One of the side effects of the evolution of literary generations in the 1970s was that more than a few of the poets who, age-wise, fell in between the New American Poetry of the 1950s & language poetry twenty years hence have never received anywhere near the attention and appreciation their work deserves. For every poet like Ted Berrigan, Kathleen Fraser, Anselm Hollo or Jerry Rothenberg who managed to become widely known & read, there are others who remain to be discovered by broader audiences. That was one reason why Qua Press’ publication of George Stanley’s A Tall, Serious Girl last year was such an important event. Why Flood Edition’s publication of the works of Ronald Johnson is likewise. Why Jack Collom’s Red Car Goes By – a 500-page Selected Poems – may prove to be the most important book that Tuumba Press will ever publish. Why it is so critical that some press step up soon to the same level of commitment for the writing of Kenneth Irby & David Shapiro & Bev Dahlen.

And that’s why it’s such a great thing that Shearsman Books has published the Collected Poems of Lee Harwood. While Harwood has published 23 other volumes of poetry & prose of his own, plus five volumes of translations of Tristan Tzara, only two have appeared in the United States, a very early chapbook from Angel Hair press called The Man with Blue Eyes, typeset on a typewriter, in an edition of just 500 copies, plus a collection of Assorted Stories from Coffee House Press, published in 1987. It says something about the state of book distribution that I never even heard about the Coffee House Press volume until I saw it listed in Collected Poems.

I picked up a used copy of The Man with Blue Eyes sometime in the late ‘60s & have been a fan ever since. Over the years, I’ve been able to obtain some of the volumes that have made it over here from such British presses as Fulcrum, Oasis and Pig, but somehow I never was able to get hold of the 1971 Penguin Modern Poets edition – Harwood’s one book from an international publisher – that contains his work alongside John Ashbery & Tom Raworth. The Collected makes clear that this was an appropriate pairing (tripling?), but it might surprise some American readers to discover that a poet of such consequence is not more well known here.

If there’s a rationale to such neglect beyond shitty distribution, it might be that Harwood has never been a formal extremist within the general framework of that poetics best known as the New American Poetry (a little harder to pin down when the poet so obviously is not an American at all, tho Harwood has done a couple of short stints Stateside over the years). Writers like Ginsberg, Olson, Creeley, Ashbery, Duncan, Eigner, McClure, even O’Hara all benefited enormously by developing signature styles that at times felt positively trademarked. This may have made it possible to more easily imitate, even parody, their poetry, but it also ensured that even a casual reader could pick up a book and immediately “get it.”* It’s a reality of the poetry market that poets who may have greater range often are less well rewarded for this – Jack Collom is a great case in point – precisely because that scope comes by sacrificing a brand so visible that it is identifiable on the page even before you read the words: McClure’s centered texts with generous displays of CAPITAL LETTERS, Creeley’s short lines, Eigner’s sweep invariably down & to the right across the page, etc.

Here’s a relatively early poem of Harwood’s, whose title – “New York will welcome me” – includes the quotation marks:

the blue cadillac
sweeps round the sky
into its tower sun setting
people file out of the offices
and crocodiles move into the subways
a grey man standing on a column
of sponge cakes
shook himself awake
and continued counting the pigeons
while a red cat
twirled his tail
on a bar stool
sucking the scotch
still in his whiskers
”life gets tedious …” he said
as the last indian arrow
passed through the breast pocket
of his last check-shirt
one dollar is seven shillings and tuppence
and at present there is a water-shortage
in new york meaning water cannot be
served at table unless requested

so the love song and finger strokings
and eyes meeting on the stairs
of eastside tenements
all at a meeting planned a year
                                         a head

Right up to the phrase “check-shirt,” this sounds a good deal like a second generation New York School poem, rich with description but heightened beyond the depictive by the improbables that have been dropped in. Then it moves through two shifts, one of which frames it not only as NY School but as a portrait of New York from a particular perspective, and then in the second stanza the final details implying far more than they actually say, making it not a description at all but a sort of love poem.

Devices associated with the New York School have remained a touchstone for Harwood his entire life, yet he is hardly that. Not only has he lived in the coastal city of Brighton, U.K., for decades, Harwood is a poet given to quite straightforward love poems, often framed in a figurative language that might remind one of the paintings of Edward Hopper”:

On the maps the countries marked there
and the distances
that separate
the areas between
         … called “land masses”

No matter what

You there at that distance
to be measured in miles?

a red truck parked in the dusty town square
here

a relentless and continuing series
of separations that by number grow unreal

left with          the place you’re in now
(the word “you” variable)

From the window

There is an isolation figured in that last line – this being the first of three sections of the poem “With a photo by John Walsh” – that over the years has become something of Harwood’s own signature. It has nothing to do with the New American Poetry, or American anything really. Its lack of sentimentality & sharpness of observation are characteristics one might associate, say, with Objectivism, but I don’t sense that this where they come from for Harwood, but rather that they’re values he has held now for many decades, so that they emerge again & again throughout these poems. A complex little poem from the book’s final sequence is entitled “On the shelf”:

Tiger you’re snarling, but you don’t know why.
Your eyes large with desperation, and what?
Life on a dusty shelf suddenly hits you.
The company of a grey dog with green eyes,
an alpine cow with bell and flowers,
a croaking frog, and a balding monk hand-puppet,
is useless, irrelevant.

A little dog trots by in the street outside
ready for combat.

Five hundred pages of such measured clarity is a remarkable achievement for any poet. You’ll have to order this book direct from the publisher – I’m not aware of an American distributor – but ordering via the web is quick & painless, and it’s a volume that should be on everyone’s shelf.

 

* The first time I read Creeley’s “I Know a Man,” it was being used as an epigram to a campus novel by Jeremy Larner called, no less, Drive, He Said.