tranquil obsessions

Some artists have large audiences, drag multitudes, sell like hot cakes. Others have a small, discreet, almost secretive following. A following that is neither a herd of silly teenagerish fans nor a snobbish coterie, but people who often don't know each other and accompany an artist at a respectful, serene distance, as if not to disturb some sacred ground of creation (into which they could only conceive of stepping barefoot, in the privacy of silence and the night). People who become addicted, as a dear poet once put it, to an artist's method, language, worldview. They got him/her under their skin.

Ever the loner distrustful of herds & bestsellers, I tend to relate to an artist's world in this way. Even when the full immersion mode, the years of "sharp study and long toil"* compel you to approach the person, there always remains a reticence, a fear of entering someone's place uninvited and with muddy shoes. Or of being sorely disappointed at human, all too human weaknesses & vanities that might mar the appreciation of the work. (That happens a lot.)

Yes, I do have my half-secret list of tranquil obsessions - and Lee Harwood's poetry is no doubt on the shortlist. How can I even begin to verbalise what draws me to his poetic world? His emotional landscapes that always leave room for disclosure and mystery, distance and proximity, groundedness and change, transformation. You can never know who 'you' and 'I' are in his poems, as they float and metamorphose incessantly; his lovers are at times men, at times women, because what counts is the absolute singularity of the moment, of the place in which love happens, and the indelible mark it leaves on memory.

And then there are, of course, the walks. The way people walk in the world in which they find themselves, the way they merge into it, its colours, sounds and feelings, blurring the boundaries between the human and the natural - culture and nature, the most arbitrary of distinctions.



In the distance __ the cliff walk
decorated piers now antique ____ you lie away
the ocean is so vast ____ someday
I am waiting ___ is your patience enough?

Ghosts haunt the sites of our past
I ___ someday soon
across the ocean ___ coming
such love goes far beyond

Green seas look soft and turn grey
the white chalk ___ a cap of dark woods
it is a matter of wonder
and what comes with time?


Lee Harwood, from 'The cliff walk', in Collected Poems (Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2004), p. 128.


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*The quote is from an ode by Basil Bunting (another artist who had the smallest but most dedicated following of readers):

These tracings from a world that's dead
take for my dust-smothered pyramid.
Count the sharp study and long toil
as pavements laid for worms to soil.
You without knowing it might tread
the grass where my foundation's laid,
your, or another's house be built
where my weathered stones lie spilt,
and this unread memento be
the only lasting part of me.