Tom Raworth has died, sad news indeed. He was fast, furious and funny, charming and witty, without push and plush. A perfect gent. And I shall miss him. In his memory I'd like to offer a passage from my aborted novel Thelma, that was based on Breton's Nadja but set in Liverpool. I think this 'chapter' parallels a passage in Breton where he encounters Robert Desnos. Apart from the existence of Thelma, this all happened, in 2002 or 3. Re-reading it, it strikes me that it has much to say about Tom as a man, his work, his reading style, and his surprising music taste.
Tom Raworth was one of the first to
see that the myth of the Beats could not be Anglicized. Despite the hopes of the
bearded bards of Liverpool performing
happenings under the arches of the Everyman. ‘It’s like tossing the quarter bottle of whiskey out of the mini
as you drive down the M16. It doesn’t work at all. There’s a whole different
way of going about things,’ he said.
Once
again, now, you see Raworth preparing to sleep.
‘I
have to take drugs I used to take for pleasure!’ he laughs, making light of the
demands upon him. The rattle of pills.
He
talks. It is three in the morning at your house near Penny Lane
‘She talks. Like
an angel talks!’
You
discovered this mutual taste, once you’d exhausted (and become exhausted by)
the avant-garde: Dave Douglas, Greg Osby, Time Berne. You did find one album,
cluttering through the piles, by his friend, the singular experimentalist Steve
Lacy – the duo with Mal Waldron – that he hadn’t yet heard.
You also praised
Lacy’s solo on ‘Absence’ (a setting of Tom’s ‘Out of a Sudden’) as the most
spectral that you’d heard. A perfect slurring growling display of ‘duende’ for
the poem’s occasion. Its rhyming couplets.
At the gig, Tom
had explained: ‘There’s a reason for this one being in the form it is. It was
written after the death of a friend, the Italian poet and painter Franco
Beltrametti, the day after he died. And Steve Lacy wanted to set something to
music, and asked for something and so, knowing that the more avant garde people
are in one field, the more traditional their taste in other things is.’
The
foregrounding of ‘the alphabet wonder(ing) what it should do’, as language does
without its medium.
As
Tom says, with typical modesty, ‘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.’
The amazing dis-equilibrium
of his recent poems. Performed – as that night – without the slightest
hesitation and at an astonishing speed. The nearest approximation to a poetry
of saying. As the words rush by too fast to grasp. In the fibres of your
response. A poetic tingling. Re-reading the poems on the page you still have trouble
recounting them objectively. Counters of arguments re-arranged – juggled lines –
so that they no longer argue but present the parts of an argument without its
mechanism. Or the mechanism without its argument. Choose your metaphor. You
can’t describe the poems, or situate the semantics of the exploded syntax in a
single completion. They have the purity, the generosity, of a gesture of
openness. So often they are empty. However much they say, there is nothing to
be said.
The obliquity
that you find in Raworth’s poems you find in the man. As if they’d written him. A living poetics.
Spend some days in Tom’s company. Say,
in Cork
You suspect that he’s waiting for
something to stir him, something to one side that he will drag even further
off-side: a pun, a graffito, a west wind….
He
talks. He sleeps.
But read 'On Tom
Raworth: The Speed of Writing and the Poetics of What is to One Side' here.
And see my 1999 poem for him, posted I.M. here. And a link to a recent poem written I.M., here.
And see my 1999 poem for him, posted I.M. here. And a link to a recent poem written I.M., here.
