Tom Raworth

1938 -- 2017

A link here to the Poetry Foundation's recording of Tom Raworth reading "Gaslight":

a line of faces borders the strangler’s work

heavy european women

mist blows over dusty tropical plants

lit from beneath the leaves by a spotlight

mist in my mind a riffled deck

 

of cards or eccentrics

was i

a waterton animal my head

is not my own

 

poetry is neither swan nor owl

but worker, miner

digging each generation deeper

through the shit of its eaters

to the root – then up to the giant tomato

 

someone else’s song is always behind us

as we wake from a dream trying to remember

step onto a thumbtack

 

two worlds – we write the skin

the surface tension that holds

                                       you

                                       in

what we write is ever the past

 

curtain pulled back

a portrait behind it

is a room suddenly lit

 

looking out through the eyes

at a t.v. programme

of a monk sealed into a coffin

 

we close their eyes and ours

and still here the tune

 

moves on

***

Tom Raworth died this week. He was a giant as a poet, and a gentle, sweet fellow. One of the greatest compliments I ever received was a simple phone call from him -- how he got my number I do not know -- telling me that my book Ketjak was "alright." 

I knew him slightly during the years he lived in San Francisco in the 1970s, was in the audience at New Langton Arts when he gave what may be the shortest talk ever, and was fortunate to see him whenever he came through Philadelphia in recent years. 

I was once told (by a poet I respect) that Americans were too quick to declare him the finest living British poet. Just the opposite, I suspect, the far reaches of the Commonwealth have been far too slow to recognize the wonder of his work. After Bunting, Tom was the Alps. He himself could not have cared less for accolades, but the weak tea that is so much of British conventionalism is just so much piss-water alongside this stronger brew. I will miss him and we will all miss his work & wit.

Here are two pieces I wrote on Tom's work some 14 years ago. 

***



Read Tom Raworth’s poetry aloud & you begin to understand almost instantly why, or more accurately how, he developed his reputation as – at least until Miles Champion showed up – the fastest reader on the scene. Try reading aloud the following stanzas from “Survival,” a poem in Clean & Well-Lit: Selected Poems, 1987-1995:

later she would walk
asleep on his feet
to the brink of inspiration
with lacquered nails
paused in mid-phrase
discounting – discrediting
the epic sweep of stars
devising stratagems
shrunk back in his head
until the day was filled
creating an illusion
radiating orange lightning
sucked into a vacuum
past ponds, down hills

nothing better than to re-claim
duck with its head swinging
knife – a blue pencil
only bad things that affect
the opposite still she came
a tall black vase
fluttering her arms
always displeased
moving every year
around protected by the wind
shook the plate in front
did not scream when he fell
outside down the stairs
poured all her brains

the adaptations
to differences in colour
associated with food
regarded as the simplest forms
stuck together in lumps
are irrelevant to survival
the struggle towards
countless changes
exhausted from hunger
sounded like water
beginning to burn
or an extinguished star
fading with darkness
smiling at the skull

feelings belonged to the past
his stomach churned
the breeze blew
through thick underbrush
following him around
out onto the highway
and grinned
flailing about
not to touch his cold flesh
you could smell it
from deep in the earth
watching the smoke crawl
from his straining lungs
with its icy purity

The line here represents one phrase, almost as though each were a single stroke that, together, accumulate into a large, complex canvas. In general, the lines contain between four & eight syllables – the two shorter exceptions in the fourth stanza above are the first such exceptions in the poem, which is already 16 stanzas long at the start of this quotation.

A different poet who focused on the phrase might vary the segments of language actually used line by line more than Raworth does: a quick tally of the 56 lines above shows 21 starting with verbs – only one is a variant of to be – with another ten starting with prepositions. It’s precisely this combination of line length & syntax that propels Raworth’s text forward so rapidly. A career of reading texts such as “Survival” in public would speed up anyone’s reading style.

“Survival” is the longest poem in Clean & Well Lit, which – with the exception of the sequence Eternal Sections – represents eight years of writing, post-Tottering State, Like the “14-line poems” of Eternal Sections – Raworth pointedly does not call them sonnets – “Survival’s” 14-line stanzas carry that familiar quantity about them. Raworth’s reluctance to employ the S-word makes sense, as the logic of these stanzas is anything but sonnet-esque. Rather, the propulsion of the language carries the reader ever forward, ever faster. If the syntax does contribute to the onward motion of the language, it never really resolves up to the level of a sentence – those little moments of closure are themselves deferred or displaced.

I’ve sometimes wondered if it is a function of Raworth’s phrase-focus that makes his work so eminently accessible to U.S. audiences & note, just to use these four stanzas as an index, that only the spelling of colour marks his text in any way I think might be recognizable to a Yank as British. Do the British really use phrases differently? I’m not enough of a comparative linguist to know, although I’m aware of the stereotype propagated by so many BBC dramas on U.S. PBS television stations suggesting that fully formed sentences with many dependent clauses are “British” in a way that the more telegraphic, interruptive mode of Yankee discourse is not. Of course nobody in those dramas sounds like Linton Kweski Johnson either, or even appears to have come from the north. Still, the complaint I once got from a young poet with partly British heritage that “there’s waaaay too many ‘experimental’ poets who like to think Tom Raworth is the only poet in England” reflects, among other things, the enormous respect & passion Americans do have toward his work.

Raworth’s Collected Poems is about to be issued from Carcanet in the U.K. & is already available for sale over its web site. Every single blurb for the book is from a Yank.

***

It’s big. It’s yellow. It’s beautiful. It, in this instance, is the Tom Raworth Collected Poems, just out from Carcanet, making an early bid for the “best book of 2003” sweepstakes. The volume has 557 pages of text, plus some 18 of “front matter” & another 20 given to various indices. At one pound, 13 ounces, it’s a brick. A brick with a cover illustration by the late Franco Beltrametti.*

Not long ago, I had a discussion with poet of my own generation whose work I’ve praised on this blog, whom I informed that I longed to see a collected works of his poetry. He argued, with surprising vigor, against the idea. His primary points were two – first, that as a young poet he had not always known when works should be held back & not published. There was a lot of writing in his first books that, in his opinion, were “not ready for prime time.”** But even more problematic from his perspective was the way in which “collecteds” eliminate shape.

Shape is a question, I agree, with any such gathering, as is detail. Perhaps the most notorious example of how placement can alter & undermine the implications of a text in such terms are the poems from William Carlos Williams’ Spring & All as they were included in his own Collected Earlier Poems. Thus did “red wheel / barrow” become something it never could have been in context, coming as it originally did 78 pages into a dense argument, leading directly to a discussion of knowledge, categories, democracy, education & confusion. There also is a distinction between collected & complete with which all such volumes must contend. Thus there are rumors afoot at the Collected Books of Jack Spicer will some day be supplanted by a much fuller edition. & we have just seen how radically different the new Collected Works of Lorine Niedecker are from her two earlier “collected” poems, T&G and My Life by Water.

There also are discrepancies in this vast edition of Raworth’s – moments that will stop a fond, familiar reader short. For example, the stanza-per-page structure of “Defective Definitions” in Clean & Well Lit runs 4-2-1, though all are quatrains. In the Collected, the stanzas are run together. Raworth himself credits the Clean & Well Lit formatting to “happenstance,” insisting that ultimately there is no such thing as “correct.” Thus Ace is a long thin poem*** in a single column in the Edge Press edition I currently own, yet appeared in double columns in the editions of Tottering State published by The Figures & by Paladin. It doesn’t appear at all in the O Book edition of Tottering State & is again in double columns in the Collected. Indeed, the three editions of Tottering State all differ substantially. The provisional nature of it all is enough to make one suspicious of a project that calls itself Collected.

Which might well be the point. As impressively well-written as these works are – & I’m one who could be persuaded that we live the Age of Raworth – Raworth’s poetry itself argues for a definition of verse as “what a poet does,” a condition that offers quite a bit of latitude. But I don’t think it’s latitude that Raworth is after, nor does his stance have anything to do with an approach to the poem as “art language” the way that David Antin’s performances do. Rather, the books like the poems themselves, are arguments for a perpetual restlessness that amounts to constant attentiveness to the conditions of the real. It’s in this sense that the Collected Poems represents an achievement of major proportion. These works are not “the alps,” as Basil Bunting once characterized Pound’s Cantos, not because the accumulation is not massive, but because there is not a sedentary moment in this book.

* Far more beautiful & colorful than the washed-out thumbnail of it on the Carcanet web site suggests.

** I don’t agree.

*** I originally typed “long thing poem” – it’s that too.

Tom Raworth

reading

@ the Kootenay School of Writing

Vancouver, BC

1998

My copy of Tom Raworth’s Collected came straight from Carcanet, which tucked in a bookmark that was, as these things often enough are these days, an advertisement for another poet, one Sophie Hannah. It includes, on one side, a head shot of the poet and a poem printed in red type, whose title (presented rather as though it were a footnote) is “Occupational Hazard”:

He has slept with accountants and brokers,

With a cowgirl (well, someone from Healds).

He has slept with non-smokers and smokers

In commercial and cultural fields.

He has slept with book-sellers, book-binders,

Slept with auditors, florists, Pas,

Child psychologists, even child minders,

With directors of firms and of plays.

He has slept with the stupid and clever.

He has slept with the rich and the poor

But he sadly admits that he’s never

Slept with a poet before.

Real poets are rare, he confesses,

While it’s easier to find a cashier.

So I give him some poets’ addresses

And consider a change of career.

Positioned directly below the photograph, head tilted slightly, hair frizzed & over-sized round glasses, the poem is virtually an invitation (if not an incitement) to imagine what it would be like sleeping with Sophie Hannah, all sort of a curious soft porn approach to promoting the lightest of light verse. The photo apparently is the official Sophie Hannah PR shot. A cropped version of it appears on her page at the Contemporary Writers site linked at the top of this blog and the full version can be found on Hannah’s page at her agent’s site. Yep, this poet has an agent, as well as a long list of books for somebody born in 1971, including fiction & children’s literature as well as light verse. The flip side of the Carcanet bookmark contains quotes about her work, positioned next to thumbnail versions of the covers of three of her collections of verse. One, credited to the Poetry Review, declares “Shall I put it in capitals? SOPHIE HANNAH IS A GENIUS.” Another, credited only to the Independent, says simply, “The brightest young star in British Poetry” (caps in the original).

Sleeping with Sophie Hannah is apparently a theme. Googling around the web, I quickly found a site for one of her books that prints two poems, one of which announces

I, therefore, will expect

Full details of our sex life in the Sun.

I will not sue you nor will I object

In any way – I’ll treat it as good fun.

Like “Occupational Hazard,” these works are rather long walks off short piers – a lot of verbiage & metrical padding given over to what are really one-line jokes. If these are signs of the “brightest young star in British Poetry,” then Benny Hill is Potemkin. If you want to take “Occupational Hazards” seriously as poetry, then you have to start asking questions like, why aren’t we told anything about what “he” does, or what the value of such plodding form brings to the occasion. You have to start treating decadence seriously, literally to explore the pathology at the heart of this work.

A few days before Edward Hirsch profiled Wendy Cope in yesterday’s Washington Post column*, Nate Dorward asked me about the inroads that British new formalism is making in the United States – you are hereby put on notice that someday soon we are likely to be seeing & hearing more from Ms. Hannah on this side of the water. The answer I think lies less in the poetry of those small islands off the coast of Europe than it does in a parallel phenomenon, the concept of amateurism in sports. Amateurism, you will recall, came seriously into being in the 19^th century as a means of keeping the unwashed classes from competing with the neo-macho boys of the elite. The poor could not devote the time needed to train & prepare without support, so the dividing line conveniently kept them out without claiming that this was its true purpose.** Every time I hear of some violation of the amateur rules of college basketball, for example, I think back on what amateurism has always been all about – setting up false boundaries to keep certain folks out.

The idea of treating a Sophie Hannah or Glyn Maxwell or Michael Hulse as though they were serious writers – let alone “bright young stars” – functions in a similar fashion. Claims as outlandish as that involve a willful forgetting. It’s a mechanism for acting as if the likes of a Tom Raworth (or any of a hundred other British poets) doesn’t exist. It’s very much like the newspapers that only review poetry volumes from the same three or four trade publishers & the “prestigious awards” that do likewise.

One sees this behavior in the United States rather often around Boston, although there are outposts here & there wherever bad poetry is sold. I suspect that there must be people up there who still adhere to the root word lurking behind the concept “New England” & who live in perpetual fear that the world will someday discover that the major Boston poet of the 20^th century was Bill Corbett. As indeed it was, unless you want to make a case for John Wieners.

I think that the welcome the British “new gen” poets receive – I tend to think of them instead as “funny formalism” – has a great deal to do with how little good poetry is coming out of its equivalent strain here in the States. So rather than look at genuinely witty writers – Frank O’Hara, Anselm Hollo or whomever – these “amateurs” of Official Verse Culture import second rate material whose only true value is that it extends a British tradition its advocates would like to endorse & encourage. Only they have to pretend that it’s not moribund in order to make their case.

That a Sophie Hannah bookmark should be tucked into a volume of Tom Raworth underscores the fact that Carcanet has been publishing her work since her early twenties, while it has only now deemed to incorporate Raworth’s work into its list, part of the process of legitimating its claim to represent poetry, rather than being what the trade publishing scene appears to be in the U.K. as well as the U.S., just another small press scene, but with great distribution. I certainly don’t fault Raworth any more than I do Ginsberg, Koch or Ashbery for choosing distribution, knowing as they do its limits & compromises. Indeed, one wonders if a Jimmy Schuyler would ever have met with the public recognition he was accorded had all his books been published, say, by Black Sparrow or Adventures in Poetry. It makes one wish that FSG would bring out a big Corbett volume, for example, just to see what it would be like for a trade publisher to print good poetry from Boston.

* The only poet reviewed in yesterday’s New York Times Book Review was a collection of work by James Merrill edited by J.D. McClatchy.

** Rather the way W “promotes” diversity while attacking affirmative action & appointing racist judges, & “promotes” health care reform while cutting benefits for seniors & protecting the insurance & pharmaceutical conglomerates

It’s big. It’s yellow. It’s beautiful. It, in this instance, is the Tom Raworth Collected Poems, just out from Carcanet, making an early bid for the “best book of 2003” sweepstakes. The volume has 557 pages of text, plus some 18 of “front matter” & another 20 given to various indices. At one pound, 13 ounces, it’s a brick. A brick with a cover illustration by the late Franco Beltrametti.*

Not long ago, I had a discussion with poet of my own generation whose work I’ve praised on this blog, whom I informed that I longed to see a collected works of his poetry. He argued, with surprising vigor, against the idea. His primary points were two – first, that as a young poet he had not always known when works should be held back & not published. There was a lot of writing in his first books that, in his opinion, were “not ready for prime time.”** But even more problematic from his perspective was the way in which “collecteds” eliminate shape.

Shape is a question, I agree, with any such gathering, as is detail. Perhaps the most notorious example of how placement can alter & undermine the implications of a text in such terms are the poems from William Carlos Williams’ Spring & All as they were included in his own Collected Earlier Poems. Thus did “red wheel / barrow” become something it never could have been in context, coming as it originally did 78 pages into a dense argument, leading directly to a discussion of knowledge, categories, democracy, education & confusion. There also is a distinction between collected & complete with which all such volumes must contend. Thus there are rumors afoot at the Collected Books of Jack Spicer will some day be supplanted by a much fuller edition. & we have just seen how radically different the new Collected Works of Lorine Niedecker are from her two earlier “collected” poems, T&G and My Life by Water.

There also are discrepancies in this vast edition of Raworth’s – moments that will stop a fond, familiar reader short. For example, the stanza-per-page structure of “Defective Definitions” in Clean & Well Lit runs 4-2-1, though all are quatrains. In the Collected, the stanzas are run together. Raworth himself credits the Clean & Well Lit formatting to “happenstance,” insisting that ultimately there is no such thing as “correct.” Thus Ace is a long thin poem*** in a single column in the Edge Press edition I currently own, yet appeared in double columns in the editions of Tottering State published by The Figures & by Paladin. It doesn’t appear at all in the O Book edition of Tottering State & is again in double columns in the Collected. Indeed, the three editions of Tottering State all differ substantially. The provisional nature of it all is enough to make one suspicious of a project that calls itself Collected.

Which might well be the point. As impressively well-written as these works are – & I’m one who could be persuaded that we live the Age of Raworth – Raworth’s poetry itself argues for a definition of verse as “what a poet does,” a condition that offers quite a bit of latitude. But I don’t think it’s latitude that Raworth is after, nor does his stance have anything to do with an approach to the poem as “art language” the way that David Antin’s performances do. Rather, the books like the poems themselves, are arguments for a perpetual restlessness that amounts to constant attentiveness to the conditions of the real. It’s in this sense that the Collected Poems represents an achievement of major proportion. These works are not “the alps,” as Basil Bunting once characterized Pound’s Cantos, not because the accumulation is not massive, but because there is not a sedentary moment in this book.

* Far more beautiful & colorful than the washed-out thumbnail of it on the Carcanet web site suggests.

** I don’t agree.

*** I originally typed “long thing poem” – it’s that too.

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.