Harry Fainlight - Selected Poems

Selected Poems

In his review of From The Notebooks, a book transcribed by Dave Tomlin from a lecture Fainlight gave at the Cambodian Embassy in the ‘70s, Nall McDevitt called the 78-page Selected Poems (Turret, London, 1986), edited by Ruth Fainlight "underwhelming", noting that pastoral works far outnumbered the poems inspired by his years in New York and asked "where were the gay-sex-in-toilets poems or the out-of-it-on-drugs poems?" Ruth Fainlight responded with a letter she received from her brother in 1981. Harry Fainlight wrote: "Your particular duty now is to help preserve the poetry that I wrote before I went to America (& since) & which belongs to your own literary area but which has been cut off & isolated from it by those three intervening years. Politically, it is only the work of those three years which they wish to exploit. And the formulae of exploitation are very profitable & so they keep on repeating them. But they have become more & more irrelevant to the whole of my work; those years exist in it only as a body of water, a lake in a far greater surrounding land mass. Certainly they are not where I live. I am saying all this because there is still no one who really cares enough to be responsible for my work; to protect it from the inroads of philistinism. If you do not, it encourages the philistine movement."