Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Technique: Dialogue: Saying
- 1 The Movement Poets and the Movement Orthodoxy in the 1950s and 1960s
- 2 The British Poetry Revival 1960–1978
- 3 Starting to Make the World: The Poetry of Roy Fisher in the 1960s and 1970s
- 4 Keeping the Doors Open: the Poetry of Lee Harwood in the 1960s and 1970s
- 5 The Persistence of the Movement Orthodoxy in the 1980s and 1990s
- 6 Linguistically Innovative Poetry 1978–2000
- 7 What Was To One Side or Not Real: The Poetry of Tom Raworth 1970–1991
- 8 Creative Linkage in the Work of Allen Fisher, Adrian Clarke and Ulli Freer during the 1980s and 1990s
- 9 The Ballet of the Speech Organs: The Poetry of Bob Cobbing 1965–2000
- 10 Be come, Be spoke, Be eared: The Poetics of Transformation and Embodied Utterance in the work of Maggie O'Sullivan during the 1980s and 1990s
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - Keeping the Doors Open: the Poetry of Lee Harwood in the 1960s and 1970s
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Technique: Dialogue: Saying
- 1 The Movement Poets and the Movement Orthodoxy in the 1950s and 1960s
- 2 The British Poetry Revival 1960–1978
- 3 Starting to Make the World: The Poetry of Roy Fisher in the 1960s and 1970s
- 4 Keeping the Doors Open: the Poetry of Lee Harwood in the 1960s and 1970s
- 5 The Persistence of the Movement Orthodoxy in the 1980s and 1990s
- 6 Linguistically Innovative Poetry 1978–2000
- 7 What Was To One Side or Not Real: The Poetry of Tom Raworth 1970–1991
- 8 Creative Linkage in the Work of Allen Fisher, Adrian Clarke and Ulli Freer during the 1980s and 1990s
- 9 The Ballet of the Speech Organs: The Poetry of Bob Cobbing 1965–2000
- 10 Be come, Be spoke, Be eared: The Poetics of Transformation and Embodied Utterance in the work of Maggie O'Sullivan during the 1980s and 1990s
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Meetings Disintegrating
Lee Harwood's first book-length publication in Britain was The White Room (1968), published by Fulcrum Press. The first section, ‘Early Poems 1964– 1965’ contains ‘Cable Street’ and some poems reprinted from the 1965 Writers Forum pamphlet, title illegible. The section collecting the poems from The Man with Blue Eyes, his award-winning New York publication, opens with Harwood's first mature poem, ‘As Your Eyes are Blue’, dating from 1965; while it is influenced by the New York school of Ashbery and O'Hara, a good many of the salient features of Harwood's subsequent work are also displayed here. In a recent short piece Harwood recalls the US volume from which the poem came, and seamlessly moves from outlining influence to outlining his own poetics:
Meeting John [Ashbery] turned me round. Being in his company, reading his poems with more care than before, seeing his approaches to writing and his personal tastes was a wonderful lesson and release. I finally realized one could make poems that worked like Borges’ fictions. Poems that created a world and invited the reader to enter, to wander round, to put in their own two cents, to use. The personal was interwoven in this work, but there was much more involved than the personal … An awareness of co-existing worlds or realities. Of playfulness and seriousness spliced together.
‘As Your Eyes are Blue’ is a love lyric, addressed from a shadowy ‘I’ to an insistently addressed ‘you’; gender is unspecified, but certain clues suggest the poem is a covert homoerotic lyric. Homosexuality was illegal when the poem was penned, so perhaps it is not purely literary considerations that leave a reader unable to identify a coherent author-subject behind the various discourses. Hesitancy and textual discontinuity are both evident in broken utterance and syntactic rupture from the start.
As your eyes are blue you move me –
and the thought of you –
I imitate you.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Poetry of SayingBritish Poetry and its Discontents, 1950–2000, pp. 103 - 124Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2005