HARWOOD, Lee

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Nationality: British. Born: Leicester, 6 June 1939. Education: St. George's College, Weybridge; Queen Mary College, London, B.A. (honors) in English 1961. Family: Married 1) Jenny Goodgame in 1961 (dissolved 1967), one son; 2) Judith Walker in 1974 (divorced 1984), one son and one daughter. Career: Monumental mason's mate, 1961; library and museum assistant, 1962–64, 1965–66; packer, 1964; assistant, 1966–67, and manager of the poetry department, 1971, Better Books, London; bus conductor, Brighton, 1969; lived in the United States, 1970, 1972–73; 1983–84; writer-in-residence, Aegean School of Fine Arts, Paros, Greece, Summer 1971, 1972; post office worker, Brighton, 1973–77, 1979–83, and since 1985; occasional lecturer, New College, San Francisco, 1983–84. Editor, Night Scene magazine, London, 1963; co-editor, Night Train magazine, London, 1963; editor, with Johnny Byrne, Horde magazine, London, 1964; editor, with Claude Royet-Journoud, Soho magazine, London and Paris, 1964; editor, Tzarad magazine, London and Brighton, 1965–69; co-editor, Boston Eagle, 1973–74. Chair, Poetry Society, London (resigned); Labour candidate for Sussex County Council,1977. Awards: Poets Foundation award (USA), 1966; Alice Hunt Bartlett award, 1976. Address: 21 Chatsworth Road, Brighton, Sussex, England.

Publications

Poetry

Title Illegible. London, Writers Forum, 1965.

The Man with Blue Eyes. New York, Angel Hair, 1966.

The White Room. London, Fulcrum Press, 1968.

The Beautiful Atlas. Brighton, Kavanagh, 1969.

Landscapes. London, Fulcrum Press, 1969.

The Sinking Colony. London, Fulcrum Press, 1970.

Penguin Modern Poets 19, with John Ashbery and Tom Raworth. London, Penguin, 1971.

The First Poem. Brighton, Unicorn Bookshop, 1971.

New Year. London, Wallrich, 1971.

Captain Harwood's Log of Stern Statements and Stout Sayings. London, Writers Forum, 1973.

Freighters. Newcastle upon Tyne, Pig Press, 1975.

H.M.S. Little Fox. London, Oasis, 1975.

Notes of a Post Office Clerk. Gloucester, Massachusetts, Bezoar, 1976.

Boston—Brighton. London, Oasis, 1977.

Old Bosham Bird Watch and Other Stories. Newcastle upon Tyne, Pig Press, 1977; revised edition, 1978.

Wish You Were Here, with Antony Lopez. Deal, Kent, Transgravity Press, 1979.

All the Wrong Notes. Durham, Pig Press, 1981.

Faded Ribbons. Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, Other Branch, 1982.

Wine Tales (includes prose), with Richard Caddel. Newcastle upon Tyne, Galloping Dog Press, 1984.

Monster Masks: Poems 1977–83. Durham, Pig Press, 1985.

Rope Boy to the Rescue. Twickenham, Middlesex, North and South, 1988.

Crossing the Frozen River: Selected Poems. London, Paladin, 1988.

In the Mists: Mountain Poems. West Bridgford, Nottingham, Slow Dancer, 1993.

Morning Light. London, Slow Dancer, 1998.

Recording: Landscapes, Stream, 1968.

Short Stories

Assorted Stories. Durham, Pig Press/Staple Diet, 1985; as Assorted Stories: Prose Works, Minneapolis, Coffee House Press, 1987.

Dream Quilt: 30 Assorted Stories. Nottingham, Slow Dancer Press, 1985.

Other

Tristan Tzara: A Bibliography. London, Aloes, 1974.

Editor, with William Corbett and Lewis Warsh, The Boston Eagle at Home. Privately printed, 1973.

Editor, with Peter Bailey, The Empty Hill: Memories and Praises of Paul Evans (1945–1991). N.p., Skylark Press, 1992.

Translator, A Poem Sequence, by Tristan Tzara. Gillingham, Kent, Arc, 1969; revised edition, as Cosmic Realities Vanilla Tobacco Dawnings, 1975.

Translator, Destroyed Days, by Tristan Tzara. Colchester, Essex, Voice print, 1971.

Translator, Selected Poems, by Tristan Tzara. London, Trigram Press, 1975; revised and enlarged edition, as Chanson Dada: Selected Poems, Toronto. Coach House Press, 1987.

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Critical Studies: In Records and Recording (London), April 1969; by Raymond Gardiner, in The Guardian (London), 8 July 1970; interview with Victor Bockris, in Pennsylvania Review 1 (Philadelphia), 1970; The Ironic Harvest: English Poetry in the 20th Century by Geoffrey Thurley, London, Amold, 1974; interview with Eric Mottram, in Poetry Information 14 (London), Winter 1975–76; "The Illusions of Freedom: The Poetry of Lee Harwood" by Paul Selby, in Poetry Information 15 (London), 1976; The British Dissonance: Essays on Ten Contemporary Poets by A. Kingsley Weatherhead, Columbia, University of Missouri Press, 1983; Some Aspects of Contemporary British Poetry with Particular Reference to the Work of Roy Fisher and Lee Harwood (dissertation), n.p., 1989, and "Lee Harwood and the Poetics of the Open Work," in New British Poetries: The Scope of the Possible, edited by Robert Hampson and Peter Barry, both by Robert Sheppard; "Some British Beat History: 10—No Longer Wailing" by Dave Cunliffe, in Kerouac Connection, 20, Autumn 1990.

Lee Harwood comments:

I like to think of my writing as a form of collage that tries to present and create a balanced world, a four-dimensional whole. My poems work with a mixture of fragments, of stories, direct talk, suggestions, and at times quotations from other artists. They jump about, like most minds and imaginations do, and hope the reader or listener is willing to make the effort to follow, to work a bit and to collaborate in the making of the text. No writer wants to be obscure or difficult, but one cannot always talk in simplistic terms. Sometimes the nature of a subject, if it is to be expressed with any clarity and precision, must allow for complexity.

*  *  *

"I just want to tell you the truth," says Lee Harwood's voice in Boston-Brighton. Whereas another poet, Robert Frost, for example, might set watch at the ocean's edge for people to peer metaphysically yet not see clearly, as in "Neither Out Far nor in Deep," Harwood sees precisely what might be there:

   a lone freighter
   silhouetted
   maybe three freighters
   with crews and cooks and captains
   are silhouetted
   are even clear out to sea
                       there
   I point in front of my face.

Harwood's first two books, consciously aware of Charles Olson's Maximus Poems, are "mappings" of reality. They include poems, photographs, historical notes, geological sketches, and photocopied advertisements. They are more collage than the Maximus Poems, less intense, more modestly personal. In place of Olson's grand "monstrance" of a national "Republic," Harwood looks for "a list of simple, practical and just acts" that move "towards a real 'socialism."'" Like Olson—and Joyce, too, for that matter—Harwood sees our world formed on the edge of the "ghost" world of the past. We must exist with the dead,

   not denying the ghosts
   but banding with them
   their existence our gravity
   the dead surround us,
   hold us up, that is support us,
   lovingly
   in the progress

Charting perception has been Harwood's love from the beginning. He is interested in how seeing "rows of white houses" might evolve into a song title and how hearing the song then brings, or does not bring, the houses back into view. He is interested in how reality is what we compose out of fragments and how within it everyone goes about, or does not go about. Harwood writes like a painter; life is "a bare canvas, but not empty— /all there under the surface." Poems happen when he rubs a pencil over the grain he did not know was there. The reality forms continuously at the edge of his syllables. If he is not invested in the next word, it will come in quotation marks, for in these poems language makes reality. Hence the fragments, the sudden spaces, the poems that end without periods or with a line sliced by diagonal space, or the poem that does not end at all:

   The curtains are once again opened
   and the opera continues
 
 
   for there is much that language does not yet know:
 
 
   All the books and maps and knowledge give us too little,
   leave large blank spaces, 'terra incognita'.

Reading Harwood is exploration; his world is transformed as his mind adjusts its focal length, just as the reader's is in reading. You cannot be quite sure when you turn the page that the same words will be where you remembered them to be, or that you will be, or that the reality you were watching will survive:

  the film breaks at this point. Crackling noises and smoke
  pour from the improvised projection room.

Harwood has an offbeat wit, and he is a marvelous storyteller. His poems invite us in. It is charming to be presented with open space or to be given ambiguity so economically constructed that we must enter the poem, participate, do what he would that we do, embrace our carefully chosen ghosts. The poet will even give us a quiz after reading to help:

   QUESTIONS
 
 
   i) Does the man go mad?
   Does he even commit suicide? (hence a well-rounded
   drama) or continue a life of quiet suburban despair?
   (so a well-rounded 'Modern' drama) …
 
 
   vi) Are we denied peace?
   Not the peace of answers, set ideas and realized
   hopes,(stagnation), but the peace to do things we
   want to do for ourselves. To push on, unhindered
   by jobs, exhaustion, and 'the treacle of fears and
   evasions'!!??

Are we? See "The Beginning of the Story" in Monster Masks.

Social commentary has a place, but Harwood's heart touches people and love. In his lyrical poems his voice is modest, unassuming, and gentle. He writes with an impressionist's eye. Reading "The Final Painting" or "Soft White" is to sense the subtlest change of hue as a cloud shifts in the sky:

   When the sea is as grey as her eyes
   On these days for sure the soft white
   mist blown in from the ocean the town dissolving
   It all adds up her bare shoulders
 
 
   Nakedness rolling in from the sea,
   on winter afternoons …

Harwood can move gracefully to prose and to collaboration. In Wine Tales he and Richard Caddel each inhabit a dozen wine labels in strange, marvelous vignettes. In All the Wrong Notes he joins photographer Judith Walker to augment dissonances in a paralyzed London, soon turning toward poetry, toward dreams, and toward the false dreams in which we struggle to disbelieve:

It's those dreams of perfection, 'the man of your dreams', 'woman of your dreams', 'the budgie of your dreams', 'your dreams come true' to a jarring chorus of cash registers and half-stifled moans.

Against this the final poem, "The Fern Cabinet," sets an alternative. Based on quotations from writers and visionaries that unite past, present, and future, it has a lyrical reality that comes into focus as "a faint cloud passes and /the distant landscape is precise in every detail."

In his years of writing Harwood has progressed beyond his mapped world that threatened to become a hieroglyph for himself to become a lyricist for whom delicate sensuality is not a dream but a better way. He thus brought to the late twentieth century a gentleness and plausibility it sorely needed.

—Edward B. Germain