A Tribute to Lee Harwood, 1939-2015

Translator of Tristan Tzara and a poet inspired by painters, Lee Harwood has died at the age of 76. To learn more about his life and career, The Guardian brings us this obituary:

Lee Harwood, who has died aged 76, created a uniquely open and intimate body of poetry. Committed to describing experiences and feelings usually excluded from formal poetry (because too embarrassing), and from modernist poetry (because too personal), Harwood produced more than 20 volumes, which tended to appear from small-scale or specialist publishers.

His most often reported aesthetic principle was to leave “blanks” that readers fill with their own memories and imaginations so that each creates a different poem from the basic foundations the writer gives. Although he later withdrew from asserting “dogmatic views on what writing’s about”, the need for his poetry to be useful to others and to have a place in social life remained central.

Early collections show the influence of the New York school of poets, especially John Ashbery, with whom he was briefly romantically involved, as is documented in his 1966 volume The Man with Blue Eyes; Harwood, too, found inspiration in affinities between poetry and painting. Also influenced by cubist and surrealist poetry, he devoted himself to translating the Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara, publishing six collections of his work and a bibliography. [...]

Continue at The Guardian.