NOTES

Last night to the Red Roaster for the Memorial Lee Harwood event. Fourteeen readers. As expected, but kept to bearable length by the capable organiser, Michaela Ridgway. I was glad to see Ken and Elaine Edwards; to run into Paul Matthews:not seen since the wedding of George Dowden (poet, Ginsberg bibliographer) more than forty years ago in Brighton) but not to learn George died here last year; to meet Sammi Gale briefly; to sit for a while with Lee’s last partner Lindy who told of being at his bedside during the final hours and hearing him say faintly and with difficulty “I want to write….”, motioning away her offer to write something down for him and just repeating “I want to write”. I talked with John Harvey, whose work I like and whose Slow Dancer press published early works of Lee’s. His concise evocative introduction set Lee clearly in the early 1960s London scene, while mention of places like Sam Widges and people like Libby Houston scratched patches of my mind long undisturbed and probably caused my later dream of that era in Movietone colour intercut with Sean Bonney scrabbling in a black and white post-war ruined Berlin. To the very left of the Harvey photo can be seen the profile of Paul Brown whose Transgravity and Actual Size presses worked through those years. His Studio Bookstore is still at 68 St James’s St, Brighton BN2 1PJ. The academic feminists seems to have overlooked Libby, whom I remember as the only woman poet in an overwhelmingly male reading scene of the early 1960s. Certainly the only poet from then to have a tree, Houston’s Whitebeam (Sorbus x houstoniae), named after her.