Here's the second review I'm republishing on this blog. You can access all the Re:Views via the hubpost here: Pages: ReViews 1-8: Number 1: Mimeo Mimeo 4 (magazine)
Glancing
Off
Tom Raworth, As When: A Selection. Ed. Miles Champion.
Tom Raworth, XIVLiners.
Tom Raworth, Structure from Motion.
[This review was first published as ‘Glancing Off’ (Raworth), Poetry Salzburg Review 28, Autumn 2015, and was an attempt to write casually about Tom Raworth’s work, i.e., to not to try to theorise it too much, apart from what I could remember from writing about the work in The Poetry of Saying and elsewhere. Hence my opening sentence. Here's another elsewhere, with further elsewheres: Pages: Tom Beau (my poem for Tom Raworth along with others' in Blackbox Manifold) and links to my other tributes]
Elsewhere, I write about Tom Raworth’s
work as an exemplar of a ‘poetry of saying’, with its eternally signifying
play, its lack of closure. I contrast this with ‘the poetry of the said’, which
involves fixity (the dreariness of anecdotage, in particular). But the two
qualities are deeply intertwined: even slippery Raworth poems demand the fixity
of reprinting them again and again in the same words, as in his As When: A Selection and two attendant
volumes, XIVLiners and Structure from Motion, the last
containing recent work. While I believe my thesis still, as literary critical
description and writerly poetics, it doesn’t help new readers of these poems
much. You need to ‘get’ them first, otherwise the critical concepts are simply
a shield, its terms jargon to fend off unmediated encounter.
I probably first read Raworth in the Penguin Modern Poets series in the trio
Ashbery, Harwood, Raworth. Ashbery then was not the eminent figure he is today;
I found the poems playful and enigmatic. Harwood I’d already read (and later
worked on his poetry). But there was something in Raworth’s notational,
throwaway, skeletal, constantly shifting writing (the lack of punctuation and the
insistent lower case the only constants) that I felt was escaping me, not like
the difficulties one has in reading the effervescent but deep resonances of Rilke
or Celan, for example, but something more basic: like having registered X out
of the corner of my eye but not quite seeing it wholly or clearly enough. Sufferers
from migraines get used to something like this – and so do readers of Raworth,
who have to accept a certain negative capability, to return to a state where we
don’t know anything. As Raworth said, in an interview quoted in Miles
Champion’s detailed biblio-biographic introduction to As When: ‘I really have no sense of questing for knowledge... My
idea is to go the other way... And to be completely empty and see what sounds.’
And so, it seems to me, must the reader. As Raworth says in the creative work
itself: ‘not rejecting knowledge but
what (as in research) passes for knowledge and is but an illusion. the words
(knowledge, intelligent, etc.) must be redefined, or new words coined.’
Part of this has
to do with the lack of method – or disarming simplicity of method. Early works simply
add new lines to past lines until they stop. Olson spoke of one perception
leading immediately to another, but we find not just perceptions (they could be
puns or linguistic coinages, plenty of over-heard or found language, not to
mention diagrams or doodles). One early poem enacts its own telling and simply
happens in a situated on-going process:
I made this pact, intelligence
shall
not replace intuition, sitting here
my hand cold on the typewriter
Later works juggle within line
limits, as I shall show. But the poesis is always intuitive, one intuition
leading to the next. Raworth is very seldom procedural (and when he is, the
procedure is only used once). Apprehension of a poetry of saying can only come
after a successful aesthetic encounter with the work, in the ‘event-act’ of
reading, as Derek Attridge calls it, intuition before tuition.
As When is a selection that stretches
Raworth’s whole career, from the early sixties until now, but is by no means
even in coverage. The first half of the book presents a clear narrative of
Raworth’s development of perceptual registers of life’s odd simultaneity, though
not necessarily its complexity. ‘Morning’ and ‘Three’ enact domestic life as semi-orchestrated
chaos. Anybody who looks after children will recognise: ‘smell of shit when i
lift him he knocks the book from my hand’, the first of 7 action-packed lines
of ‘Three’ that end with the temporary harmony of ‘they go down the hall all
carrying something’. I say ‘not complexity’, because complexity implies order
and Raworth’s poems share something with the contemporaneous anarchistic epistemology
of Paul Feyerabend with its ‘anything goes’ and his stand ‘against method’.
When perceptions are adjoined by fantasy and linguistic games, as in the
playful opening of ‘Wedding Day’ (‘noise of a ring sliding onto a finger’), the
very poem in which he made the ‘pact’ regarding intuition, though with whom is
not clear, the reader has to go with the unknown flow (or not). To read the
work as a witty super-charged stream of consciousness isn’t a bad way in. My students
often say this and I then encourage them to develop a better sense of stream,
because consciousness co-exists with other streamed qualities. Fragmentary
fictional scenarios are just as likely to jump into view (‘we were leaving on a
journey by slow aeroplane’) as the perceptions of our poet at stool, where the
anticipated stream probably isn’t consciousness:
between my legs i read
levi
stra
origina
quality clo
leaning
too far forward
into
a patch of sunlight,
or his wide-eyed quotidian but
peculiarly inessential queries (‘where do all the cigarette ends go?’), or even
his accurate registering of language in production, as in the voice (in ‘Love
Poem’) that begins: ‘there have been so many other men in my pause life’.
Humour, of course, is what carries the reader here; there is something in the
human covenant that grants humour and wit exclusive rights over our intellect
(it is an intellectual function that undermines itself).
I want to dwell
on ‘gone to lunch back in five minutes’, the opening section of ‘The University
of Essex’. Raworth was briefly student and staff member there, after years away
from education and its fossilized ‘knowledge’, though the poem itself suggests
he registers his distance still, as in the third line’s ‘no and no’:
night closed in on my letter of
resignation
out in the square one of my threads
had broken loose
the language i used was no and
no
while the yellow still came
through, the hammer and the drills
occasionally the metabolism alters
and lines no longer come express
waiting for you what muscles work
me
which hold me down below my head?
it is a long coat and van on the
horizon
a bird that vanishes the Arabic
i learn from observation is how to
break the line
(genius creates surprises : the
metropolitan
police band singing ‘bless this
house’
as the filmed extractor fans
inflate the house with steam
Many of these early poems abound
with questions about self (as in the speculation about metabolism and muscles)
but a growing area of enquiry is about writing itself. In this poem questions
about the line are both existential and technical for the poet. A sketchy sense
of location, though often surreal in its detail, as in the ambiguous threads in
the equally ambiguous square, segues into the astonishing vision of the police
band, in a parenthetical aside that opens but doesn’t close before the final,
sinister, image. Although it offers what looks like closure, this phrase cannot
be held responsible, as it were, for the almost liminal consciousness (not arranged
in a ‘stream’) of dislocated yellow, hammers and drills.
In the 1970s the
poems become more self-conscious with Raworth’s self-confessed stretching
towards the long poem, and some of the longer poem sequences seem to be
deliberately ‘tracking’ – to use the title of one of them – its possibilities:
‘the connections (or connectives) no longer work – so how to build the long
poem everyone is straining for?’ he asks. However, he isn’t about to commit The Four Quartets. He answers his own
question with a poetics statement that he characteristically partly registers
as a question and places in parentheses: ‘(the synopsis is enough for a quick
mind now (result of film?) – you can’t pad out the book).’ Implicit is celerity of mind as writerly and readerly
modes, the montage techniques of Jean-Luc Godard or Jeff Keen being the
apposite filmic analogies. ‘Tracking (notes)’ itself is a serial poem-and-prose
piece that juggles poetics and ‘philosophy’ (the remarks on ‘knowledge’ quoted
earlier come from this work), as when Raworth usefully tells us ‘the true
direction is always glancing off’, presented alongside examples of that
‘glancing’ itself: ‘saddle of hare?’
one section reads entirely, as if questioning collective nounhood. Another sequence, ‘Stag Skull
Mounted’, a notational diary poem, tracks its own (eventual) failure as method,
its exhaustion: the final entry is ‘this trick doesn’t work’, at which point
the process must be abandoned. As a later interview has it, which modifies
and extends the metaphor of ‘glancing off’: ‘At the back there is always the hope that there are other people
... other minds, who will recognize something that they thought was to one side
or not real. I hope that my poems will show them that it is real, that it does
exist.’
One aspect of
Raworth’s work that we don’t get in As
When is most of the long poems that Raworth did achieve in the late 1970s and early 1980s (they are literally
long in their short-lined, occasionally one word, measures down the page) like Writing and Catacoustics, since
Champion, probably wisely, didn’t want to excerpt. (They can be found in the
2003 Carcanet Collected Poems.) This
is the perfect form for an on-going, digressive tracking of ‘anything goes’, an
additive non-method, but is a rollercoaster for the reader who must stay with
it, understanding or not. This process is also reflected in Raworth’s famous
‘quick mind’ recitation style. However, Champion selects ‘West Wind’, the poem
I think of as the last of this series, and a personal favourite, because it
combines the perceptual and linguistic play of earlier work with a political
commitment that derives (accidentally?) from having been written during the 1983
British election when Raworth’s mother was in hospital. It combines social
observation recorded nowhere else (‘if I can’t take the dog in/ I won’t vote’),
with savage political comment about Thatcher (‘handbag’). The Falklands War is
brilliantly equated with poverty at home and ‘the state as/ the status/ quo’:
puffs of unrelated news
restore
our former glory
which apparently
was a global servant class
too poor
to see the crown jewels
Yet these quotations from the flow
do violence to the experience of the tickertape flicker of the poem’s progress,
jumping and cutting, from these moments of political acuity to perceptually
disturbing data, such as ‘fragments/ of black spider motion’ with which the
poem ends. To Raworth’s question, ‘result of film?’ we must answer, ‘Yes.’
Another
deliberate gap in the Champion selection is the extraordinary series of 211 fourteen
line poems that Raworth wrote between about 1986 and the mid-1990s, but these
are published collectively in XIVLiners for
the first time. Beautifully designed, with one poem per page, we can savour
each in isolation, in this pocket-book edition. If we are invited by the book’s
title to think of them as sonnets, then the punning cover, Raworth’s own,
showing 14 ocean liners, gently
pushes away from that identification, with a joking raspberry of a foghorn. If
they are sonnets, as I’ve said elsewhere, then they display a
tear away whole sections
of what is good
bags of camel’s hair
a blue that carries further
the unlikeness of dusk and chaos
crossing a stream
where tributaries enter a river
you can’t wait for science
to drain that space of wet earth
dry
the face seemed to lack contour
nothing is left but a vast expanse
deep grooves of habit
trodden into the soil
under a full moon crossed by a
vulture
It doesn’t matter that the source
is a geography book (and it might not help to identify it). What matters is
that the syntactic indeterminacy of the piece, the difficulties we have making
sense of it (we are hard-wired for that, and can’t just leave it alone), create
a kind of unfinishable reading. Is line 2 connected to line 3, thus changing
the meaning? What kind of ‘face’ is it? ‘Deep grooves of habit’ might be
metaphorical rather than real but they are still ‘trodden into the soil’, in a
location ‘under a full moon’ that promises nocturnal rest, but the ‘vulture’ in
the last line seems ominous, despite the ordinary specificity of ‘camel’s
hair’, ‘stream’, ‘tributaries’ and ‘river’. The semantic field traceable
between these words even allows you to say what the poem is ‘about’, what
matter they encircle. But none of the poems seems to close; indeed, they read
differently on re-encounter. You can’t remember them, often. This is what I mean by a ‘poetry of saying’:
the poems inaugurate an eternality of utterance (one of their first printings
was entitled ‘Eternal Sections’). This book could remain in and out of your
pocket forever.
This vertiginous
negative capability, best learnt with these fourteen liners, is necessary in
encountering Raworth’s recent work, represented in the final pages of As When and in Structure from Motion, a title that suggests its poetics. The long
poem ‘Got On’ which appears in both books, is a strikingly new departure, its
stuttering lineation impeding reading and offering almost aggressive
resistance: ‘fuck the friendly image’ it begins before collecting as much of what
is glancing off as it can: names, fragments of speech, political analysis, and
even the headline-like: ‘hearings reveal ineffable blood warmth’. (I admit to
be still reading this text.) ‘Spear
Shaking’, in contrast, is an egregious and technically-adroit example of
Raworth’s one-off procedural works, using a technique that the Oulipo calls
‘The Chimera’, but which, in Raworth’s witty ways, is more like the ‘one song
to the tune of another’ game on the Radio 4 anti-panel show ‘I’m Sorry I
Haven’t A Clue’ (an analogy that is appropriate to the very English nature of
Raworth’s humour). Richard III’s most famous speech (as re-diffused by
Shakespeare) is populated with items from a keyword-list used by the US
security services to track online chatter, but we can still discern the lilt of
the original: ‘Now is the power outrage of our weapons cache/ Made toxic jihad
by this breach of threat.’ This contemporary map of fears is an appropriate
example to round off this review of over sixty years of intuitive and
intelligent exploration of periphery vision, of showing where the action is,
beyond ‘knowledge’.
Robert Sheppard
July 2015
