EDWARD FIELD IN KENSINGTON GARDENS

After ringing the bell on the board outside the apartment block we were buzzed into the lobby and sat and waited on the sofa.  Down he came, Edward Field who after living for three months of the year in England for a long time knows all the bus routes and walks and can point out the helipad where he viewed Princess Diana disembarking when she lived at the Palace.

We walked along Queensway towards Kensington Gardens. Edward is about five-six, slim and spruce in an olive coloured shirt and peaked Robin Hood cap. With a silvery goatee and a puckish grin, he’s nimble and in great shape, and it’s incredible that he is approaching his eightieth birthday.

There was a suitable spot not far from the sunken garden with its fountain spraying into the burning afternoon air that last day of May. A bench was found in the shade and the microphone set up. (We soon forgot that a churning tape recorder was present and just talked naturally. At least, as naturally as you can when you have a page of questions typed out, most of which I got to.) 

He's known many of the big poets and painters of the New York scene of the early 1950s. He didn't like Kenneth Koch who he said was bitchy and nasty.  Ginsberg he’d met a few times, though wasn’t a close friend.  He also had some catty remarks himself about Harold Norse and his horrible greasy wig. I said I thought of Norse as a sort of American Mishima of poetry  -- he had after all, like the Japanese writer, rebuilt his body on a heroic scale.  This drew from Ed no more than a shrug.

The real scoop as I think of it though was that he said he had an affair with Frank O'Hara. I didn't really make enough of this, and decided later that the interview had been transcribed and sent to him for approval/clarification I would add a few extra questions such as did he share an apartment with O'Hara, and how long they were together.  (He speaks touchingly of how Frank took him up and made him feel he was worth something.)

Nor did I get deeply enough into what makes him, Field, unique. In that time of Modernism Edward Field was one of the few who pursued simplicity and directness. He made poetry an instrument for his own purposes, an apparatus with which to understand the world and untangle the complexities that wrapped his struggling homosexual soul. (He was in analysis for several years, before deciding on a do it yourself approach and following his instincts.) Field has a very basic and common sense attitude that human relations are the important thing. That is the basic theme, that and the fact of being human in the first place. It was Frank O’Hara who taught him that in poetry you can just be yourself and write about the things that are important to you as if they ARE important. You don’t have to shilly-shally about trying to find things that are ‘poetic’, that you’re supposed to write about.

Field’s twist to all this is that he’s a human as you and I are, dear reader. A human who goes to the john and wipes afterwards.

This is an as it were unhypocritical attitude in writing, a kind of super-surreal thing of OK here we are now, I’m a man with warm human bowels writing this to you who are similar. It’s Whitmanic.  OK, others may have a way of directing their interest elsewhere and that’s up to them, but he will hold to his own way. It turned off a lot of editors.

Now, his writings come to seem more modern than ever as we see that popular art, what most of the people were really interested in without thinking of it as art or culture, the cartoons, the movies, is as characteristic of its time, and, who knows, maybe as valuable as any other.

Field’s generosity to my own scribblings was touching  -- and he said that we were very alike, also that I was a Bohemian. He’d thought at first that I must be a sort of rustic poet but after reading Sketches by Derz and Scribbles & Squibs he realised that I was an urban, restless spirit.

‘Of course, you’ve got a college degree,’ he said approvingly. I didn’t say that his experiences, including flying 27 missions over a flak-flaming Europe and being shot down and picked up from a life raft, were an initiation degree devoutly to be envied by any scribbler.