From the Notebooks by Harry Fainlight, reviewed in The Wolf

This review in issue 15 of The Wolf, published in July 2007, covers From the Notebooks by Harry Fainlight, a book from Iconoclast Press priced at five pounds plus postage. The reviewer is not named. Most of the piece is a portrait of the poet (1935 to 1982), brother of the better-known Ruth Fainlight, whom it calls "a missing link of English poetry" and an English poete maudit.

The review traces how his dual British and American citizenship, which he later renounced, gave him a strong grammar school education, a Cambridge scholarship and a friendship with Ted Hughes, and also access to the American avant-garde, including a relationship with Allen Ginsberg that it compares to Verlaine and Rimbaud. While British poetry was importing American poetics, it says, Fainlight went to New York to learn at first hand. There Poetry at the Metro advertised him as the new Shelley, and Ginsberg ranked him first among English poets of his generation. His credits there included the magazine Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts, a cameo in Andy Warhol's Harlot, and a piece called Mescalin Notes.

Back in London, Bernard Stone's Turret Books issued Sussicran, a 12-page pamphlet whose title spells narcissus backwards, the only collection of his to appear in England in his lifetime. He was associated with the magazine International Times, and he took part in the 1965 Albert Hall reading. In the film Wholly Communion he is shown struggling to convey The Spider, his long account of an LSD trip, to an audience of 7,000. The reviewer calls the poem a prophecy of the darker side of the psychedelic era to come. Fainlight also appears as the character Marty Mission in Neil Oram's 24-hour play The Warp.

Work

From the Notebooks

Author

Harry Fainlight

Publisher

Iconoclast Press

a missing link of English poetry

reviewer, The Wolf, issue 15

the most gifted English poet of his generation

Allen Ginsberg, The Wolf, issue 15