The next thing one notices about “Survival,” and about Clean & Well Lit in general, is that Raworth is not amused. The puckish wit of “Lion Lion” –

the happy hunters are coming back

eager to be captured, to have someone unravel the knot

but nobody can understand the writing

in the book they found in the lion’s lair

or of “The Conscience of a Conservative” – both collected in Tottering State – has been supplanted by a far more political tone: the first line in Clean & Well Lit is “the obsolete ammunition depot.” In that poem, “Out of the Picture,” “Survival,” “Blue Screen” & elsewhere in these works of the late ‘80s & early ‘90s, Raworth is far more apt to deploy a language that is public in its origin, the discourse of journalism & administration. This shift isn’t as dramatic, say, as the renunciation of LeRoi Jones & emergence of Amiri Baraka a generation earlier & Raworth, unlike Baraka or, say, Denise Levertov, opts for ambiguity & nuance as central to his vision, but the transformation is profound nonetheless.

From long before Jones (The Anathemata), Bunting (Chomei at Toyama) or Auden, British poetry has history of political engagement & Ed Dorn’s excursions to the U.K. in the ‘60s carried forward his own Olson-derived slant on how politics might be integrated into the poem. My own sense is that Raworth carries this sense of engagement one step further, perhaps more, in the ways in which he points the political toward the personal:

out it makes a noise

to the men and women who work

on the police computer

with a piece of piano wire

politely smiling

in front of the camera

plain clothes, nothing conspicuous

an unusual weapon

after a hot dinner

bent to fit any body

on the verge of cracking

strange things that make existence

these lost parts of the city

shrouding all of us

The key line to this stanza, as is so often the case, is exactly the one that sounds “out of place” – after a hot dinner – personalizing precisely the blandness of police work envisioned not as “cops & robbers,” but as bureaucrats before all else. The three lines that conclude the stanza immediately preceding this one pitch the tone more sharply:

an imaginary country

complete in every detail

in a perennial state of war

An almost perfect portrait of the Bush (II) administration several years avant le lettre. Thus, with this frame, the innocent piano wire of the next stanza becomes, in addition to all its other meanings, a possible instrument of torture.

Raworth’s politics are progressive but essentially unnamable. It’s interesting that Raworth, who has been known to issue political Christmas cards & whose forays into editing have also reflected a left-of-Tony Blair perspective, generally has shied away from critical writing as such save for obituaries. That’s a genre that allows him to write positively about what he believes in, but in terms that are at once both personal & settled. Poems such as “Survival” complement this by enabling Raworth to display the dystopian discourses of daily life in a context rich with ambivalence as well as horror. 

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.