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As When covers the
past 50 years, or so, of Tom Raworth's extraordinary writing life. About 25%
of the material here may be new to readers - in that those pieces were not
included in the 2003 Collected Poems, or they were 'previously only issued as fugitive cards and
broadsides' (cover blurb).
Miles Champion's Introduction is useful as a biographical summary: it traces
Raworth's schooling, his first jobs (I didn't know that he had worked at the
Wellcome Foundation, for instance) and his initial steps into writing and
publishing. It details his marriage and his literary friendships, with the
likes of Ed Dorn, Asa Beneviste and Ted Greenwald, and his time spent at the
Universities of Essex and Northeastern Illinois. There are also historical
details about Raworth's transatlantic movements and his early involvement in Outburst magazine, the Goliard Press and, of course, a
summary of Raworth's own publications, including the early Selected, Tottering
State (1988); the later Selected, Clean
& Well Lit (1987-1995) and the 2003 Collected.
Biography apart, what is really
useful in the Introduction is that it gives the uninitiated reader a
way in to reading Raworth's poetry.
Despite Champion's claim that these poems are not 'difficult', to anyone but
someone familiar with Raworth's poems, this work certainly does present difficulties... how, for example, is one to
read these fragmentary lines:
sotto le nuovole
wrapped in crisp
workshops
cue ape
la vucca e traditura
di lu cori
moat threatened puppies
sample massive
trim my long gene
'a gesture dear
not a recipe'
Champion suggests that this mode of poetry 'inhabits the present as fully as
art allows' and that 'the literary recognition of the fact that we live
necessarily, albeit fractionally, in the past - that light has velocity - is
his alone.'
How this fractionality becomes useful in
reading lines such as these is given perspective by Raworth's comments on his
own processes:
'I write down fragments of language passing through my mind that interest me
enough after thought has played with them for me to imagine I might like to
read them. What form that documentation takes doesn't interest me as an
intention, but only as the most accurate impression of the journey of
interest.'
In other words, these poems record Raworth's own processes of impression and
thought, freed from the limitations of poetic form. This has led to, as Champion notes, poetry of 'ever
greater compression', in which the 'Boundaries between poem, journal entry
and notation of atmospheric buzz are thrillingly dissolved, so that poems
become entirely congruent with a tracking of the poetic signal.'
Once the new reader understands this compositional technique (and, hence, way
of reading), the poems can be taken on their own terms - don't try to compare
them to other poems you know - and then they do, as Champion says, stimulate
'the mind as much as the eye and ear.'
After his Collected Poems, much
has been said, of course, about Raworth's poetry, so I shall limit myself
here to a few excerpts from the poems which do not appear in the Collected.
Fragments which jumped out at this reader include the following, which
stand alone and do not require a reviewer's insightful elucidation, save to
say that what I enjoy here is a stimulating, understated politics and the
ability to make me laugh (Raworth's poetry has always done that), as well as
to please the ear and eye:
privatised profits
socialised losses
illiquid buckets
toxic assets
Jack sprat
Jill downhill
('From Mountains and Gardens')
not into the etymology of
gesture
watch death in your ear
reconcile god's teachings
with recreational
shooting
and defence of self and
country
driving around watering
lawns
time will be vaporised
now of my three score
years and ten
('Birthday Poem')
i shall forge the blade
of my own substance
and it may not be a blade
('How to Patronise A Poem')
I am lonely for my
replaced cells
1945, 1952, 1959, 1966,
1973, 1980, 1987
learn your language
no direction is home
('Drop In Existence' [whole poem])
culture is reassurance :
art is nervousness
('Dreaming')
everywhere i go at night
i spoil
a perfect wash of moon
light on the ground
with lousy lines like
this
('Continued (Subtitles)')
© Andy Brown 2015
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