DESIGNS IN WORDS: ON LEE HARWOOD
David Hackbridge Johnson
The University of Pennsylvania poetry archive (PennSound) has just published a conversation between Eric Mottram and Lee Harwood that took place at The Poetry Society on October 9th 1972. Every word of it – and it's mainly Harwood with a few feeder questions from Mottram – is worthy of deep scrutiny. Harwood describes himself as an ‘arch-storyteller’ and, contrary to poetic appearances, John Ashbery as an ‘arch-confessionalist’. I'm going to take a leap here and assume that the word arch is not being used in a hierarchical sense but in the sense pertaining to the idea of playfulness and teasing. This suggests a confessional subtext lying underneath Ashbery's essentially painterly surface – if I may borrow a term from Clement Greenberg. Is it true to say that there is a surface lyrical sheen common to both Harwood and Ashbery's work? You could hardly say that about Mottram's poems which are knotty, convoluted, packed with material – almost unreadable, or so I thought, until I heard Gavin Selerie read his work at a conference in London a few years ago. I also like Harwood's mentioning of Jack Spicer saying, if you think you want to write a poem about Vietnam, don't do it. Write a letter to The Times instead. Hovering over this is the idea of Jean Cocteau's, also mentioned by Harwood – that the poet is not so much an artist but more of a radio receiver, and that a good poet keeps his equipment in order, the better to hear the incoming messages. All of this appeals to me as one increasingly irked by poets and poems that have designs on me, that announce themselves from the outset in favour of one or other position, that have already caught me in their claws, that have softened me up with rhetorical persuasion before swallowing me whole. I like Frank O'Hara, who wanders into a poem as if it were a dime store or a nightclub. Given that both O'Hara and Ashbery were art critics and both known to Harwood, I have to ask, did Harwood paint? Or, are words his paintbrush? Reading the collected poems of anybody is a big ask. A lectern is required for the heavier tomes. But even though it has many hundreds of pages, my beautiful Shearsman Press volume of Harwood's collected poems feels remarkably light under the hand. This is perhaps an illusion caused by reading the poems themselves, which often have a translucent feel about them, like the surface of a lake, or of a brush skimming over watercolour paper. Harwood's impressions are deft, they have a hovering presence, they seek to make few demands, they pass through narrow spaces with feline grace. Is this the archness that Harwood attributes to both himself and Ashbery? But if there are stories and confessions lying just beneath the surface, what are they? Probing under the surface of a Harwood poem might not reveal much in the way of hard data. But there must be a reason why so many poems have a much weightier afterlife than an initial reading would suggest. This is certainly to do with what is being left out. We can't necessarily know what this is but by the exquisitely careful placing of the words that we do read, we are left with absences that are not mere emptiness. It is probably not necessary to evoke the ‘sous rature' – the ‘under erasure' concept of Jacques Derrida, since I detect this technique at work in early poems of Harwood written just before the first of Derrida's major works was published. In any case for poems that leave most of themselves out, we have William Carlos Williams as a useful model. Harwood’s derivation of absence comes less from literature but more from the painters he admired, such as Larry Rivers, Robert Motherwell and Franz Kline, whose works are full of lacunae, empty spaces which the viewer might fill in, sometimes, in the case of Rivers, with helpful labels and arrows pointing to what isn't there – a nose, a mouth. It is interesting to note that Harwood's favoured position as a poet is among American and French writers – few British poets are mentioned in the conversation, although he realizes that there was a subculture of British poetry largely left out of the official picture – he was aware of David Gascoyne for instance, and then later was influenced by F.T. Prince and Roy Fisher. If writers like Gascoyne and Dylan Thomas were trying to capture ricochets from surrealism, combined with a certain apocalyptic tendency, Harwood learnt a more objective craft under the tutelage of Ashbery, who regarded a poem as an object offered to the reader, who then passes it to another. Harwood also emphasizes the idea of a poem existing inside and outside of the poet simultaneously. I suppose this might be called a form of poetic cubism in that it suggests different perspectives operating in parallel. Certainly in Harwood and Ashbery there is an absence of overt self-expression – something I think that bored them both as exemplified in the ‘lapel-grabbing' emoting of the Beats. Particularly beautiful in considering the idea of a poem not only as an object but an incomplete object to be added to or subtracted from by future readers, is a passage from a Jack Spicer letter that Harwood quotes: ‘Poems should echo and re-echo against each other. They should create resonances. They cannot live alone any more than we can.' With Harwood's poems there is a sense in which there is no one poem but a linked chain of utterances. To borrow another word beloved of French postmodernists, we might see a poetic oeuvre as behaving like a rhizome. Perhaps in reading the collected poems of Lee Harwood we are invited to complete the poems or to subtract some from each other to create new formations of words and new gaps. This is a poet that has no designs on us but who has created designs in words, that leave sufficient spaces for the reader's participation. As Harwood himself says in relation to deliberate ambiguities in Roy Fisher's poem City, ‘a poem should be a catalyst not a cameo.' Of deep significance to me: Harwood and myself have stared at the self-same unfinished painting of Gustave Moreau, albeit many decades apart. I am sure that Harwood is talking of the late masterpiece Les Chimeres, a work of both frenzied detail and blank spaces, of fully realised, moulded forms and hastily sketched-in architectural fantasies. Harwood recalls hours looking at this painting, something I did myself only last year. The sense of being mesmerized is achieved by the invitation to fill in the spaces Moreau left for us. In that sense the painting is both finished and unfinished. Laying down the brush was not the end of the work. A resonance, like that spoken of by Jack Spicer, is the bequest to those that look and speak and hear.
©DHJ 22.i.2026