Our Editors’ Picks for Porch and Playa
Lee Harwood, New Collected Poems
The English poet Lee Harwood, who died in 2015, wrote remarkable poems. On one level, his verse was transparent; on the other, nearly opaque, which is probably what endeared him to John Ashbery who pushed his work everywhere and on everyone, including me. I have a number of his books, mostly from small presses, including his own Collected from 2004. Now, thankfully, Kelvin Corcoran & Robert Sheppard have compiled a most marvelous and seemingly complete collection that adds an additional 200 pages to the 2004 Collected that Harwood, himself, edited. 60 pages in this new volume come from his first book Title Illegible which Lee, for some reason decided to omit from the 2004 edition. There is also considerable material from after 2004, as well as fugitive poems from various publications.
This New Collected finally gives readers an opportunity to witness the evolution of a poet from being early-on enamored with the Beats to his embrace of the New York School Poets. This turn resulted in him winning the 1966 Frank O’Hara Prize for The Man with Blue Eyes. By the 70s and 80s, however, he was forging new directions, using collage more, playing with sound.
Among the many sterling poems collected here (as in earlier editions) is his long early prose/collage poem “Cable Street,” which he imbued with its history and politics (…what humiliations and pain. The fat men laughing in their clubs. Churchill wanting to slaughter every striker.”) and contemporary observations of his London neighborhood:
“The square at night all wind scudding and black cobbles. sound of fights in Cable Street, and another drunk or cursing woman staggers round the square. one more lap. and sometimes this scene is so clichéd, it could be out of some Brecht opera or Zola. It’s too absurd. people dying, and crowded, and hungry.”
—Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno
Jennifer Hambrick, a silence or two
From the opening line of Jennifer Hambrick’s new collection of haiku, it’s clear that any kigo (seasonality) or nature in this haiku will not be a romp in the peonies. Hambrick takes us to gory, harsh, and painful terrain right from the start:
blood dusk
the sign language
of memory
Hambrick builds a deeply emotional story with poem after poem in this collection. Ultimately, the nature and seasonality in the book is the human body in its cycles of life and death.
If this sounds heavy for a summer read, fear not. The poet tempers her sorrow with hope, her grief with desire. Hambrick is a virtuoso of the haiku. I can’t think of a better way to spend a summer afternoon than in her embrace.
—Dana Delibovi
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World
Summer, fall, winter, or spring, regardless of the season, whenever time is out of joint, one can do no better than to turn to Rabelais.
If you read Classical French, so much the better. But if, like me, you don’t, there are numerous translations of Gargantua & Pantagruel out there. Whatever form you read it in, the book’s indespensable companion is Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World, superbly translated from the Russian by Hélène Iswolsky.
Beyond its analaytic rigor, much of what makes Bakhtin’s book so deeply enjoyable is that it is moves the reader, so far as is possible, into the mind of the early Renaissance’s master carnivalizer, and shows his novel in light of the cultural revolution in which he took so significant a rôle. This moment of popular “gay and festive truth,” grounded in the “lower material bodily stratum,” was succeeded by centuries of reaction. Thus Bakhtin – writing in the 1930’s – offers insights into our present cultural circumstances.
In Bakhtin’s view, the march of “reason” in the centuries since Rabelais have engendered a fear and rigidity that tends to paralyze our ability to laugh at life along with death – much less imagine the age-old dream of “a feast for all the world.” Bakhtin’s examination of Rabelais within his world gives powerful evidence of the ways in which the suppression of the carnivalesque has qualitatively affected the writing we consume and produce, and radically circumscribed the scope of what we think of as literature.
But above and beyond all else, Bakhtin’s celebration of Rabelais takes the reader on a deep, joyous, and life-affirming ride.
—Eric Darton
Michael Nott, Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life
Sometime in 1972, while living in England, I went into Chaucer Books in Canterbury and emerged with Thom Gunn & Ted Hughes, Selected Poems (1964). While the bookseller was ringing up my purchase, he asked what I thought of Gunn. I said I’d not read him but if Faber thought it worthwhile to pair him with Hughes, I was intrigued. As was usually the case with British booksellers, he took it upon himself to tell me I wouldn’t be disappointed. Gunn ranked right up there with Larkin and Davie and Hughes and Heaney.
The proprietor’s recommendation was right on the mark. From that moment on, I became enamored of Gunn and followed his output. Now, everything I, or most anyone, would want to know about Gunn’s life and work is available in the weighty and often brilliant biography by Michael Nott, who coedited 2022’s The Letters of Thom Gunn. Nott delves deep into Gunn’s multiple “lives” from English school boy through Cambridge University to his departure for California in 1954 in pursuit of his American lover, Mike Kitay, with whom he spent the rest of his life in San Francisco. Gunn died of a meth overdose in 2004.
Gossip and raw detail, such as the profound effect Gunn’s mother’s suicide had on the 15-year-old, are delivered with sympathy and understanding. While Nott often seems more taken with Gunn’s hedonistic drug use and flagrant homosexuality than with his poetic achievements, he does portray an artist whose life influenced his work. I found it best to read A Cool Queer Life with a copy of the 2017 Selected Poems of Thom Gunn, edited by Clive Wilmer, as a reference. Again, I came away believing Gunn to be among the best Anglo-American poets of his generation. Nott’s exceedingly well-researched biography of a consummate poet and consummate outrageous free-liver is of exceeding importance and value.
—Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno
NOTE: BBC radio archives has an interesting, earlier interview and reading of Thom Gunn and some of his work.
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