dumbfoundry

Lee Harwood, who is 65 this year, is still not much known outside the world of small press publications. His 20 or so volumes of poems and prose poems have been issued by tiny, often fugitive outfits, such as Pig Press, Galloping Dog Press, Slow Dancer Press, Transgravity Press, and Other Branch Readings. But, like Jeremy Prynne, whose work drew fire earlier this year from the heavyweight academic professors John Carey and John Sutherland, Harwood has cult status among followers of the alternative British poetry scene. And while the dauntingly rigorous experiments with poetic language of Prynne, despite being quoted on the Today programme, will probably always be caviar to the general, Harwood's poetry is not only not "difficult" - it is open, moving and exquisitely delicate in its attention to landscape, mood, and the pressures of time and history.

Like Prynne's, Harwood's work has generated its fair share of academic articles celebrating its discontinuity and indeterminacy, and connecting it with the thought of such as Derrida or Lyotard. Harwood is, however, the least academic of poets - indeed one of the most charming and disarming aspects of the persona his poems embody is the way he so frankly and uninhibitedly commits himself to poetry itself, rather than theories about poetry, as the fullest and most authentic way of engaging in life. [...]

This entry was posted by eeksypeeksy on Saturday, September 18, 2004 at 9:24 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.