In 1989 Tom Raworth commented on the focus and purpose of his poetry:
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 implications of this poetics is felt throughout his work. But
during the late 1960s and early 1970s, Raworth seems to have been working
through, at times in quite a tortured way, the implications of wishing to
expand his range, in serial texts that became less immediately phenomenological
and more imbedded in the language as it is produced. They are more meditative,
more logopoetic, in Pound's sense, of the intellect moving among words. They
are at once more self-referential, and self-definitional. ‘Tracking (notes)’
states
we
are
now
This
questions the assumptions ordinarily placed upon the plural personal pronoun,
the important verb ‘to be’, and upon the nature of time. The last of these
haunts a number of these works of the early 1970s, not least of all because
spontaneity and process raise issues about temporality. The poem seems to be
asking where ‘are we now?’ an issue that pervades the prose passages, in more
social and aesthetic terms:
things of
your time are influenced by the past. the artist can only go on from there and
see the situation as it is: anything else is distortion.....i stick with de
Kooning saying ‘i influence the past’ - and it is not important for the work of
a time to be available in the mass media of its time: think of dickens on film,
dostoyevsky on radio.
The past is
only activated by, realized in, the present (‘what's done/is’ as another of the
brief poems has it). Raworth reverses, and makes egalitarian, Pound's notion
that artists are the ‘antennae of the race’, not in some reductive
suggestion that everybody is an artist, but that the required nature of
education is to open everybody to the age's aesthetic messages, whatever the
medium:
within everyone is an antenna sensitive to the messages of the
time: art is beamed to these antennae. education should tune them : instead
they are smothered with phony ‘learning’. the past has no messages (yes it has
- whispering smith’s harmonica and a dog howling in the night).
Characteristically,
Raworth cancels his own arrogance when it threatens to elevate the ‘now’; the
non-Proustian anti-epiphany of the narrator’s memory is comic but decisive. We
also face a revision of his earlier insistence upon the intuitive as against
the intellectual (or intelligence), as long as we recall that inert factual
learning, or research, is different from the vitality of the ‘beamed’ art.
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.
In a
slightly later sequence, ‘The Conscience of a Conservative’, one section reads:
imagine
being
but not
knowing
The ironic
impossibility of imagining a state of non-knowing without some knowledge of the
imaginary and of the concept of being is not stated but felt in the segmented
lineation. Amid these ‘snapshots that are interiorized both in their
presentation of experience and their dissection of the phrase or even the
single word’, as Geoffrey Ward puts it, the prose meditations on poetics
implicitly demonstrate the inadequacy of the notational mode which they
interrupt. They interrogate the difficulties of poetic expression in a world in
which the discursive is undercut by the speed of contemporary technology and in
which development of ideas is replaced by immediacy of image. Yet even the
famous ideogrammic method of the juxtaposition of fragments, of Pound, which
serves Lee Harwood well in The Long Black Veil, for example, is
rejected:
the connections (or connectives) no longer work - so how to build
the long poem everyone is straining for? (the synopsis is enough for a quick
mind now (result of film?) you can't pad out the book).
That
celerity and quickness might be part of the answer rather than the problem for
Raworth is intuited:
all week I’ve (week)
felt
the speed of writing
explanation rejects my
advance
Practice,
this implies, outstrips explanatory poetics (if there can be such a thing) but
it also recognizes that velocity as a scriptural equivalent of mental celerity
might ground the poetics of what is to one side.
*
I have written critically of Tom's work a great deal but here's a relaxed take on his extraordinary 14 liners, written after the work discussed above.
See also from my abandoned novel Thelma here which features Tom Raworth as a character, my 1999 poem for him, posted I.M. here., and my recent one written I.M, here.
*
I have written critically of Tom's work a great deal but here's a relaxed take on his extraordinary 14 liners, written after the work discussed above.
See also from my abandoned novel Thelma here which features Tom Raworth as a character, my 1999 poem for him, posted I.M. here., and my recent one written I.M, here.
