Lee Harwood

Life

Travers Rafe Lee Harwood was born in Leicester to maths teacher Wilfred Travers Lee-Harwood and Grace Ladkin Harwood, who were then living in Chertsey, Surrey. His father was an army reservist and called up as war started; after the evacuation from Dunkirk he was posted to Africa until 1947 and saw little of his son. Between 1958–61 Harwood studied English at Queen Mary College, University of London and continued living in London until 1967. During that time he worked as a monumental mason's mate, a librarian and a bookshop assistant. He was also a member of the Beat scene and in 1963 was involved in editing the one issue magazines Night Scene and Night Train featuring their work, as did Soho and Horde the following year. Tzarad, which he began editing on his own in 1965, ran for two more issues (1966, 1969) and signalled his growing interest in and involvement with the New York School of poets. It was during this time that he began to engage with French poetry and started on his translations of Tristan Tzara.

In 1967 he moved to Brighton where, with the exception of some time in Greece and the United States, he lived for the rest of his life. There he worked as a bookshop manager, a bus conductor, and a Post Office counter clerk. He also became a union official and involved with the Labour Party in its radical years, even standing (unsuccessfully) in a local election. At the Poetry Society Harwood was identified with the radicals but did not join in their block resignation in 1977, arguing that 'as a trade unionist I've never believed in resignation as a useful political weapon – it always seems best to work from inside an organisation'. At that time, there was an identifiable political element to Harwood's poetry, discernible in the volume "All The Wrong Notes" (1981).

In 1961 he married his first wife, Jenny Goodgame, by whom he had a son, Blake, in 1962. After the breakdown of this marriage, he met the photographer Judith Walker while a writer in residence at the Aegean School of Fine Arts in Paros, Greece, and married her in 1974. Photographs by her are used in his collections Boston-Brighton and All the wrong notes. Harwood and Judith Walker have a son, Rafe (1977) and a daughter, Rowan (1979). Lee Harwood died on Sunday, 26 July 2015 in Hove, East Sussex. There is a Rowan Tree (Mountain Ash) planted in his honor in New York City's Central Park as well as a memorial paving stone set into the park's Literary Walk. There is also a memorial bench on the north path of Brunswick Square, Hove, UK.

Poetry

Harwood's early writing is similar to the poetry of the New York School, especially that of John Ashbery, whom he met in Paris in 1965. What he was aiming for, he said in a 1972 interview, was an unfinished quality containing a mosaic of information. Robert Sheppard has described Harwood's style as at once 'distanced and intimate'. Later, after discussion with F. T. Prince, he aimed for a certain elegance where references to the English colonial enterprise function as an alternative cultural mythology. There is about this writing an aspect of collage (which Harwood likens to similar procedures in cinema and painting) which he takes even further in the collections published during the 1970s. Here lyric lines alternate with scraps of conversation, blocks of prose or long-lined verse. In his later work, however, some critics have discerned a falling off of immediacy while, in the view of others, such as Alan Baker, Harwood 'returned to form' with the books 'Morning Light' (1998) and 'Evening Star' (2004).

Harwood's first book, title illegible, was published by Bob Cobbing's Writers Forum in 1965. His Crossing the frozen river: selected poems appeared in 1988 but is now out of print; Shearsman has since published both a Collected Poems (2004) and a new Selected Poems (2008).

Audio recordings of Harwood reading his poetry may be found on the University of Pennsylvania PennSound website Lee Harwood