larkin’s Hull:
the indian chiefs
what are the wounds, anyway, and their cost?
In the morning everything is white
low clouds trail across the upper pastures
and the valley is thick with mist
‘sometimes their canoes only hollowed-out tree trunks’ (CP 150)
Fragmentation and collage seem suitable forms to evoke what a later colonial poem calls ‘confused longing’ amid such a world with its numbed calendars of pain. (CP 201) But in another poem, ‘Linen’, such intensely isolated shards of truncated utterance enable a gesture of readerly intervention, as if the reader could literally step into the silence and finish the job, although the poem emphatically ends with its own excessive double simile that belongs to ‘cavalier’ New York baroqueness (yet how odd they seem for the sensation of touching skin). We are invited to help the poem reach its figurative climax, but not to provide it, like a Hollywood fluffer.
touching you like the
and soft as
like the scent of flowers and
like an approaching festival
whose promise is failed through carelessness (CP 144)
‘The Big Chop 1969-1970’ (again delayed until 1975 when HMS Little Fox was published by the late Ian Robinson’s Oasis Books) attempts to meld the puritan-cavalier routine, but read in chronological sequence, it seems to contain exercises towards the large scale and major success of the next section ‘The Long Black Veil: a notebook 1970-1972’, which Harwood himself called ‘the end product, the "flower" of my work to date’, so that ‘The Big Chop’ reads as ‘the roots of that work’ as Harwood put it. (dust jacket HMSLF) In its juxtaposition of poetry and prose (its generic insistence upon its notational quality), ‘The Long Black Veil’ picks up, slightly unexpectedly, on the experiments of ‘Cable Street’. Harwood’s philosophy of composition, his poetics, posits a hopeful ‘presentation of informations and the art as mover, catalyst - to somehow work together, be one’. (dust jacket HMSLF) Harwood also benefited from ‘an American permission’ (to use a phrase of Geoff Ward’s) to write long sequences, particularly from the influence of Olson’s The Maximus Poems. In its turn, ‘The Long Black Veil’ both influenced, and was influenced by, the contemporary British version of this ‘permission’, which was called ‘open field poetry’ and was proselytised by Eric Mottram and exemplified not only by Harwood’s work, but by projects like Allen Fisher’s contemporaneous Place (Book One). This was a mode that both authors would need eventually to surpass, as the technique of notational bare utterance upon the blank page, the invasion of lyric concision by quotation, page-space a kind of literal mapping, a guide to the territory of experience hinted at, became a fashion. In short, an enabling technique quickly became an imitative style. But the careful plural that Harwood places on ‘informations’, the reminder of complexity, suggests the gains initially to be had from this method. In an indirect passage of poetics within ‘The Long Black Veil’ Harwood writes (or mainly quotes):
The questions of complexity
On Gide’s death Mr. Forster said – ‘I realized more clearly how much he had got out of life, and had managed to transmit through his writings. Not life’s greatness – greatness is a nineteenth century perquisite, a Goethean job. But life’s complexity, and the delight, the difficulty, the duty of registering that complexity and of conveying it.’
The distinctions (CP 177)
This style or technique suited the restlessness that is both geographical (we pass from Brighton to California) and thematic. ‘The Long Black Veil’ borrows its title from a country and western song about loving ‘my best friend’s wife’. In an unpublished part of an interview Robert Creeley states: ‘(Lee and I) had a sad number at one point in the later sixties when my wife [Bobbie Louise Hawkins] and he had an intense and frustrated relation…. My wife and I were having extraordinary problems so it was hardly unusual. But she was very moved and drawn to him, and he likewise to her.’ This instability haunts the intense sparks of passion amid a (sometimes literal) ocean of separation: ‘you there/me here’. (CP 184) I have written (twice) elsewhere of this extraordinary poem.
In ‘Qasida Island (1971-72)’ this open field mode was put to good use in shorter tighter lyrics, particularly in the tri-partite poem ‘One Two Three’, with its clear invitation in title and final line (‘Now put it together’) for the reader to enter into the co-production of the utterance. (CP 201) Its openness is a gesture to the reader, different from the intended literal lacunae of ‘The Sinking Colony’ poems. By presenting narratives of gift-exchange, the exchanges of sexual passion and the stiffness of colonial rigeur, it asks the reader to relate all of its parts. It is a gesture of obligation to the reader to initiate an inventive response, the sort defined by Derek Attridge as when ‘the reader attempts to answer the work’s shaping of language by a new shaping of his or her own (which will in turn invite further responses),’ an image of the catalytic response Harwood has often attributed to acts of reading, and – more generally - to acts of social and political change (as I shall show):
Yes, I suppose, fascinated by the delicacy
of the piano part in the first movement
of Beethoven’s ‘Ghost’ Trio
(‘he sighed… but real enough,
aesthetic coat-trailing aside.
The delight beyond the technicalities
- not pursuing, but there
to be recognised (CP 199)
The apocryphal pamphlet, Captain Harwood’s Log of Stern Statements and Stout Sayings, published in 1973 by Writers Forum, is largely a commonplace book of informations and quotations, mainly drawn from politics (Mussolini to Mao), Poundian modernism and the I Ching, the Chinese book of divination. While such a publication enjoyed only the limited distribution of a little press, it is worth remembering that in 1971 Harwood shared the pages of Penguin Modern Poets 19, with John Ashbery and Tom Raworth and ‘reach[ed] an even wider readership. Even my father had heard of this series,’ Harwood recalls. (Bio. 145) He was also included in a couple of widely-read Penguin anthologies, Michael Horovitz’ The Children of Albion (1969), a gathering of ‘underground’ poetry, and less tribally, Edward Lucie-Smith’s catholic first edition of his British Poetry Since 1945 (1970). (Harwood has, of course, been widely anthologised since.)
‘Boston to Brighton’, a section of the Collected, equates to a second Oasis book (called Boston-Brighton of 1977) but is divided into two parts. ‘Boston’ celebrates the city in the US where Harwood lived in 1972. It was also the home of his second wife, the photographer Jud Walker, whom he had met while a writer in residence at the Aegan School of Fine Arts in Paros, Greece, and whom he married in 1974. It ranges from an ironic found poem about Kennebunkport, (which is all informations) to bare lyric notations, but the two modes are not otherwise juxtaposed or, one it tempted to say, made complex, as they had been in ‘The Long Black Veil’. The second part, ‘Brighton (1973-77)’, celebrates the British city Harwood and Walker settled in, and where they had two children, Rafe, born 1977, and Rowan, born 1979. It includes the minimalist straight talking of ‘Chên’, derived from a reading of the I Ching:
the clarity
what believed
or rather hoped for (CP 226)
It also includes a successor to ‘The Long Black Veil’, ‘Notes of a Post Office Clerk’. This extended text is only excerpted in The Collected, which suggests a measure of authorial dissatisfaction. Indeed, in 1993, Harwood himself called it ‘a worthy but dull attempt’. (Bio, 149) Harwood used the style of ‘Chên’ to develop the mappings of the earlier work (quite literally there are maps) of the Sussex coast where he lived and worked as a post office clerk, an occupation he carried out intermittently for 19 years.
Indeed, a sense of civic and family obligation pervades this period’s writings and partly accounts for their heavy literalism, their optimism in ‘clarity’. In ‘The Notes of a Post Office Clerk’ we read, that ‘now in England 1975’ there exists ‘a list of simple, practical, and just acts, /moves towards a real “socialism”’. (CP 253) That list was Harwood’s own political manifesto and, although excluded from the published poem, it appeared in full in a magazine publication of earlier drafts, advocating a fairly radical socialist equitable incomes and fiscal policy, major political reform and a utopian commitment towards catalytic social change, a hint of which survives into the published poem: ‘The steps that could change this, that could be taken now, open a few doors and windows, start the change that would produce changes as yet unknown.’ (CP 253)
During the mid to late 1970s, Harwood was actively involved in politics, as a union official and as a member of the Labour Party during its most radical years, now often derided, and he stood as a candidate in local elections (unsuccessfully). He was no more immediately successful as a member of the Poetry Society General Council, being drawn to negotiation as a strategy rather than conflict when the Arts Council began to object to the changes Bob Cobbing and others had spearheaded, after a radical take-over and make-over of the once moribund organisation. As fellow poet Elaine Randell said, ‘Along with Lee Harwood and Roy Fisher at that time, I personally felt that we could work within the constraints, that the money [for promoting radical poetics] was the important thing and that things would adapt if tempers and personalities calmed down.’ Such a hope was vain and all three, along with Harwood’s publisher Ian Robinson, suffered ostracization from certain quarters for not joining the walkout. The judgement of history may be on Harwood’s side. (Peter Barry’s forthcoming book The Poetry Wars, Salt, promises to open up this sore on the body poetic again, and threatens to have new things to say.)
The one exception to the stylistic austerity in Boston Brighton is the prose piece dedicated to Jud, entitled ‘Old Bosham Bird Watch’. Its opening
out of nothing comes...
nothing comes out of nothing
cut / switch to…. (CP 230)
suggests a recovered delight in language's ability to create ex nihilo, through fictions, through juxtaposition, though the details here are more domestic and local, less mythological, than those of the 1960s. The metaphor for erotic obsession and wider knowledge, as ever, is one of movement: ‘That I love you, we know this, parting the branches and ferns as we push on through the wood.’ (CP 231) The re-discovery of prose was to be crucially important for Harwood in the next few years.
Next month this review continues with a look at the emergence of the mature Lee Harwood. Read it here.
Page 493
Part One
Lee Harwood’s Collected Poems – references to it marked CP in the text - takes the reader through varying landscapes, and changing obsessions, personal relationships, artistic passions. The metaphor of travel is apposite for a major characteristic of Harwood’s writing, that is, its restlessness, and one he repeatedly uses himself. On page 229 (about half way through this forty year accretion of work) we are warned to expect ‘a long road’; reaching the penultimate page we are reminded still ‘it’s a long road’ (p. 521). It is a journey, characterised not just by mutability and variety, but by what Harwood calls an ‘insistence’ (p. 168). It is
not so much a repetition
but a moving around a point, a line
- like a backbone – and that too moving
(on) (CP 177)
For example, the effect of the numerous times the reader is reminded of the inadequacy of language, particularly to evoke the emotive charge of erotic adventure, is cumulative. ‘You’ – followed by half a page width of silent space – ‘I hardly begin to say’ is emblematic of dozens of such insistences, limit-cases, crisis-points, breakdowns. (CP 463) The confessions of faltering, stumbling words, ‘moving around a point’, or the dozens of literally unfinished declarations of love or wonder, suggest that Harwood has snatched such anti-rhetorical ‘failure’ from the jaws of his greatest triumphs, his wounded poems.
Reading this oeuvre is also a stylistic adventure, a pageant of literary forms, with its readerly delights and surprises. Harwood knows this too. When he writes, ‘My heart weeps,’ and then comments, ‘Who would ever have thought I’d write that?/ “My heart weeps”?’ – he not only presents the troubling sentence twice, he presents its repetition in his frequently used and estranging quotes to defuse the subterranean romanticism – but he also knows he can rely upon a readership of whom he can ask such a question, who have followed his progressive ‘movings-on’ (CP 182), who have become accustomed to the interrogative assumption behind his ‘voice’, indeed recognise this self-conscious, knowing hesitancy as his voice (to play up to that doubtful metaphor).
The stages of this long – unfinished - journey are represented by the sections of the Collected Poems, published by Tony Fraser’s Shearsman Books in 2004. They broadly correspond to previously published books or to sections of those books. Very few poems have been omitted from what is now effectively the canon of Harwood’s work, and these are stylistically weak texts, mostly plucked from the company of poems in the first 96 pages of this 522 page publication.1 More positively, a number of uncollected poems have been added, mostly from the 1970s and the early 1980s, along with some previously unpublished recent work (to which I will return next month).
The White Room ( Fulcrum Press, 1967), Harwood’s first large volume, was already a kind of early collected poems, and began, as does this new book, with early work, called here ‘title illegible/early work 1964-1965’. Most of this was originally published in Harwood’s first pamphlet, with its characteristically self-evasive title: title illegible (1965). A regular attendee at Bob Cobbing’s Writers Forum workshop (and he was later, in 1967, to follow Cobbing as manager of Better Books, an important subcultural London venue throughout the sixties), Harwood was also published by Cobbing’s press. Little of this Writers Forum pamphlet survives the editorial process; this section of early work is dominated by ‘Cable Street’, a flawed but necessary poem, and important for Harwood’s subsequent development in that it is a long text in lyric fragments and prose. It is not unlike Roy Fisher’s near contemporary City (1960), or, only a little more distantly, the later books of William Carlos Williams’ Paterson. (It also encouraged others, such as Iain Sinclair, to begin to explore the little histories of London.) The text deals with Harwood's day to day life in the East End (where he lived until 1967, with his first wife, Jenny Goodgame, whom he married in 1961, and their son, Blake, born the following year), balancing the everyday with - to take one central example - the Battle of Cable Street between the fascists and communists, which was played out on the same turf 30 years before. The young Harwood applauds Lenin and eulogises the coming revolution: ‘O Prince your days are done/The Revolution’s come’. (CP 22)
The labour Harwood expended in the mid and late 1960s on translating from the French a representative selection of the ex-Dadaist and Surrealist Tristan Tzara possibly steered him from continuing to use this work as a direct model in his own writing (only a few early exercises in surreal mode are included). He met Tzara in 1963, not long before his death, and Tzara approved certain of the early translations. This body of work also is excluded from the Collected Poems, but several volumes have gathered these translations and its introductions, including Chanson Dada in 1987, for which he wrote a new introduction, and which is due to be republished soon. He also published a Tzara bibliography in 1974. As a part of the burgeoning literary underground Harwood was also a publisher of occasional magazines, (Night Scene, Soho, Horde) whose name changed with each issue, but one was an act of pure homage and assumed lineage: Tzrarad. There was even a subsequent anthology of that name. In his recent In the Sixties, Barry Miles explains: ‘We published Darazt, an anthology featuring a long poem by Lee Harwood, and named after his mimeo magazine, Tzarad (Darazt being Tzarad backwards). Lee was particularly fond of Tristan Tzara. There were some collages by me, inspired by Max Ernst, some photographs of Gala Mitchell naked by Hoppy, inspired by Bill Brandt, and a three-column text by William Burroughs.’ (Barry Miles, p. 64) 'Hoppy' was John Hopkins, who also ran the UFO Club, the centre of underground musical culture, with which Harwood also had some contact. Along with Pete Brown, Spike Hawkins and others, Miles tells us, Harwood read at the first ‘Spontaneous Underground’ event at the Marquee Club in January 1966, on an anarchic bill that included Donovan and Graham Bond, with most of the performers and audience in fancy dress. (When read this passage recently over the phone, Mr Harwood denied remembering any of it, proving, I suppose, that if you can remember the sixties then you weren’t blah blah blah. Or possibly the shame of being on the same bill as Donovan provokes amnesia. (The other day there was a horrible scream from downstairs. I went down there. I asked Patricia what the matter was. She said that Donovan was on Midweek. Why? I asked with incredulity. Cashing in on the Dylan revival, she explained. Again? sez I!). There's also the question of the relationship of Harwood's The White Room with the Cream song of the same title, written by Pete Brown.)
The brief gay lyrics early in the Collected, ‘This morning' for instance, open a theme of erotic longing at forced separation that haunts the entire oeuvre: ‘the pain of my leaving/and my love for you’. (CP, 23) This intensifies in ‘The Man with Blue Eyes’, a section of both Collected Poems and The White Room. This also appeared, under that title, as a separate volume, published by Lewis Walsh and Anne Waldman’s Angel Hair Books in 1966. It won the Frank O'Hara Prize, and heralded Harwood’s arrival in New York and inaugurated a transatlantic exchange that continues to this day. An erotic liaison with John Ashbery (whom he had met in Paris in 1965), and a more general literary engagement with the New York poetry scene at its height, engendered some deeply felt love poetry, including 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.’ In those days homosexuality was still illegal. In comparison, the straight love poem, ‘Summer’, demonstrates a similar erotic anxiety, though it can afford to be more graphic (though anatomically questionable, ‘length’ surely a masculinist measure of eroticism):
The damp heat
and discomfort of clothes, a tongue passing the length
of her clitoris … and back again …
erections in the musty pavilion. ( CP 41).
Indeed the explicitness is arguably an over-compensation for the restraint of the, otherwise better written, gay poems with their lack of gender markers, and their focus on detached parts of the body; ‘if only I could touch your naked shoulder’ could easily be read as non-gender specific. (CP 29)
The final ‘Blue Eyes’ poem, 'Landscape with 3 People’, while signalling separation and loss as much as earlier poems, is the first poem to adopt the more obvious narrative, even allegorical, mode that dominates the ‘The White Room (1966-67)’, replete with the mysterious menace that ghosts so many of Harwood’s fictions:
I loved him and I loved her
and no understanding was offered
to the first citizen
when the ricks were burnt (CP 50)
This large section reminds us that Harwood’s sheer output of the later 1960s and early 1970s is staggering. (One hundred and sixteen of the 500 pages were produced before he was 30.) More obvious exercises in a New York mode suggest Harwood was in danger of becoming a card-carrying member of an already fading avant-garde. The tragic death of O'Hara in 1966 might be thought emblematic of its demise, despite the rise of the genius of the second generation, Ted Berrigan. Harwood mirrors the insistent jocular name-checking and casual enjambment of the two poets:
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;
maybe I will one day, but it will have to be soon
as he must be getting old. (CP 58)
Ironically, it was Prince – a stylish British poet much admired by Ashbery, and who Harwood did subsequently meet! – who issued the salutary warning that Harwood was ‘pattering on’. This led Harwood to realise the dangers of sheer production: ‘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’. (PI p 13) The best poems in The White Room show an opening of this range beyond standard second generation 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 our modern mythologies - and even about the nature of poetry itself. He matches an adherence to New York grace, while characteristically focusing on linguistic failure:
PLATO was right to banish
poets from the Republic. Once they try to go beyond the
colours and shapes, they only ever fail, miserably –
some more gracefully than others. (CP 96)
The influence of Borges’ strange narratives is evident too. Even some of these poems are rather long, and the danger of 'pattering on' was sharply dealt with by the next Fulcrum book, Landscapes (1969). Again the change of style or emphasis is prefigured by a single poem in the earlier volume, this time ‘When the Geography was Fixed’, which was originally featured in The White Room, as well as in Landscapes.
The section ‘Landscapes 1967’ is actually best read as (if not originally conceived of) as a sequence of eight poems that meditates dreamily upon the doubleness of its title: a landscape is a geographical term as well as the name of its artistic representation. The role of artifice is obvious in this interplay of nature and culture, erotic encounter and erotic representation. ‘When the Geography was Fixed’ plays on the conceit that ‘one woman in the gallery… liked the picture and somehow the delicate/ hues of her complexion were reflected in it’ (CP 100). This creates an ontological uncertainty, a sort of palimpsest world, which is an analogue for the mechanisms of consciousness and memory. (It may owe to O’Hara’s own poem of the erased canvas, ‘Oranges’.)
- you paint over the picture and start on
the new one but all the same it’s still there
beneath the fresh plains of colour (CP 108)
‘Landscapes’ is one of Harwood's finest achievements. In contrast, ‘The Picture Book 1968’ is a mixed bag. Its obsession with love and colonialism points towards the thematics of The Sinking Colony, while ‘The Coast 1968’, which was the final part of the Landscapes volume, points towards the stylistic fragmentation of that next Fulcrum book. Half lines and caesurae attempt a new semantic simplicity, while notions of heterosexual love as atomised body parts and the specifics of coastal geography merge to create stylistic complexity.
The whole outline called ‘geography’
meeting at a set of erotic points
lips shoulders breasts stomach
the town dissolves sex thighs legs (CP 125)
‘The Coast’ also announces Harwood’s partial removal to the actual coast, at Brighton, where he worked initially at Bill Butler’s underground Unicorn bookshop, though during these years he led a peripatetic life, taking on various temporary jobs from librarianship to forestry, between Brighton, London, Exeter, and Gloucestershire. His first marriage had broken up by this time.
The poems in ‘HMS Little Fox 1967-1968’ had to wait until 1975 for a larger volume (of that title) to appear. The closure of the important Fulcrum Press in 1973 by its founders, Stuart and Deirdre Montgomery (Stuart is a dedicatee of one poem), meant these poems appear displaced in Harwood’s publishing history. While this at once attests to the prodigious output of these years, the delay in publication may also derive from the fact that the poems obliquely record the ‘morbid masochism’ of the heroin addiction that had overtaken Harwood in these years. (CP 139) It was not just the geography that was ‘fixed’, to use a pun he opens up in the pointedly entitled and barely encoded ‘Chemical Days’:
‘The fix’ can only mean
the man with two blue flags who stands all day
on the cliff top. (CP 133)
His attempt to escape this ‘fix’ is charted most poignantly in ‘Love in the Organ Loft’, a poem dedicated to Marian (O’Dwyer). ‘Watching over my’ sleeping ‘love’ like one of Picasso’s minotaurs, the narrator fights not just the drug as he
double(s) my usual intake
to feel without compassion my brain wince
under chemical blows,
but the disjointed fictionalising that this evokes, or produces through confusion or hallucination:
I mean what is happening? – NOW! Do you see
what I mean? – like does the cathedral nestle
in the sky’s warm lap?....
This parable can be used for most things – think of a river … (CP 138)
This ‘almost indefinitely transferable allegory of “feeling”’ (to use Prynne’s term for this aspect of Harwood’s work) contrasts so much with the coterminous poems of ‘The Coast 1968’ that one must note this as the beginning of what Harwood later called a routine: ‘I can see my work does seem to swing this way; it’s a sort of puritan-cavalier routine. I suddenly wanted to cut the crap, and stop being a tap-dancer, and try to talk straight’ (PI p. 13), a stylistic oscillation between plainness and baroqueness, notational realism and elaborate fictiveness, a battle between the influence of Creeley and Olson on one hand, and Ashbery and Borges on the other. ‘Love in the Organ Loft’ explicitly equates the plain style with health and artifice with addiction, abjection, and evasion. More generally, there is another dichotomy at work within the ‘routine’. It is difficult not to see it sexualised as a dialectic between ‘straight’ talk (which, remember, is Harwood’s own word) and Ashberyean gay camp. Harwood’s term ‘swing this way’ echoes the (admittedly inaccurate) demotic marker of bisexuality: to swing both ways. Even amid the most baroque fiction, a telling line of straight talking has it: ‘I loved him and I loved her’ (CP 50). But then Harwood’s work is full of collapsing binaries. As he confesses in a recent interview, reversing the polarities of his writerly ‘routine’: ‘At times the personal is the fiction and the elaborate stories … are the real thing.’ These are not be the only times that one can observe a personal dimension behind what is represented by Harwood as stylistic preferences.
Despite the establishment of the puritan-cavalier oscillation, The Sinking Colony (the final Fulcrum book of 1971) experiments further with fragmentation, again resulting in one of Harwood’s great (but admittedly not characteristic) poems, ‘Animal Days’, another narrative of colonialism and erotic obsession. It is pared down, but not straight talking exactly, because it is a variety of cut up. Despite the inevitable nod towards the techniques of William Burroughs evoked by the term (and although Tzrara is often cited as the originator of this brutal form of collage) the model actually was Ashbery's collage poem ‘Europe’ from the controversial 1962 volume, The Tennis Court Oath, which has one section reading in its entirety: ‘I’m on my way to Hull/ grinned the girl.’ (135) Harwood's poem seems located anywhere but Europe, let alone Larkin’s Hull:
the indian chiefs
what are the wounds, anyway, and their cost?
In the morning everything is white
low clouds trail across the upper pastures
and the valley is thick with mist
‘sometimes their canoes only hollowed-out tree trunks’ (CP 150)
Fragmentation and collage seem suitable forms to evoke what a later colonial poem calls ‘confused longing’ amid such a world with its numbed calendars of pain. (CP 201) But in another poem, ‘Linen’, such intensely isolated shards of truncated utterance enable a gesture of readerly intervention, as if the reader could literally step into the silence and finish the job, although the poem emphatically ends with its own excessive double simile that belongs to ‘cavalier’ New York baroqueness (yet how odd they seem for the sensation of touching skin). We are invited to help the poem reach its figurative climax, but not to provide it, like a Hollywood fluffer.
touching you like the
and soft as
like the scent of flowers and
like an approaching festival
whose promise is failed through carelessness (CP 144)
‘The Big Chop 1969-1970’ (again delayed until 1975 when HMS Little Fox was published by the late Ian Robinson’s Oasis Books) attempts to meld the puritan-cavalier routine, but read in chronological sequence, it seems to contain exercises towards the large scale and major success of the next section ‘The Long Black Veil: a notebook 1970-1972’, which Harwood himself called ‘the end product, the "flower" of my work to date’, so that ‘The Big Chop’ reads as ‘the roots of that work’ as Harwood put it. (dust jacket HMSLF) In its juxtaposition of poetry and prose (its generic insistence upon its notational quality), ‘The Long Black Veil’ picks up, slightly unexpectedly, on the experiments of ‘Cable Street’. Harwood’s philosophy of composition, his poetics, posits a hopeful ‘presentation of informations and the art as mover, catalyst - to somehow work together, be one’. (dust jacket HMSLF) Harwood also benefited from ‘an American permission’ (to use a phrase of Geoff Ward’s) to write long sequences, particularly from the influence of Olson’s The Maximus Poems. In its turn, ‘The Long Black Veil’ both influenced, and was influenced by, the contemporary British version of this ‘permission’, which was called ‘open field poetry’ and was proselytised by Eric Mottram and exemplified not only by Harwood’s work, but by projects like Allen Fisher’s contemporaneous Place (Book One). This was a mode that both authors would need eventually to surpass, as the technique of notational bare utterance upon the blank page, the invasion of lyric concision by quotation, page-space a kind of literal mapping, a guide to the territory of experience hinted at, became a fashion. In short, an enabling technique quickly became an imitative style. But the careful plural that Harwood places on ‘informations’, the reminder of complexity, suggests the gains initially to be had from this method. In an indirect passage of poetics within ‘The Long Black Veil’ Harwood writes (or mainly quotes):
The questions of complexity
On Gide’s death Mr. Forster said – ‘I realized more clearly how much he had got out of life, and had managed to transmit through his writings. Not life’s greatness – greatness is a nineteenth century perquisite, a Goethean job. But life’s complexity, and the delight, the difficulty, the duty of registering that complexity and of conveying it.’
The distinctions (CP 177)
This style or technique suited the restlessness that is both geographical (we pass from Brighton to California) and thematic. ‘The Long Black Veil’ borrows its title from a country and western song about loving ‘my best friend’s wife’. In an unpublished part of an interview Robert Creeley states: ‘(Lee and I) had a sad number at one point in the later sixties when my wife [Bobbie Louise Hawkins] and he had an intense and frustrated relation…. My wife and I were having extraordinary problems so it was hardly unusual. But she was very moved and drawn to him, and he likewise to her.’ This instability haunts the intense sparks of passion amid a (sometimes literal) ocean of separation: ‘you there/me here’. (CP 184) I have written (twice) elsewhere of this extraordinary poem.
In ‘Qasida Island (1971-72)’ this open field mode was put to good use in shorter tighter lyrics, particularly in the tri-partite poem ‘One Two Three’, with its clear invitation in title and final line (‘Now put it together’) for the reader to enter into the co-production of the utterance. (CP 201) Its openness is a gesture to the reader, different from the intended literal lacunae of ‘The Sinking Colony’ poems. By presenting narratives of gift-exchange, the exchanges of sexual passion and the stiffness of colonial rigeur, it asks the reader to relate all of its parts. It is a gesture of obligation to the reader to initiate an inventive response, the sort defined by Derek Attridge as when ‘the reader attempts to answer the work’s shaping of language by a new shaping of his or her own (which will in turn invite further responses),’ an image of the catalytic response Harwood has often attributed to acts of reading, and – more generally - to acts of social and political change (as I shall show):
Yes, I suppose, fascinated by the delicacy
of the piano part in the first movement
of Beethoven’s ‘Ghost’ Trio
(‘he sighed… but real enough,
aesthetic coat-trailing aside.
The delight beyond the technicalities
- not pursuing, but there
to be recognised (CP 199)
The apocryphal pamphlet, Captain Harwood’s Log of Stern Statements and Stout Sayings, published in 1973 by Writers Forum, is largely a commonplace book of informations and quotations, mainly drawn from politics (Mussolini to Mao), Poundian modernism and the I Ching, the Chinese book of divination. While such a publication enjoyed only the limited distribution of a little press, it is worth remembering that in 1971 Harwood shared the pages of Penguin Modern Poets 19, with John Ashbery and Tom Raworth and ‘reach[ed] an even wider readership. Even my father had heard of this series,’ Harwood recalls. (Bio. 145) He was also included in a couple of widely-read Penguin anthologies, Michael Horovitz’ The Children of Albion (1969), a gathering of ‘underground’ poetry, and less tribally, Edward Lucie-Smith’s catholic first edition of his British Poetry Since 1945 (1970). (Harwood has, of course, been widely anthologised since.)
‘Boston to Brighton’, a section of the Collected, equates to a second Oasis book (called Boston-Brighton of 1977) but is divided into two parts. ‘Boston’ celebrates the city in the US where Harwood lived in 1972. It was also the home of his second wife, the photographer Jud Walker, whom he had met while a writer in residence at the Aegan School of Fine Arts in Paros, Greece, and whom he married in 1974. It ranges from an ironic found poem about Kennebunkport, (which is all informations) to bare lyric notations, but the two modes are not otherwise juxtaposed or, one it tempted to say, made complex, as they had been in ‘The Long Black Veil’. The second part, ‘Brighton (1973-77)’, celebrates the British city Harwood and Walker settled in, and where they had two children, Rafe, born 1977, and Rowan, born 1979. It includes the minimalist straight talking of ‘Chên’, derived from a reading of the I Ching:
the clarity
what believed
or rather hoped for (CP 226)
It also includes a successor to ‘The Long Black Veil’, ‘Notes of a Post Office Clerk’. This extended text is only excerpted in The Collected, which suggests a measure of authorial dissatisfaction. Indeed, in 1993, Harwood himself called it ‘a worthy but dull attempt’. (Bio, 149) Harwood used the style of ‘Chên’ to develop the mappings of the earlier work (quite literally there are maps) of the Sussex coast where he lived and worked as a post office clerk, an occupation he carried out intermittently for 19 years.
Indeed, a sense of civic and family obligation pervades this period’s writings and partly accounts for their heavy literalism, their optimism in ‘clarity’. In ‘The Notes of a Post Office Clerk’ we read, that ‘now in England 1975’ there exists ‘a list of simple, practical, and just acts, /moves towards a real “socialism”’. (CP 253) That list was Harwood’s own political manifesto and, although excluded from the published poem, it appeared in full in a magazine publication of earlier drafts, advocating a fairly radical socialist equitable incomes and fiscal policy, major political reform and a utopian commitment towards catalytic social change, a hint of which survives into the published poem: ‘The steps that could change this, that could be taken now, open a few doors and windows, start the change that would produce changes as yet unknown.’ (CP 253)
During the mid to late 1970s, Harwood was actively involved in politics, as a union official and as a member of the Labour Party during its most radical years, now often derided, and he stood as a candidate in local elections (unsuccessfully). He was no more immediately successful as a member of the Poetry Society General Council, being drawn to negotiation as a strategy rather than conflict when the Arts Council began to object to the changes Bob Cobbing and others had spearheaded, after a radical take-over and make-over of the once moribund organisation. As fellow poet Elaine Randell said, ‘Along with Lee Harwood and Roy Fisher at that time, I personally felt that we could work within the constraints, that the money [for promoting radical poetics] was the important thing and that things would adapt if tempers and personalities calmed down.’ Such a hope was vain and all three, along with Harwood’s publisher Ian Robinson, suffered ostracization from certain quarters for not joining the walkout. The judgement of history may be on Harwood’s side. (Peter Barry’s forthcoming book The Poetry Wars, Salt, promises to open up this sore on the body poetic again, and threatens to have new things to say.)
The one exception to the stylistic austerity in Boston Brighton is the prose piece dedicated to Jud, entitled ‘Old Bosham Bird Watch’. Its opening
out of nothing comes...
nothing comes out of nothing
cut / switch to…. (CP 230)
suggests a recovered delight in language's ability to create ex nihilo, through fictions, through juxtaposition, though the details here are more domestic and local, less mythological, than those of the 1960s. The metaphor for erotic obsession and wider knowledge, as ever, is one of movement: ‘That I love you, we know this, parting the branches and ferns as we push on through the wood.’ (CP 231) The re-discovery of prose was to be crucially important for Harwood in the next few years.
Next month this review continues with a look at the emergence of the mature Lee Harwood. Read it here.
Page 493
Monday, December 19, 2005
Clark Allison: MIND'S EYE
1
Parallel Tracks
parallel tracks there are lines beneath us
outboard climes plucked and seen before reducing
in sense stack whose ambience strung short
and undone I have varied according to
method how many times that theme which
you could and I decline slipping aside
test that and lift squarely hard and
harsh just stopped dead in its tracks
excess detritus there must be more than
doors closing spidered webs linger aflame as
if rent comprehension won’t cognise thick reflection
has recollection build up a little time
and came toward feasance not being untutored
hats synced to shirts few contest an
abstruse equation unspent covered ground quick head
of steam your realisation the fidelity of
moments to this garden among trees stepped
2
Spanned Attention
do I keep to themes spent tread
a mask may unfathom foreign places visit
one thing leading to others anodyne and
whither storm and tide fluent playing at
life and travelled nothing much as given
can’t help but betray itself once again
trapped as can caught within self interest
being powerful motives taken out with what
makes every good intention some kind of
preference whether truth could beauty really try
the soak of personality can’t stake another
minute where seen might believe at all
of what was imparted reads like an
abstract vast rooms hinging on light patterns
of interaction been there before imbued and
jump cut reclaiming spanned attention never was
and got to pare it all back
3
Shedding Light
evidence of foreign travel bags packed and
checked notched down a peg or two
more than enough sense of continuity tired
of repetition other angles shedding light his
default demeanour of unruffled gaminess taking it
all in stride enough of time ratching
expressionless static horizon plane of vision unheard
roccoco disabuse an elaboration of sockets sinked
to reason fared and disavowed going elsewhere
at reckless pace I have effaced detail
after synonym to render incomplete pixel upon
flatbed no rejig anon season sip quit
tender squib picked up and let go
the printer’s ink I withstand height less
vertigo queasy sun in the eyes spanning
out of sight the impossibilities of wrapping
up so many loose ends connected late
4
Mind’s Eye
oblique transit space slides the mid line
give it time and take immersion therapy
threads given instruction shudder and shiver and
only ache O relenter the company we
keep transferred over to dark nights transform
the ether lux an idea of heaven
not mine you only turned back displacement
of the mind’s eye hollow caverns with
neither doors nor lights dispel them as
narrow expressive range defaulting to control panel
restless and almost futile gestures set to
an automatic where what only comes naturally
could nearly look like trying primeval strokes
to sustain life reverting to the same
defensive manoeuvres call it personality crisis I
took against the mirror and called it
time or shape no more nor less
5
Sprung Loose
the day of the funeral what burns
fingers slipping drawn from life relinquish this
taint foisted immaculate and ignorant wishing the
past neither filled nor empty no imagination
a getting back appealed of words in
some sound or gesture a lucid freeze
hopelessly distracted your sentience mars the
beachhead
remember last contoured dismembered cipher shed blind
catcher run the drop down you will
find colour and efflorescence currents ebb and
turn shun mastery having been here before
to thin and bind allows keeping place
oblivion and strong medicine no cure for
this disease and pass through inertly in
a manner of saying sprung loose not
recognising street nor curve pent up and
discharged covering the cost of sent far
6
Fade Out
tomorrow or till the end of time
the mind going blank fade out and
imagining torso rip ordinance sack taste bud
fending clover hop joust staged roundabout all
over by way of analogies bowl of
grapes by hand a wonder of apostles
by virtue of language such a long
way to go slow and glance consume
them thistle slight glow sunset breach the
cloak of wear and tear down which
way hey enough signage to post direction
impressed upon tight appearance slit and sand
the narrows that lodged air pockets and
nets to trap fish and wake no
destination how much could suffice and ring
walk road slog and circuitous revelry at
gasp and turned along the curved slope
These pieces are the opening 6 from a set of 17, entitled “Mind’s Eye”, which were put together by Clark as part of a collaborative project organised by Rupert Loydell consisting of work by 7 contributors. This is tentatively identified as a ‘17x7’ series. Each contributor’s poems are set
out in groups of 17, of length 17 lines, with 7 words per line.
(Ed: good to see what Adrian Clarke dubbed ‘neo-formalism’, and what I liked to call ‘iso-verbalism’, having its day.)
Clark Allison was born in Glasgow in 1961 though he spent nineyears in the 1980s living in Los Angeles. Author of Temporal Shift/Daubs (Trombone Press 98) and of several poems and reviews appearing in Notus and Stride, of which 'Six Paragraphs 1 & 2' at(www.stridemagazine.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/2003/june/6paras.htm) and 'an actuality/In the mere number of us', on GeorgeOppen, at(www.stridemagazine.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/2003/october/allison-oppen.htm), will interest regular readers of Pages.
2019: his review of Robert Sheppard's Hap may be read here:
Page 492
Parallel Tracks
parallel tracks there are lines beneath us
outboard climes plucked and seen before reducing
in sense stack whose ambience strung short
and undone I have varied according to
method how many times that theme which
you could and I decline slipping aside
test that and lift squarely hard and
harsh just stopped dead in its tracks
excess detritus there must be more than
doors closing spidered webs linger aflame as
if rent comprehension won’t cognise thick reflection
has recollection build up a little time
and came toward feasance not being untutored
hats synced to shirts few contest an
abstruse equation unspent covered ground quick head
of steam your realisation the fidelity of
moments to this garden among trees stepped
2
Spanned Attention
do I keep to themes spent tread
a mask may unfathom foreign places visit
one thing leading to others anodyne and
whither storm and tide fluent playing at
life and travelled nothing much as given
can’t help but betray itself once again
trapped as can caught within self interest
being powerful motives taken out with what
makes every good intention some kind of
preference whether truth could beauty really try
the soak of personality can’t stake another
minute where seen might believe at all
of what was imparted reads like an
abstract vast rooms hinging on light patterns
of interaction been there before imbued and
jump cut reclaiming spanned attention never was
and got to pare it all back
3
Shedding Light
evidence of foreign travel bags packed and
checked notched down a peg or two
more than enough sense of continuity tired
of repetition other angles shedding light his
default demeanour of unruffled gaminess taking it
all in stride enough of time ratching
expressionless static horizon plane of vision unheard
roccoco disabuse an elaboration of sockets sinked
to reason fared and disavowed going elsewhere
at reckless pace I have effaced detail
after synonym to render incomplete pixel upon
flatbed no rejig anon season sip quit
tender squib picked up and let go
the printer’s ink I withstand height less
vertigo queasy sun in the eyes spanning
out of sight the impossibilities of wrapping
up so many loose ends connected late
4
Mind’s Eye
oblique transit space slides the mid line
give it time and take immersion therapy
threads given instruction shudder and shiver and
only ache O relenter the company we
keep transferred over to dark nights transform
the ether lux an idea of heaven
not mine you only turned back displacement
of the mind’s eye hollow caverns with
neither doors nor lights dispel them as
narrow expressive range defaulting to control panel
restless and almost futile gestures set to
an automatic where what only comes naturally
could nearly look like trying primeval strokes
to sustain life reverting to the same
defensive manoeuvres call it personality crisis I
took against the mirror and called it
time or shape no more nor less
5
Sprung Loose
the day of the funeral what burns
fingers slipping drawn from life relinquish this
taint foisted immaculate and ignorant wishing the
past neither filled nor empty no imagination
a getting back appealed of words in
some sound or gesture a lucid freeze
hopelessly distracted your sentience mars the
beachhead
remember last contoured dismembered cipher shed blind
catcher run the drop down you will
find colour and efflorescence currents ebb and
turn shun mastery having been here before
to thin and bind allows keeping place
oblivion and strong medicine no cure for
this disease and pass through inertly in
a manner of saying sprung loose not
recognising street nor curve pent up and
discharged covering the cost of sent far
6
Fade Out
tomorrow or till the end of time
the mind going blank fade out and
imagining torso rip ordinance sack taste bud
fending clover hop joust staged roundabout all
over by way of analogies bowl of
grapes by hand a wonder of apostles
by virtue of language such a long
way to go slow and glance consume
them thistle slight glow sunset breach the
cloak of wear and tear down which
way hey enough signage to post direction
impressed upon tight appearance slit and sand
the narrows that lodged air pockets and
nets to trap fish and wake no
destination how much could suffice and ring
walk road slog and circuitous revelry at
gasp and turned along the curved slope
These pieces are the opening 6 from a set of 17, entitled “Mind’s Eye”, which were put together by Clark as part of a collaborative project organised by Rupert Loydell consisting of work by 7 contributors. This is tentatively identified as a ‘17x7’ series. Each contributor’s poems are set
out in groups of 17, of length 17 lines, with 7 words per line.
(Ed: good to see what Adrian Clarke dubbed ‘neo-formalism’, and what I liked to call ‘iso-verbalism’, having its day.)
Clark Allison was born in Glasgow in 1961 though he spent nineyears in the 1980s living in Los Angeles. Author of Temporal Shift/Daubs (Trombone Press 98) and of several poems and reviews appearing in Notus and Stride, of which 'Six Paragraphs 1 & 2' at(www.stridemagazine.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/2003/june/6paras.htm) and 'an actuality/In the mere number of us', on GeorgeOppen, at(www.stridemagazine.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/2003/october/allison-oppen.htm), will interest regular readers of Pages.
2019: his review of Robert Sheppard's Hap may be read here:
Clark Allison: ‘One Side
Ripening’, Stride, January 2019: http://stridemagazine.blogspot.com/2019/01/one-side-ripening.html
Page 492
Tuesday, December 13, 2005
Bill Griffiths: Ghost Story 3: MIDNIGHT EXPRESS
As we approach the year's Midnight, here's the third of Mr Griffiths' tales of mystery and local government
The bus station at Seaville – late at night – is not a pleasant site. The toilets are locked, but the mix of hormonal relicts and disinfectant pervades the concrete court. The decorative crowds of travellers back from work have long gone; the shy gangs of youngsters, with bikes to practice on, or girls to sit with, or slogans and graffiti to create, are gone likewise. Long since to bed, or whatever. The sky has darkened and the single bulb or two that provides company shows a tendency to blink – then blanks out. Shivery winds roll round the exposed bays and alleys, empty of their buses. What a place to be. But you dare not turn up late or even on time: what if you missed the last bus – the connection to the night coach at Sundercity – the only way out to London – the escape to civilisation, company and the real. It’s worth turning up early, and suffering the cold – was that a flick of snow? – and the isolation, just to know that you cannot miss the bus.
Not that there are any signs of regular travellers. I begin to doubt that there will be a late bus after all. The timetable is illegible, even supposing there was light to make something of the tiny figures. Are they am/pm or 24-hour? No way of telling. Of course, I checked up at home, before I set out – but come to think of it, it was rather an old brochure I grabbed to give me info. Yes, 23.23 – easy to remember – or is that what worries me? Perhaps I wanted to believe it – that I could get from tiny Seaville to the big Sundercity even at virtual middle-night – much better than mere and mortal accuracy. If you didn’t mind standing about in the darkness, the chill, the isolation.
Maybe it’s not so lonely, after all. Someone is turning out from a late-drinking pub somewhere – I can hear them singing – or humming – or whatever. Not a cheerful sound. Perhaps they will avoid the bus station. No. They are on their way. I can hear them getting closer, but I can’t see them quite. It’s too dark, and they are keeping back near the wall where it isn’t so exposed to the wind. I can make out shapes – people – a group – but that’s it. They don’t approach. They don’t say hello. They just have a melody or two to keep them warm. Blessings. At least it means the late bus must run, doesn’t it?
Yes, they have timed it to a T. Decrepit enough, an old bus that is all the company cares to risk at this time of night, coins the corner, and with an almost antique throb, comes to a stop – and just at my bay! No doubt about it, this is the 49 to Sundercity. I can’t make out the lettering on the front – there is no proper illumination – but the number seems as near as right – I check with the driver – 49? – a sort of solemn neutrality as I show my pass. After me the choristers get on. As I supposed, they are hugely old, and not easy on their feet. Must be a good pub, theirs. They sit way behind me at the back of the coach. I do not feel inclined to turn round and notice them. Not a friendly bunch, I’d guess. Probably known each other for years and don’t need to speak to strangers. Not typical of Seaville, mind.
I don’t care. I’m on my way. My faith in the bus company vindicated. The snow and the piercing wind, the dark and the loneliness behind me. More or less. It’s now warm, here, on board. Not cheerful, exactly. The driver doesn’t speak. The group at the back are singing a hymn now – it rings a bell – isn’t that the one at the Cup Final? – that’s it: Abide With Me. I almost join in.
Fast falls the eventide…
Fast falls the eventide…
Well, what else is there to do in a chilly bus on its way to a dark city late at night? Maybe they come from a pub with hymns on its jukebox. I turn to show my appreciation, but somehow they have blended into the dark shadows around the back seats – I can hardly make them out. I leave them alone after that. I’m on my way. I don’t need them.
We peter along – Sunnyside Up – the estates outside Seaville – round onto the old main road – average time – no spectacular racer this – but no rush either. There is a patch of country-like darkness, then we start to find our way towards the satellites of Sundercity. Suddenly – for no one has hailed the bus since we got on a Seaville – there is a stop. The antique brakes pull on, and the stiff doors fold open like an aged screen of zigzagging moth-cloth. Ah, this is where the old folk dismount. I can hear them moving forward. I see them clearly now, as they move past, silent, slow, slightly wobbly-coggly, like old folk who need sticks and a supporting hand. I do not offer. They will soon be gone, with their wheezy hymns and dark presence, and then we will be on our way! Sundercity! Hurrah!
The bus, however, disagrees. There is no move to shut the doors. There is no response from the driver. Does he know I am here? Is he too far in advance of the schedule? Unlikely, the slow rate we’ve been moving. Perhaps he’s had an attack and slumped in his seat, a martyr to late shifts. Well, it’s getting embarrassing, so I move forward to check. They don’t like being goaded, but a friendly enquiry…
How, man! We’re bound for Sundercity, are we? (No reply.) Must be time to gan, eh? (Nothing.) Drive, can you? (Humour.) (No response.) Aw, come on, it’s getting ower-late. I want to get to Sundercity. Nummer 49… Sundercity…
It seems useless. There is no response, but the driver seems upright and alert, in his way. Eventually he turns a head towards me, slow and gaunt, like a tortoise might. I wait, apprehensive somehow. I mean, how old can a timetable be? ‘We can go no further,’ he seems to be saying. Well, I know the regulations – you have to go to the terminus – the destination on the front of the bus – but then, did I check? Maybe the last bus stops short now. The old folk seemed to expect it. They all got out. ‘Sundercity?’ I query, in a last attempt to get him moving. But the engine has stopped now. The driver is adamant. Nothing is going to move. I have to get off.
How far to Sundercity I wonder, as I step down. Outside. Not nice. A musty smell. Stones and strange carved caprices over the wall. Great… A graveyard. Must be the cemetery at Grunge. No sign of the others. No hymn-singing now. The only sound is the bus doors creaking shut behind me.
Page 491
The bus station at Seaville – late at night – is not a pleasant site. The toilets are locked, but the mix of hormonal relicts and disinfectant pervades the concrete court. The decorative crowds of travellers back from work have long gone; the shy gangs of youngsters, with bikes to practice on, or girls to sit with, or slogans and graffiti to create, are gone likewise. Long since to bed, or whatever. The sky has darkened and the single bulb or two that provides company shows a tendency to blink – then blanks out. Shivery winds roll round the exposed bays and alleys, empty of their buses. What a place to be. But you dare not turn up late or even on time: what if you missed the last bus – the connection to the night coach at Sundercity – the only way out to London – the escape to civilisation, company and the real. It’s worth turning up early, and suffering the cold – was that a flick of snow? – and the isolation, just to know that you cannot miss the bus.
Not that there are any signs of regular travellers. I begin to doubt that there will be a late bus after all. The timetable is illegible, even supposing there was light to make something of the tiny figures. Are they am/pm or 24-hour? No way of telling. Of course, I checked up at home, before I set out – but come to think of it, it was rather an old brochure I grabbed to give me info. Yes, 23.23 – easy to remember – or is that what worries me? Perhaps I wanted to believe it – that I could get from tiny Seaville to the big Sundercity even at virtual middle-night – much better than mere and mortal accuracy. If you didn’t mind standing about in the darkness, the chill, the isolation.
Maybe it’s not so lonely, after all. Someone is turning out from a late-drinking pub somewhere – I can hear them singing – or humming – or whatever. Not a cheerful sound. Perhaps they will avoid the bus station. No. They are on their way. I can hear them getting closer, but I can’t see them quite. It’s too dark, and they are keeping back near the wall where it isn’t so exposed to the wind. I can make out shapes – people – a group – but that’s it. They don’t approach. They don’t say hello. They just have a melody or two to keep them warm. Blessings. At least it means the late bus must run, doesn’t it?
Yes, they have timed it to a T. Decrepit enough, an old bus that is all the company cares to risk at this time of night, coins the corner, and with an almost antique throb, comes to a stop – and just at my bay! No doubt about it, this is the 49 to Sundercity. I can’t make out the lettering on the front – there is no proper illumination – but the number seems as near as right – I check with the driver – 49? – a sort of solemn neutrality as I show my pass. After me the choristers get on. As I supposed, they are hugely old, and not easy on their feet. Must be a good pub, theirs. They sit way behind me at the back of the coach. I do not feel inclined to turn round and notice them. Not a friendly bunch, I’d guess. Probably known each other for years and don’t need to speak to strangers. Not typical of Seaville, mind.
I don’t care. I’m on my way. My faith in the bus company vindicated. The snow and the piercing wind, the dark and the loneliness behind me. More or less. It’s now warm, here, on board. Not cheerful, exactly. The driver doesn’t speak. The group at the back are singing a hymn now – it rings a bell – isn’t that the one at the Cup Final? – that’s it: Abide With Me. I almost join in.
Fast falls the eventide…
Fast falls the eventide…
Well, what else is there to do in a chilly bus on its way to a dark city late at night? Maybe they come from a pub with hymns on its jukebox. I turn to show my appreciation, but somehow they have blended into the dark shadows around the back seats – I can hardly make them out. I leave them alone after that. I’m on my way. I don’t need them.
We peter along – Sunnyside Up – the estates outside Seaville – round onto the old main road – average time – no spectacular racer this – but no rush either. There is a patch of country-like darkness, then we start to find our way towards the satellites of Sundercity. Suddenly – for no one has hailed the bus since we got on a Seaville – there is a stop. The antique brakes pull on, and the stiff doors fold open like an aged screen of zigzagging moth-cloth. Ah, this is where the old folk dismount. I can hear them moving forward. I see them clearly now, as they move past, silent, slow, slightly wobbly-coggly, like old folk who need sticks and a supporting hand. I do not offer. They will soon be gone, with their wheezy hymns and dark presence, and then we will be on our way! Sundercity! Hurrah!
The bus, however, disagrees. There is no move to shut the doors. There is no response from the driver. Does he know I am here? Is he too far in advance of the schedule? Unlikely, the slow rate we’ve been moving. Perhaps he’s had an attack and slumped in his seat, a martyr to late shifts. Well, it’s getting embarrassing, so I move forward to check. They don’t like being goaded, but a friendly enquiry…
How, man! We’re bound for Sundercity, are we? (No reply.) Must be time to gan, eh? (Nothing.) Drive, can you? (Humour.) (No response.) Aw, come on, it’s getting ower-late. I want to get to Sundercity. Nummer 49… Sundercity…
It seems useless. There is no response, but the driver seems upright and alert, in his way. Eventually he turns a head towards me, slow and gaunt, like a tortoise might. I wait, apprehensive somehow. I mean, how old can a timetable be? ‘We can go no further,’ he seems to be saying. Well, I know the regulations – you have to go to the terminus – the destination on the front of the bus – but then, did I check? Maybe the last bus stops short now. The old folk seemed to expect it. They all got out. ‘Sundercity?’ I query, in a last attempt to get him moving. But the engine has stopped now. The driver is adamant. Nothing is going to move. I have to get off.
How far to Sundercity I wonder, as I step down. Outside. Not nice. A musty smell. Stones and strange carved caprices over the wall. Great… A graveyard. Must be the cemetery at Grunge. No sign of the others. No hymn-singing now. The only sound is the bus doors creaking shut behind me.
Page 491
Thursday, December 01, 2005
Iain Sinclair: Patrick Hamilton
PATRICK HAMILTON
PATRICK HAMILTON IN ST LEONARDS ON SEA
‘The sea! The sea! What of the sea?
The sea!
The solution - salvation! The sea! Why not?’
-Patrick Hamilton
a bone, a Norman bone
scavenged from pitted shelf, rain
early, against delight of snow, failed roads
meat as it’s fired, citadel stagnant with peace
hung in harness, brother spirits, late whisky
from pharmacist, a gentleman commoner
tyre track distinguishing narrow skull
Pat, Paddy, powers to your elbow
marine parenthesis, bed above butcher’s slab
harnessed in bracers, shirtless, blindlight
smell and texture of chartered streets
you step fastidious into the young girl’s body
her shame, geyser bath, soapflakes
sticky in tight hair, like flying
old values, old men: cigarette breakfast
II
Karl Marx & Hopalong Cassidy: this time apparently
you can trust the black shirt rider, saddlebum
smarter than singing cowboy, white-hat Roy
as beard, secular Jewish patriarch
granite paperweight holding down Highgate
it’s confusing, headline backwards
canted road hidden from promenade,
wake up last night’s radio, shadow of invasion
sea hiccups, every wave a dog’s head,
cork waistcoat, cork room, memory used up
‘that’s you done to a nice turn, sir’
hands tremble, three air shots on a 9-holer
game’s over, no more commuter trains
files thicken, print faints
the thin book it’ll cost you fifty notes
III
if you agree to oppose, you agree
Hamilton never got his head around Marxism
confused coarse golf with horizonless steppes
tanks ‘roll’ into Bluewater, confirm television
threat, when the car crunched Earl’s Court
his brother, fellow Norman, was in Victoria
watching the Marx Brothers in ‘The Cocoanuts’
Freddie Mills borrowed a fairground rifle
to shoot himself, suspect vehicle, exploitation
of complimentary parking space up west
pass me the knout & the knot tightens
roped cabin trunk transports body parts
uneconomic migrants
try ‘Hamilton’s Drop’ watered whisky
pissed into the hold of container ships
IV
gun-product collage, poetic ‘objects’ of mass observers
armpits eyebrows private life of midwives
sheer bollocks said H turning from rattle
slatted blinds concrete & pleasure
warden cadging light from cab driver
no hot water to scour dental plate
Naafi-style cafeteria breakfast Gielgud
holding free hand like a slack prick
I want war, H, to end it:
Yale lock, the difficulty in dying
To Save A Life! Do not interfere with this equipment
V
Mexican Fast Food from 5 to 11, Urban
Conflict Simulation Internet Access
if I had a gun I could kill myself cleanly
leave others to write up the mess
easier to swallow than a No.9 iron he said
everything tastes like marmalade
a ghost play without ghosts
plains of marzipan moving sand
the Egyptians I understand watch the same
sunrise it only takes about three years
VI
caught Hamilton’s tail squeezed juice
peardrops dissolving in milk
when he touched fingers to temple he bled
hair fell in marmalade, wife’s
a toff, sickbed, autographed bat
imprint of her buttocks, moving south
& stopping is a curse, karma of
unbricked villa. The earlier applicant
suggested movies in an upstairs room, Lang
Hitchcock, dancing girls, projector beam
cone of blue smoke: that trick
they went for the usual crusty hotpot
too close, too loud,
20,000 streets under the sea, nothing
in the can to touch Max Von Sydow
splaying cold fingers, raising stiff arm
disbelief, a blister in her palm
VII
refusing to read or even read about Billy Budd
climbed Melville not yet born
seaboots & long-coat in glycerine soft
ascent driven starwards mizzen-mast
‘a great writer but unreadable’
bit above himself lost in computer pool
spoke Scotch & travelled once to America
20,000 spectators looking from blue yonder
dissolute faces red-paint fire
man he knew should possess grain & water
so give himself up to his judges & swing
avoiding gibbet gibbeted at dock gates
bone pendulum, pulp writer’s winter fever
VIII
why does Stacey from Holiday Rewards have to be late
Americana, beamed from sub-continent
to swing & mimic, allowed to go so far before
I say no with mock serious conviction
or, better, ‘Go away’. He dig it, the German
cleared by truth commission repentance
private resolution, disturbed by glow under pier
Hamilton couldn’t tell left from right,
Hitler Youth costume in wardrobe,
no aberration against disorganisation
of hot places where older Bavarian gentlemen
hide out: to be here, to be fixed
in the matter-toffee of narrative
mouse on sticky pad
death by screwdriver, how they scuttle
legless, behind fridge
according to whim: in darkness or light
AFTERMATH
Three years slumber on the banks of the Ocean.
William Blake
It explained his dreams. The Chinese caused his dreams. Every terror and queerness of sleep, even unspeakability – it is painted in China white.
Don DeLillo
Pistol Pete hadn’t played professionally for a while, and he was thought of as forgotten. I hadn’t forgotten about him, though. Some people seem to fade away but when they are truly gone, it’s like they didn’t fade away at all.
Bob Dylan
This poem is shortest section from Buried at Sea, a volume of Iain Sinclair's poetry to be published by the Worple Press in 2006. It is the most substantial volume Sinclair has published since Suicide Bridge.
See Iain Sinclair's take on another famous writer-drinker, Malcolm Lowry, here. And a piece by me on Sinclair's 'social poetics', 'Everything Connects', here.
PATRICK HAMILTON IN ST LEONARDS ON SEA
‘The sea! The sea! What of the sea?
The sea!
The solution - salvation! The sea! Why not?’
-Patrick Hamilton
a bone, a Norman bone
scavenged from pitted shelf, rain
early, against delight of snow, failed roads
meat as it’s fired, citadel stagnant with peace
hung in harness, brother spirits, late whisky
from pharmacist, a gentleman commoner
tyre track distinguishing narrow skull
Pat, Paddy, powers to your elbow
marine parenthesis, bed above butcher’s slab
harnessed in bracers, shirtless, blindlight
smell and texture of chartered streets
you step fastidious into the young girl’s body
her shame, geyser bath, soapflakes
sticky in tight hair, like flying
old values, old men: cigarette breakfast
II
Karl Marx & Hopalong Cassidy: this time apparently
you can trust the black shirt rider, saddlebum
smarter than singing cowboy, white-hat Roy
as beard, secular Jewish patriarch
granite paperweight holding down Highgate
it’s confusing, headline backwards
canted road hidden from promenade,
wake up last night’s radio, shadow of invasion
sea hiccups, every wave a dog’s head,
cork waistcoat, cork room, memory used up
‘that’s you done to a nice turn, sir’
hands tremble, three air shots on a 9-holer
game’s over, no more commuter trains
files thicken, print faints
the thin book it’ll cost you fifty notes
III
if you agree to oppose, you agree
Hamilton never got his head around Marxism
confused coarse golf with horizonless steppes
tanks ‘roll’ into Bluewater, confirm television
threat, when the car crunched Earl’s Court
his brother, fellow Norman, was in Victoria
watching the Marx Brothers in ‘The Cocoanuts’
Freddie Mills borrowed a fairground rifle
to shoot himself, suspect vehicle, exploitation
of complimentary parking space up west
pass me the knout & the knot tightens
roped cabin trunk transports body parts
uneconomic migrants
try ‘Hamilton’s Drop’ watered whisky
pissed into the hold of container ships
IV
gun-product collage, poetic ‘objects’ of mass observers
armpits eyebrows private life of midwives
sheer bollocks said H turning from rattle
slatted blinds concrete & pleasure
warden cadging light from cab driver
no hot water to scour dental plate
Naafi-style cafeteria breakfast Gielgud
holding free hand like a slack prick
I want war, H, to end it:
Yale lock, the difficulty in dying
To Save A Life! Do not interfere with this equipment
V
Mexican Fast Food from 5 to 11, Urban
Conflict Simulation Internet Access
if I had a gun I could kill myself cleanly
leave others to write up the mess
easier to swallow than a No.9 iron he said
everything tastes like marmalade
a ghost play without ghosts
plains of marzipan moving sand
the Egyptians I understand watch the same
sunrise it only takes about three years
VI
caught Hamilton’s tail squeezed juice
peardrops dissolving in milk
when he touched fingers to temple he bled
hair fell in marmalade, wife’s
a toff, sickbed, autographed bat
imprint of her buttocks, moving south
& stopping is a curse, karma of
unbricked villa. The earlier applicant
suggested movies in an upstairs room, Lang
Hitchcock, dancing girls, projector beam
cone of blue smoke: that trick
they went for the usual crusty hotpot
too close, too loud,
20,000 streets under the sea, nothing
in the can to touch Max Von Sydow
splaying cold fingers, raising stiff arm
disbelief, a blister in her palm
VII
refusing to read or even read about Billy Budd
climbed Melville not yet born
seaboots & long-coat in glycerine soft
ascent driven starwards mizzen-mast
‘a great writer but unreadable’
bit above himself lost in computer pool
spoke Scotch & travelled once to America
20,000 spectators looking from blue yonder
dissolute faces red-paint fire
man he knew should possess grain & water
so give himself up to his judges & swing
avoiding gibbet gibbeted at dock gates
bone pendulum, pulp writer’s winter fever
VIII
why does Stacey from Holiday Rewards have to be late
Americana, beamed from sub-continent
to swing & mimic, allowed to go so far before
I say no with mock serious conviction
or, better, ‘Go away’. He dig it, the German
cleared by truth commission repentance
private resolution, disturbed by glow under pier
Hamilton couldn’t tell left from right,
Hitler Youth costume in wardrobe,
no aberration against disorganisation
of hot places where older Bavarian gentlemen
hide out: to be here, to be fixed
in the matter-toffee of narrative
mouse on sticky pad
death by screwdriver, how they scuttle
legless, behind fridge
according to whim: in darkness or light
AFTERMATH
Three years slumber on the banks of the Ocean.
William Blake
It explained his dreams. The Chinese caused his dreams. Every terror and queerness of sleep, even unspeakability – it is painted in China white.
Don DeLillo
Pistol Pete hadn’t played professionally for a while, and he was thought of as forgotten. I hadn’t forgotten about him, though. Some people seem to fade away but when they are truly gone, it’s like they didn’t fade away at all.
Bob Dylan
This poem is shortest section from Buried at Sea, a volume of Iain Sinclair's poetry to be published by the Worple Press in 2006. It is the most substantial volume Sinclair has published since Suicide Bridge.
See Iain Sinclair's take on another famous writer-drinker, Malcolm Lowry, here. And a piece by me on Sinclair's 'social poetics', 'Everything Connects', here.
My monograph Iain Sinclair is still available here: Iain Sinclair | Liverpool University Press
Page 490
Page 490
Tuesday, November 29, 2005
Robert Sheppard: Iain Sinclair's Lud Heat
The book’s process of composition seems to have arisen out of journals, in which both dreams and reality are meticulously recorded; some of these find their way into the finished book. ‘An invasion of white rats, scuttling over the steps of a double ziggurat’, (LHSB 41) matches the precision of his daytime perceptions: ‘The white of horse-chestnut candles’. (LHSB 41) However, Sinclair is no Hopkins, looking for the inscape of nature. Textual quiddity comes from chat with his mostly Irish Catholic workmates as they discuss their negative reactions to the death of Princess Anne’s horse or the visit of Cardinal Heenan to the East End. The thirty-five poems of the book first appear as extensions of this journal, a poem a day. Barely punctuated, using space and the ampersand to punctuate both meaning and pace, the poems’ sentence-phrases hang on the line, their enjambement often at the ends of phrases, leaving an appropriately notational flavour. The first poem begins in medias res with an awareness of its potentialities and processes:
sits
the coat of darkness, wondering
if he would ever write it (LHSB 41)
(Unfortunately, this blogzine can’t accurately reproduce the indentation on ANY of the poems in this posting, on this page.) The poems overhear the things of the world, in this case a television, with painful intensity:
in another room the electric serial
loud & raw
has taken something from his eye (LHSB 42)
The self, presented in the third person, is threatened, is still looking downward, but accepts the powers around it. The first poem ends:
these are the summer words
& if he works
it is not all because he has to
face down
along the curve of falling energies
there is nothing more
or less
than to become unconscious
to hood the day’s falcon (LHSB 42)
This extraordinary final image suggests that the essence of daytime consciousness is a fierce predatory gaze that must be actively extinguished. Later the poems rise to generalities and the first person plural to express their sense of human absorption in, and the lack of escape from, cyclical routine (and again the (impossible) typography is constituent of it meaning).
we come out of the cycle of pains
or
the pains become by repetition pleasurable
are worn down
& go into the butter
of a fat new moon (LHSB 88)
The passive awareness of uneasy harmony both in consciousness (‘dreams are sleek now filled/with pasturing doubts’), (LHSB 88-9) and in material reality (‘the sofas are human /& enclose every vertebral ache’), (LHSB 89) lends a certain grace to these poems unique in Sinclair’s work, the confirmation of personal happiness that strives, in the words of another poem, to ‘construct a more generous sentence’. (LHSB 94) Brittle theorizing is reserved for the prose essays (which were composed later), but these poems also register unease with their own lyrical compass, a striving towards such analysis. Pleasure and pain are insufficient measures as they absorb one another.
we loll in the pleasure of it
until that becomes boring & the eyes
ache again for images they cannot bear (LHSB 89)
The poetic inheritance of this work is largely American. While the ‘relaxed, meditative free verse’ derives from that tradition, more importantly so does its permission that a ‘poem’ might include prose.(2 ) It was William Carlos Williams who observed that Pound’s Cantos ‘can include pieces of prose and have them still part of the poem. It is incorporated in a movement of the intelligence which is special, beyond usual thought and action’.( 3) Williams sought to emulate this is in his own Paterson (1948-63), which not only uses assorted prose but, like Lud Heat, is intensely concerned with locality; the ragbag approach is arguably well suited to capturing the cluttered physical collage of urban space. Olson’s Maximus Poems (1950-70) makes use less of prose as a vehicle, but its tightly scored lines of breath-units (also scored for the eye using the layout devices of the typewriter) were dubbed ‘Projective Verse’ by Olson in his famous poetics essay of that name. Concerned to keep the rhythms of perception and language open and in harmony, sensitive to each momentary experience by emphasising writerly process and improvisatory spontaneity, through a mobile free verse line, projective verse was an ideal model for Sinclair’s journal-like responses to his quotidian existence. Indeed, Sinclair has admitted that, early in his writing life, Olson ‘became the major figure for me’. (V 38). Additionally, Olson’s focus upon topological data dealing with New England’s early settlement, which Sinclair experienced as ‘a sense of somebody nailing down a sea town and opening it up to the world’, suggested that a semi-scholarly attention to place might also yield appropriate aesthetic results. (V 38)
These examples may have influenced British precursors to Lud Heat, one acknowledged by Sinclair, the other not. The unacknowledged is Roy Fisher’s late modernist evocation of Birmingham, City (1960), with its assemblage of varieties of poetic forms and defamiliarizing prose. The acknowledged precursor is Lee Harwood’s Cable Street (1964), which focuses upon the same East End territory as Lud Heat, juxtaposing slight lyrics and background prose, particularly dealing with radical politics (such as the anti-fascist Battle of Cable Street in 1936). Contemporary to Sinclair’s own work, Chris Torrance’s The Magic Door (of which Sinclair published the first two books in 1975 and 1977), is praised in Lud Heat for its ‘neat fast descriptions’ and its ability to show that ‘the dream/with the observed world is shared’, both qualities Sinclair has emulated. (LHSB 65) Allen Fisher’s Place project (1971-79), is – in Sinclair’s words, an ‘Olsonian epic about South London’ - which places Blake at the centre of its inspiration. (V 73) Like Blake, both Fisher and Sinclair were publishers of their own books, in Sinclair’s case, adding maps, drawings and photographs to illustrate the text in its Albion Village Press edition. Part of Place offers a reading of Lud Heat as a fraternal enterprise, which is still one of the best introductions to the work. Fisher recognizes the need to communicate about the nature of place, and the symbolic interpretation of the built environment. (Sinclair just listed the omnibus edition of Place, published by Reality Street, as one of his books of the year.)
The necessity to locate, to place ourselves becomes increasingly apparent to people living, as you do Iain, in the throws (sic) of, up against the old walls of a city, when this city – London – is now one borough of 33 held in the name of the Greater Council.(4 )
Fisher writes approvingly that ‘your concern is energetic and about energy’ and that Sinclair is concerned with ‘situational fields, lapping overlapping’, but he sceptically employs a qualifying set of inverted commas when he observes that ‘it is from … buildings that the energies of the area are – I was going to say, “generated”’.(5)
Fisher has in mind the theory contained in the essay with which Lud Heat opens, ‘Nicholas Hawksmoor, his churches’. The architect Hawksmoor, who designed and built London churches in the early eighteenth century after the devastation of the Great Fire of London, is represented as a man who could read the metropolis he found, and, more importantly, who could ‘rewrite the city’ in a frenzied, barely conscious urge, (LHSB 14) with ‘risky quotations’ from architectural history; (LHSB 14) ‘It is possible to imagine that he did work a code into the buildings.’ (LHSB 17) Even the modern standard work on Hawksmoor confesses, ‘The strangeness … of many of Hawksmoor’s formal devices, has found recognition in the present century’s exploration of the subconscious.’ 6 The guiding conceit of Sinclair’s essay is expressed in the form of a map of London; lines are superimposed upon it in the shape of two pentagrams, rather like Alfred Watkins’ ley lines, supposedly demonstrating that Hawksmoor’s six churches – he had a hand in a further three - were deliberately aligned with one another for occult signification. What Sinclair attempts in the essay, with its strategic cod academic tone, is analogous to what he accuses Hawksmoor of achieving: quotations are piled on, associated, encoded and presented as ‘evidence’. Writers – Yeats, Milton, Blake, Defoe, Bunyan, Keats – are nodes of ‘heat’ spread around the pattern, ‘generated’, as Fisher almost cannot bear to say, by the configuration of the buildings. We are promised ‘only a fraction of the possible relations’. (LHSB 16) Hawksmoor’s architectural quotations include Egyptian symbols and pyramids, and these assume the darker aspects of the patterning: sun obelisks (more heat) point the reader to invisible plague pits and murder sites, emphasizing the ‘unacknowledged magnetism and control-power, built-in code force of these places’. (LHSB 21) The Jack the Ripper murders of 1888, the Ratcliffe Highway Murders of 1811 (which De Quincey had famously taken a cool look at in his essay ‘Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts’ (1827)), and the contemporaneous murder of Abraham Cohen in 1974, had all occurred within the influence lines of these churches, almost literally on their doorsteps. More speculative accounts, that Hawksmoor planned an unrealized Basilica after the Primitive Christians on what would become the site of the Carpenters Arms, which was the Kray Twins’ gangland headquarters, stretches the threads of the web almost to breaking point. St Anne’s Limehouse, which is identified with a Mortuary Temple, becomes particularly important, with its pyramid (around which, one may read in other sections of the book, Sinclair mundanely mows the grass and against which he ‘risks’ leaning while he eats his sandwiches). Sinclair himself suffers sunstroke working this patch – the Scorpion god Selkis is invoked by this time - and it is no surprise to learn that ‘St Anne’s was gutted by fire on the morning of Good Friday, April 6, 1850. Vernal Equinox, time of occult threat’. (LHSB 37)
While Sinclair is careful to emphasize that his quotations act only as provisional confirmation of one another, of patterns of unacknowledged repetition, the reader is marshalled by a relentless rhetoric of assimilation and connection to believe that these sites are indeed funnels of power for the gods, diffusing their influence through the ‘heat’ of poets, yet emerging in a violent and violating form in negative acts of murder. Murder, far from being one of the fine arts, is a sacrificial act of purification. The possibility that the family of Abraham Cohen, for example, might not have appreciated this conclusion, should they have read the essay, gives pause for thought. Peter Barry recognizes the danger: ‘This overdetermined universe would quickly become unbearably claustrophobic, and perhaps ultimately silly, in the hands of any other writer.’( 7 ) It provided a neat enough thesis for Peter Ackroyd to run with in Hawksmoor, but that was a work of fiction and Sinclair’s essay – unless it is read like one of Borges’ meticulous inventions - is not. Allen Fisher’s scepticism about this over-determination remains as a powerful corrective. Barry also argues that, despite the mode of argument and its problematics in terms of ‘truth’ and ‘fiction’, there is something ‘common’ to the urban experience in Sinclair’s ‘mapping out danger points’; he explains, ‘The mapping reclaims the city, recuperates its mean, chartered streets, and fits them into an ordered, frightening, preconception’. (8) Once again, Sinclair’s actions seem close to that of his invented Hawksmoor,‘re-writing’ the heat of Lud’s territory, as well as to the experience of the ordinary urban dweller.
The finding of equivalences becomes the focus of other prose essays that intersect the poems and journals. The essays on viewing the films of the American experimentalist Stan Brakage and the sculpture of his friend Brian Catling locate a similar ‘autoptic instinct’ in the artists’ practices. (LHSB 78) While Brakage is literally filming an autopsy – ‘meaning “the act of seeing with one’s own eyes”, from the Greek’ – (LHSB 54) Catling ‘serves the Necropolis. Objects are made in fear & expectation of death… In photographs we see the wooden pyramid … that is so close to the Limehouse pyramid, & was made in advance of the first sight of it: intentional, willed, pre-vision.’ (LHSB 84) Art is an energized, unacknowledged intensifier of circumstance and the lore of place; the artist is a variety of shaman, simultaneously blessed and cursed with vision. But the narrator of these pieces – culturally sophisticated and self-regarding - is still the character who waters his broad beans after work and records that fact. He writes of his family (and family to come): ‘Anna sickens towards the new life/the frog-bud forcing itself in her womb.’ (LHSB 134) But this is balanced against the recognition that ‘death/is every mother’s prophecy’; the hot dead of the dead hamlets are always beckoning. (LHSB 134)
At the centre of these discourses, contending with these patterns of connection, is the ‘narrator’. Sinclair is here recognizing the problematics of autobiographical representation, but also capturing a sense of the discontinuous self that the artist-shaman must assume. He wonders ‘when I am/ “not quite myself”/what (not who)’ he is. (LHSB 50) Egoic dissolution, activated psychosomatically by the Limehouse contagion of sunstroke (and by hay-fevers, upon which he theorizes), is addressed in the essay ‘In the Surgery of the Sun’:
As the ego breaks I am host to another being, who pushes through & not with the pink tenderness of new skin – but with old flesh, hard as wood. The earlier ‘I-do-not-know-who-I-am’ virus is confirmed, as this terminal caricature eases out of my face. (LHSB 109-10)
Host is held hostage by the parasite. Sinclair appears here as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Jekyll, fully aware that Hyde is bursting through. Indeed, Stevenson is quoted: ‘As for myself I cannot believe fully in my own existence… the weather is threatening.’ (LHSB 50) At times there is a more beneficent sense of diminished selfhood, of a sinking of self in perception, almost a Zen Buddhist approach to the process; characteristically, this appears in the poems:
subdue all ego
(& rigorous eye)
into the unmarked
morning quality of autumn light (LHSB 124)
To break the patterns that the text builds up, to approach something like this ‘unmarked’ experience, the energy must be annulled or countered. On a literal level, the ‘narrator’ has to leave his summer employment. On another level, he must return to the map and locate an ‘oracle’, on the outer point of London. He must then run to the oracle and return; a state of ‘total body exhaustion’ is ordained. (LHSB 138) That the oracle turns out to be a urinous machine-gun bunker in the Lea Valley seems not to matter at this stage of Sinclair’s career. Later, he would allow irony to undercut the cosmic patterning. It is, however, a ritual he feels impelled to enact, as later, Sinclair is drawn in his documentary to become a stalker of predetermined routes. This run even prefigures his need to circumnavigate the M25, as a ritual of annihilation, in his much later book, London Orbital. But his final state is a kind of Keatsian negative capability before the energies he invokes, an imperturbable emptiness rather than oracular fulfilment. Like the artist figure in Blake’s Jerusalem, Los, whose healing pilgrimage across London matches his own, he annihilates selfhood. ‘He knows nothing of the precisions & mechanics & movements & meanings here either. An ignorant man, ground-held, muddy in motive – he jogs back the way he came.’ (LHSB 134). That means he’s on his way over one of (at least) two bridges know as ‘Suicide Bridge’, a name that provided the title of Iain Sinclair’s second substantial book. (9)
Notes
1. Rachel Potter, ‘Culture Vulture: the testimony of Iain Sinclair’s Downriver, Parataxis 5 (Winter 1993-4), 42.
2. Peter Barry, Contemporary British Poetry and the City (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000), 173.
3. William Carlos Williams, ‘Excerpts from a Critical Sketch: A Draft of Thirty Cantos by Ezra Pound’ (1931), reprinted in ed., J.P. Sullivan, Ezra Pound (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 119.
4. Allen Fisher, ‘A Confluence of Energies: A Reading of Iain Sinclair’s Lud Heat, in his Stane, Place Book III (London: Aloes Books, 1977), 30/31.
5. Fisher, ‘Confluence’, 30/31.
6. Kerry Downes, Hawksmoor (London: Thames and Hudson, 1970), 206.
7. Barry, Contemporary British Poetry and the City, 178.
8. Barry, 172.
9. This text is dealt with in my forthcoming Northcote House publication, Iain Sinclair.
Updates 2016: Further links:
Lud Heat is once again available here.
My book Iain Sinclair may be bought here. Or Here: Iain Sinclair | Liverpool University Press
Another of my reviews of Sinclair's poetry may be read here.
My account of Dining on Stones is featured here.
My critical volume When Bad Times made for Good Poetry has some further thoughts on Iain Sinclair's work. Some of the thinking for that, on the 'social poetics' at play in Sinclair's work may be read here.
Suicide Bridge is also back in print and may be bought here Suicide Bridge – Skylight Press here. This reprints my 1980 review of the book!
Here is an account of Iain Sinclair celebrating Malcolm Lowry in Liverpool in 2014.
You can read about my recent poetry here,
here and here, and follow the links to points of online purchase.
Page 489
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