I first met Lee Harwood somewhere in the mid-1970s, in the notably pungent cellar bar of the Why Not? Pub in Liverpool. The Why Not? (that was always a good question) was a long-running venue for regular poetry readings, and Lee read from his most recent book, H.M.S. Little Fox. The work was very different to the usual fare of Liverpudlian poetic evenings, and had a big impact on me and, I’m sure, others there. I remember I was sitting with some musician friends – indeed, we must have been performing ourselves – and in response to The Long Black Veil sequence Lee read from, one of us busked the song of the same name, much to his delight.
Lee’s was already an illustrious name, a name more than a little away from the mainstream, which in those days didn’t prevent him from being President of the Poetry Society, though he soon tired of the sectarianism and consequent in-fighting. Lee’s reading style was like his poetry, and the poetry was a true reflection of Lee himself – understated, amused and amusing, thoughtful, unobtrusively well-read, concerned to give the reader, the audience, the person on the other side of the conversation enough space to make/discover their own response. Following the reading, we started to write to each other.
Lee was someone who nourished poetic friendships, and was concerned to build networks for his friends. Very quickly he’d introduced me to people with whom he thought I had something in common (he was unfailingly supportive of my work). These names included Paul Evans, Ric Caddel and Ian Robinson, all of whom became friends and two of whom were to publish me as well as Lee. These helped me construct an alternative poetic network, ultimately more nourishing than the one I found in Liverpool.
Lee and I would exchange versions of new work for comment, and we began a long-running habit of sending each other postcards, the more bizarre the better. Our tastes in literary heroes overlapped more than somewhat, and included Robert Louis Stevenson and Jorge Luis Borges, great narrators both (Lee liked his stories). The poetry he valued could come from anywhere in the spectrum, from George Oppen and John Ashbury to Anne Stevenson – a close friend to the end of his life – from Tristan Tzara to F.T. Prince and Elizabeth Bishop, whom he kept urging me to read during the months, a few years ago, when he was working through her Collected Poems.
The circumstances of my life took me away from poetry and old connections for two decades, so it was well into the new millennium before I met Lee again, at a reading in Exeter, my new home. It was the same old Lee, spare, spry, happy to be in that place, that moment. ‘Fantastic’, he said. ‘I still read your books’. And I had still been reading his – never stopped. We picked up where we’d left off, all these years ago, with some additions – we’d become cognoscenti of heart surgery and allotments.
Lee could talk fluently about his work, penetratingly about the work of others, but he was not inclined to the academic. He belonged to the flow of life and thought out in the world. He worked – on the buses, for the post office, for the railways. He had been a union official, a Labour Party candidate. His life was sustainable and his mind was kept free and independent. He had relationships, deep ones, but valued solitariness – one cherished alter ego, I remember, was ‘The Lone Gent”. Stays with his partner Lindy in Lyme Regis allowed him to visit the Devon contingent – Harry and Lynn Guest, John Hall, Tony Frazer, Ann and me – but summer in touristy Lyme was only tolerable for short periods before Brighton called him back.
At one stage in recent years, when I’d begun a sequence based on the month of Brumaire in the French revolutionary calendar, we’d thought that Lee might cover another month, perhaps Thermidor or Fructidor, but his reading around the subject put him off – the blood, the horrible, cold-blooded injustices. He saw no way of treating the material. It had really been a way of luring him back into writing, for his output had slowed right down, down to the point where he thought he might be ‘finished’. His health, too, was deteriorating, and walks around Exeter and Lyme would be conducted at a slower pace, with pauses. This was a man who had walked and scrambled and climbed with relish for most of his adult life. We still laughed a lot, though – Lee’s capacity for hilarity being one of the joys of his company.
Then, unexpectedly, came ‘The Orchid Boat’. All the felicitousness, the fearless expression of what in other hands might have seemed banal or embarrassing but which rang like a bell, the sudden introductions of fugitive voices and scenes from outside the apparent locus of the poem that set it in the greater world, the absolute modesty and the generosity to the reader, all the familiar characteristics of Lee at his best, but with something added, the shadow of the mortality that had to be faced:
Without thinking
I step aboard the orchid boat,
the feel of silk
carrying me beyond all mirrors.
The last time Ann and I saw Lee he was very near death – it was only an hour or two away. He was peaceful, unresponsive but, his family thought, still aware. I don’t know whether he heard any of what we said, about what he’d meant to us and so many others (we named as many as we could). But we said it anyway.
Alasdair Paterson
Lee’s was already an illustrious name, a name more than a little away from the mainstream, which in those days didn’t prevent him from being President of the Poetry Society, though he soon tired of the sectarianism and consequent in-fighting. Lee’s reading style was like his poetry, and the poetry was a true reflection of Lee himself – understated, amused and amusing, thoughtful, unobtrusively well-read, concerned to give the reader, the audience, the person on the other side of the conversation enough space to make/discover their own response. Following the reading, we started to write to each other.
Lee was someone who nourished poetic friendships, and was concerned to build networks for his friends. Very quickly he’d introduced me to people with whom he thought I had something in common (he was unfailingly supportive of my work). These names included Paul Evans, Ric Caddel and Ian Robinson, all of whom became friends and two of whom were to publish me as well as Lee. These helped me construct an alternative poetic network, ultimately more nourishing than the one I found in Liverpool.
Lee and I would exchange versions of new work for comment, and we began a long-running habit of sending each other postcards, the more bizarre the better. Our tastes in literary heroes overlapped more than somewhat, and included Robert Louis Stevenson and Jorge Luis Borges, great narrators both (Lee liked his stories). The poetry he valued could come from anywhere in the spectrum, from George Oppen and John Ashbury to Anne Stevenson – a close friend to the end of his life – from Tristan Tzara to F.T. Prince and Elizabeth Bishop, whom he kept urging me to read during the months, a few years ago, when he was working through her Collected Poems.
The circumstances of my life took me away from poetry and old connections for two decades, so it was well into the new millennium before I met Lee again, at a reading in Exeter, my new home. It was the same old Lee, spare, spry, happy to be in that place, that moment. ‘Fantastic’, he said. ‘I still read your books’. And I had still been reading his – never stopped. We picked up where we’d left off, all these years ago, with some additions – we’d become cognoscenti of heart surgery and allotments.
Lee could talk fluently about his work, penetratingly about the work of others, but he was not inclined to the academic. He belonged to the flow of life and thought out in the world. He worked – on the buses, for the post office, for the railways. He had been a union official, a Labour Party candidate. His life was sustainable and his mind was kept free and independent. He had relationships, deep ones, but valued solitariness – one cherished alter ego, I remember, was ‘The Lone Gent”. Stays with his partner Lindy in Lyme Regis allowed him to visit the Devon contingent – Harry and Lynn Guest, John Hall, Tony Frazer, Ann and me – but summer in touristy Lyme was only tolerable for short periods before Brighton called him back.
At one stage in recent years, when I’d begun a sequence based on the month of Brumaire in the French revolutionary calendar, we’d thought that Lee might cover another month, perhaps Thermidor or Fructidor, but his reading around the subject put him off – the blood, the horrible, cold-blooded injustices. He saw no way of treating the material. It had really been a way of luring him back into writing, for his output had slowed right down, down to the point where he thought he might be ‘finished’. His health, too, was deteriorating, and walks around Exeter and Lyme would be conducted at a slower pace, with pauses. This was a man who had walked and scrambled and climbed with relish for most of his adult life. We still laughed a lot, though – Lee’s capacity for hilarity being one of the joys of his company.
Then, unexpectedly, came ‘The Orchid Boat’. All the felicitousness, the fearless expression of what in other hands might have seemed banal or embarrassing but which rang like a bell, the sudden introductions of fugitive voices and scenes from outside the apparent locus of the poem that set it in the greater world, the absolute modesty and the generosity to the reader, all the familiar characteristics of Lee at his best, but with something added, the shadow of the mortality that had to be faced:
Without thinking
I step aboard the orchid boat,
the feel of silk
carrying me beyond all mirrors.
The last time Ann and I saw Lee he was very near death – it was only an hour or two away. He was peaceful, unresponsive but, his family thought, still aware. I don’t know whether he heard any of what we said, about what he’d meant to us and so many others (we named as many as we could). But we said it anyway.
Alasdair Paterson