Lee Harwood Memorial

   Sent to me by a friend who discovered it in Brunswick Square, Hove. It's mentioned, in fact, on Lee Harwood's Wikipedia entry.

    In turn it sent me back to LH's poems, often marvellously indirect and floating, like ambient music you can dip in and out of, treating it now as background sound and now as something to home in on the detail of.* "What Harwood’s work manages to achieve is a form of representation which both communicates through language and acknowledges its limitations simultaneously...The incomplete nature of the text allows the reader’s own associative imagination to come into play, to complete the meaning of the text." (from The Poetry Archive, where you can hear Harwood read some of his poems.)

*I was thinking of what has become my most-listened to album of recent months, Robert Ashley's Private Parts, although it would certainly be stretching the definition of "ambient music" to call it such - it really stands outside any genre of music or spoken-word recording and I fear I will have to devote a post to it to do it any justice - in the meantime, take a listen