tony harrison: Loiner Sandie Byrne, editor Oxford, #25.
AS the planet revolves towards a new century with all that involves, there is no such thing as English poetry at large in the last part of this twentieth-century; there are only English poets with particular places in mind. Think of Larkin and you think of his troubled haven in Hull. Think of Hughes and you think of his genesis as a carpenter's son in Yorkshire. Think of Tony Harrison and you think of how he has gone on
eternally about his origins in his particular place.
Born a baker's son in Leeds in 1937, Harrison was educated at Leeds Grammar School and Leeds University (where he read classic and took a diploma in linguistics) and takes a sorrowful pride in being one of The Loiners, to cite the title of the collection he published in 1970 and the term he defines as meaning ''citizens of Leeds, citizens who bear their loins through the terrors of life, 'loners'.''
As a loiner, Harrison loves to dwell on his family misfortunes in Leeds. In ''Marked with D'' he recalls the last flame of his father:
The baker's man that no-one will see rise
and England made to feel like some dull oaf
is smoke, enough to sting one person's eyes
and ash (not unlike flour) for one small loaf.
And in ''Long Distance II'', his most memorable poem, he offers poignant images of his father and his old flame in Leeds:
Though my mother was already two years dead
Dad kept her slippers warming by the gas,
put hot water bottles her side of the bed
and still went to renew her transport pass.
You couldn't just drop in. You had to phone.
He'd put you off an hour to give him time
to clear away her things and look alone
as though his still raw love were such a crime.
For all his meaningfully predictable rhythms and mainly monosyllabic rhymes Harrison can be a heartbreakingly beautiful poet but, as a loiner, he feels bad about it.
Auden, a big influence on Harrison, claimed that to stink of poetry is unbecoming and, as a professional prole, Harrison is self-conscious about the bad odour of poetry for the mass of people. He says so again and again. In ''Ghosts: Some Words Before Breakfast'' he says ironically:
I'll have my portrait done, and then I'll show it,
to prove I've really made it as a poet.
And in ''Self Justification'' he says despairingly:
Me a poet! My daughter with maimed limb
became a more than tolerablesprinter.
And Uncle Joe. Impediment spurred him,
the worst stammerer I've known, to be a printer.
And in another poem he goes on again about Uncle Joe's speech impediment:
How you become a poet's a mystery!
Wherever did you get your talent from?
I say: I had two uncles, Joe and Harry -
one was a stammerer, the other dumb.
In another poem, about boarding the Belfast-Newcastle plane anonymously, he goes on about his own impediment as a loiner who feels being a passive poet makes him one of the awkward squad ill at ease with combative proles:
The rowdy squaddy, though he doesn't know it
is sitting next to one who enters ''poet''
where he puts ''Forces''....
Being a photographer seems bad enough.
God knows the catcalls that a poet would get!
Harrison is a lucky loiner in this collection of tributes to his considerable talent. There are no catcalls. There is only collective adulation. Sandie Byrne, editor, kicks off the celebration by describing Harrison as ''our most literate as well as our most technically accomplished poet''.
While using a loyal plural Sandie is simply speaking for Byrne. Hughes, to give one Royal example, may be more technically accomplished than Harrison though not as politically correct as Tony to be one of ours in Byrne's time. Much is made of Harrison's polemical television poem v., written during the miners' strike of 1984 when the left was right for writers but wrong for New King Coal (Scargill was approvingly quoted by Harrison in v.).
Richard Eyre, who directed the film of the poem in 1987 for Channel 4, compares Harrison to Shakespeare and Chekhov which is obviously going over the top. Christopher Butler considers the question of what kind of skinhead Harrison might have been ''but for his education''. Where there's hype there's hope.
Reflecting on his part in the television production of the poem, Melvyn Bragg is full of praise for the way Harrison makes verse out of versus and a victory out of v.
These Vs are all the versuses of life
from LEEDS v DERBY, Black/White
and (as I've known to my cost) man v. wife,
Communist v. Fascist, Left v. Right...
Life just is not quite as black and white as this versus that and that is what gives me serious problems with Harrison as a poet at large in this anthology of admirers. Everything is so plain to him and his plain style of a confrontational culture of this as one of us versus that as one of them.
If you are not one of the family left in - defeatist Dad or numb Mum or stammering Uncle Joe or anyone kicking ass for the cause of Leeds United - you are one of the foes left out Poetry (think of Pound and Eliot and Brecht and Neruda) should save more than the self and books on poets should do more than promote the poet as a proletarian pet. Harrison is a fine poet too comfortably petted in this dogmatically flattering collection by the fans.
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