Poetry's Balletic Boot-Boy (Tony Harrison: Selected Poems - Tony Harrison)

Member Name: repairmanjack

Product:	Tony Harrison: Selected Poems - Tony Harrison
Date:	13/08/02 (5341 review reads)
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Advantages: Sheer power of his wordplay, By turns powerfully though-provoking and achingly beautiful

Disadvantages: None - if you have any interest in poetry you need to discover this man.

The work of Tony Harrison raises many interesting points about language, class and the very culture the receptive audience takes for granted. His work is complicated by his social dichotomy: Harrison bestrides working-class ethic (and education) and literary assimilation and accomplishment (with its middle-class assumptions). He is, within two lines of his work, both benefactor of literature and its destroyer. A cultural Colossus. An iconoclast.

This collection comprises Harrison’s most celebrated works - from the beautiful but biting (certainly in its notorious language) “v.“ to two of my personal favourites: “Them & [uz]“ and “Marked with D.“ I thought I would take you through these two poems, contrasting their style and content, to give you an idea of what I love about the man, and hopefully whet your appetites to take a look at this book for yourselves. I have selected these two poems in particular as I believe Harrison intends them for different audiences. The first, with its proliferation of high-class cultural totems, is addressed to the literary canon that first chastised and then absorbed him. The second seems a love letter to - or rather of - his father, his kin and birthright; everything that Harrison understands by the word “home“.

It is perhaps easiest to tackle Marked with D. first as it sets up the political tropes that rule the other poem (and much of Harrison’s other work) in a gentler format. Its title is a subversion of a nursery rhyme, suggesting an iconic referencing for his earlier life and influences (prior to his pursuit of academia, and the chimera it makes of him). The poem is about the funeral, and cremation of the poet’s father, a simple baker in life. Indeed, the “D” of the title is assumed to mean “daddy“, but could, given the theme of the poem stand for “death“, or through its exploration of a baker’s commun
ion (“ash (not unlike flour) for one small loaf”) for “duty“. Harrison uses the icons of light in several ways through the poem: the innuendo of the crematorium and the bakery is obvious; the burning light and heat of both fires are subsumed, and then supplanted with the fires of holy light (“his cataracts ablaze with Heaven”).

The poem seems synonymous with the idea of transition. Meek flesh becoming more - moving toward the grand inheritance promised in biblical scripture (to which his parents, given their status and place in time, might have lent more credence than Harrison himself. As he later capitulates, his manna is found in the mundane world). The idea that Harrison explores is of his father gaining something - a release from his leaden tongue, an ability to articulate and interact in a way hitherto impossible for him - due to his education and the politics of class. A learning process that elevates him from the mortal to the divine. I find a fascinating subtext to this notion, and it is of Harrison himself: if the idea explored is of a learning process, can this not be some laconic exploration of Harrison’s education experience? The crude dough of his working-class intellect, bloated and given form by the power of the transitional process. The process itself is then viewed in the aftermath, and with educated criticism. He has come through the fires of education (as his father does the cremation) yet finds himself educated but intrinsically unaltered. There is no Heaven to reach - just as the literati that embraces him are really no different from the social roots he clings to. Maybe it is Harrison himself who is marked with “D”. He is his father’s son in some uncelebrated, almost unnoticed way. Heavy stuff, I know, but check out the complete work. Its incredibly moving.

Harrison often makes political gestures with his work - breeching traditional sonnet tropes of structure and
, although less often, it seems, rhyme scheme - which will probably guarantee he never makes laureate: which would be the biggest crime in literature of the past fifty years. In this piece, he rebuilds the sestet of the sonnet, adding lines in a hyperbolic strengthening of his theme. His politicking emerges not only in the subversion of the sonnet form (which has to be intentional: Harrison could have delivered this piece just as succinctly in free verse, yet has made a decision to follow a convention, and then explode it), he uses the sestet to transport his personal sorrow to a greater theme than the mere death of his father. He accuses England, and thus its class system, of making his father “feel like some dull oaf”. His father’s base language skills, his dialect, render the man mute in projected society.

Harrison further explores this theme, from a personalised perspective, with Them & [uz]. Here is a much more physical playfulness with the classical frame of the sonnet - and of the language itself. The title hints at the deconstructive force behind this piece. The ampersand symbol instead of the conjunctive “and”; the parentheses bracketing the dialectical bastardisation of “us”. Here is a poem not to his kin, but on their behalf. An angry piece, it wears the shrouds of high culture: Demosthenes, the Greek orator with the speech imperfection (with whom Harrison later conjoins himself with the line “my mouth all stuffed with glottals”); the reference to Keats “Ode to a Skylark“, armoured with the guttural pronunciation of Harrison’s youth. These are tropes of a culture perhaps unknown to Harrison in childhood, and thus his family in maturity. They are flags he sends up to attract the attention of the appreciative establishment (and middle-class readership, whom he implicitly addresses), the morsel that baits the trap. The first sonnet is indicative of the elitism that he so frow
ns upon, the carefully layered language and phonetic graces, the incomprehension of which kept his father voiceless in the world; robbed father and son of their rightful communion. (Harrison drums this point home in the poem “Bookends“ (also in this collection), in which the rift between father and son is not one of generational or moral divide, but of education (commenting on its results in the son, and its social worth: “what’s still between’s/not the thirty or so years, but books, books, books.”))

What Harrison attempts with this poem is a unification of classes and understandings. It is a protest piece, demonstrating the flaws in the literati’s posturing, banging against the shield of received pronunciation. He cites such adopted totems as Wordsworth, accusing the elite, in fact, of crippling the musicality of the language (“Wordsworth’s matter/water are full of rhymes”) by subjecting it to such stilted projection. He champions the relaxation and dialectical ambivalence of Cockney Keats and the torpid rhymes of Wordsworth, and holds his own tongue up for the same consideration (“mi ‘art aches”; “ended sentences with by, with, from”), as in the gentle language of his mother’s name “’not Florence and not Flo but always Florrie’” in Marked With D.

Them and [uz], however, is as interesting in its minutia as its schema. The first line of the second sonnet, for instance, is a ribald blow to the “Receivers”, delivered in an explosive colloquial tongue. It is an affront and attack on the language as well as its presumed protectors: “So right, yer buggers then!,” he cries. One wonders why further colloquialism is not employed within the second sonnet? Why “my” is not reported as “mi”, as in his Keats tribute. Does Harrison fear losing his implied reader? Or has the mantle of a thoroug
h and literate education instilled some value of “correct” language within the poet?

His dedication may go some way in addressing these questions. Supposedly penned in regard to two of the poet’s cultural influences, Richard Hoggart a cultural essayist, and the less obvious icon of Leon Cortez (with an assumedly irreverent professorship awarded by Harrison). Cortez, a radio comic, broke down the mythology of the language, subverting the strange and lumpen texture of Received Pronounciation (in his case Shakespeare) into the Cockney dialect (once described by Angela Carter as a voice that “clanged like dustbin lids” - but, nonetheless, it is an unforced meal upon the tongue). Harrison’s poems are a tribute to that idea, a cathartic process of spoon-feeding language and high-brow referencing to the masses.

Harrison, through his qualms and fears, seems, at times, something of an apologist. He speaks for “his people”, yet questions his own right to; his dislocation from them an albatross. The idea of the isolation from one’s roots, of one’s good works being all but unacknowledged by the unwitting audience he hopes to console (and conjure in the minds of the middle-classes), imbues a subtle, and sorrowful, backwash of guilt to the vivid portraits he creates. It is perhaps notable with Harrison’s poems that he does not write to his parents, as they lack either the desire or capacity to appreciate such work (or this, the literary canon, with their received pronunciation, would have us believe. Harrison, after all, has risen from the same soil as his family. He chooses not to genuflect before outmoded and pompous ideologies - instead situating himself alongside them like some semi-complicit usurper). Rather, Harrison seems to write for his parents (and thus for their families, kin and class - extrapolating their themes and iconography onto his class of birth as a whole). He writes for th
em: both in memoriam and tribute, and - possibly most importantly - in articulation of their own lives and ideals.

The converse can also be shown. Via such texts Harrison has developed an ability for explaining the simple to a middle-class elite, who seem to have sloughed off casual understandings, requiring instead, an elevated discussion and negotiation to bring validity to something intrinsically “beneath” themselves. Such resolution is at the core of his work. Indeed, he quotes the words of Arthur Scargill (reported, notably in the Sunday Times newspaper, in 1982) in an epigraph to “v.”

Through such defamiliarisation, Harrison attempts to negotiate a place for himself in the world (particularly evident in the opening verse of “v.”). His work functions as a soapbox whereby he seeks to address the politics, not only of society, but of the insidious mismanagement and “lawfulness” of our language. Through his introspection, his questioning of his own merit and drive, we view a broader field of cultural politicking and social concern. Harrison‘s relation to the separated fields of his peers, and his attempts to commune them, reveals a man and his craft near inseparable in their motivation. He appears a metaphor for his own work: a demotic empathiser, and grandstanding politician, bound in one challenging skin.

To say this collection is not to be missed, is an understatement. Harrison might just be the most important poet writing today - an English answer to another troubled genius, Seamus Heaney. His work is full of joy and love, yet it is in the little details, the barbed comments and shocking, but poetic, observations of our country, that this collection truly shines.

A classic work.

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