In an email response to the first of my two blogs on his work, Tom Raworth remarks “I’ve never thought I was reading fast,” commenting also that “I see all those 14 liners as dependent clauses.” Yet in ordinary speech, dependent clauses, precisely because they are usually bracketed by their “independent” brethren, often invoke a slight acceleration in speaking. The return to an independent (or, more accurately, dominant) clause is then marked by a return to the slower pacing of speech.

There is an interesting & rather constant tension between how a poet reads aloud & the text on the page itself. In Raworth’s explanation, there is at least a cause & effect relation between syntax & style. Listening to Louis Zukofsky read aloud from “A” – 12 on Joel Kuszai’s marvelous Factory School website, I note that Zukofsky follows the start of his excerpt with a relatively rigorous pause at every line break for about the first two stanzas (starting with “The best man learns of himself / To bring rest to others,” p. 135 of the UC Press edition). Yet, only a few lines later, following Zukofsky’s own pauses, I would transcribe one stanza as follows:

The time would be too short –

Throw some part of your life after birds –

Eat and drink.

What cry

Tops older fame –

Far-sighted not sure sense?

Heart with mind quick to love,

Look to the real thing unfold it within you

Turned there thru pleasure,

Bound anew.

Sweet thing,

Merry thing

Making your brow half an arch of a bridge

So that all people there facing round quicken their pace,

Fleet and lean

Desire you but to thirst what you have –

On the page, this same stanza appears more regular:

The time would be too short –

Throw some part

Of your life after birds –

Eat and drink.

What cry tops older

Fame – Far-sighted

Not sure sense? Heart

With mind quick to love,

Look to the real thing

Unfold it within you

Turned there thru pleasure,

Bound anew.

Sweet thing, merry thing

Making your brow

Half an arch of a bridge

So that all people there

Facing round

Quicken their pace,

Fleet and lean

Desire you but to

Thirst what you have –

Lineated thus, some portions of the text accelerate while others slow down. Zukofsky’s line breaks often stress his Shakespearean phrasing. Read aloud, he mostly buries these little twists mid-line, rapidly passed by. Thus the page maximizes the potential for torque in Zukofsky’s language, whereas his voice, thin & reedy as it is, minimizes it. Whether this represents a conscious approach to reading aloud or simply reflects Zukofsky relaxing into the moment of the reading itself is open to speculation, but I’m really sure that such a distinction matters.

Beginning in the 1950s, there was some real effort to equate the line with voiced phrasing – “breath” is what Olson called it, even though it is the need to breathe that stops, rather than propels, the line. The poets of that decade found the more casual & seemingly arbitrary approach of some high modernists to the question of the voiced linebreak almost startling to hear. The rather hard line approach of these younger writers would reach its apotheosis in Robert Duncan’s readings around 1970, when he literally whispered a voiced count of three between every single line as he read aloud.

Today, I think most poets treat the text much more as though it were a musical score, the typed line breaks a possible, but not necessarily fixed, index of pauses or timing. Raworth, in focusing on a syntactic type, generates a style. Or does so at least in part. The second longest poem from Clean & Well-Lit, “Emptily,” proceeds in a rather different manner. On the surface, it appears to be a long centered poem rather in the manner of Michael McClure. In fact, it contains 31 “units,” unnumbered & unseparated (& visible as such only due to the formatting, containing two such units per page, an approach that requires leaving a great deal of white space in each page’s header). Each unit consists of three stanzas, consisting of five lines, two lines & one line, in that order. Other rules are visible:

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>the last line of the first stanza consists of two syllables, which may be spread out over one word or two

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>the first line of the second stanza in each unit consists only of one single-syllable word

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>the fourth line of the first stanza, the second line of the second stanza & the sole line of the third stanza will be relatively long

It’s a curious fact about the centered line that, by virtue of having its linebreak visibly marked at the start as well as the end, linebreaks are thereby minimized & any variability in line length is muted, since the “overhang” now juts out only half as far, albeit in both directions.

Combined with the plasticity of the lines themselves, this centered text can be read almost as rapidly as prose & certainly as rapidly as “Survival.” So while there are more subject-verb combinations here than in “Survival,” they do little if anything to slow the propulsion of the reader through the text. Thus it’s no accident that Colin MacCabe, quoted on the O Press site in a blurb for Tottering State, chooses terms such as “quickest” & “mercurial” to characterize Raworth’s writing. “As a reader,” MacCabe writes, “his delivery is the fastest in the business.” Factory School offers evidence in the form of a Raworth reading, although of more recent work.