Tom Raworth is the author of over forty books of poetry, including his Collected Poems, published in 2003. He became a presence in international poetry in 1961 as the editor of Outburst, publishing poetry from American and British writers working in modes derived from modernist practice. Since the years of Outburst, Matrix Press, and the Goliard Press, which he co-founded with Barry Hall in 1965, he has been active in the outer precincts of poetry, writing and producing books and more ephemeral publications, sometimes working together with friends including Edward Dorn, Anselm Hollo, and Franco Beltrametti, but mostly solo. In the later eighties and early nineties he published, at first on a daily basis, Infolio, a four-page magazine whose contributors included some published in Outburst and younger poets and artists from Britain, France, Italy, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States.
Raworth is also a visual artist known for his collages — small squares in a grid, the material for them typically torn or cut from newspapers and magazines and doled out randomly before being meticulously arranged in the squares so that, examining them closely, one finds shapes and images superimposed and turned every which way; the collage seen at a distance is more abstract. In one collage, made for a 2007 exhibition at Miami University, the image of a woman’s face is hidden in several squares behind images of flowers and the white borders of the top layer of paper, which at a distance resemble pieces of a picket fence. In another, photographs of the faces of Osama Bin Laden and George Bush are among the cars and words and colours of what might be a comic strip. Raworth has said that his choice of newspaper for material owes something to the way time and light changes it, which links his collages with key concerns in his poetry; likewise, the grid works as an analogy for the fourteen-line units of his poems in Visible Shivers1 and Eternal Sections.2 The grid reappears, thanks to Flickr software, in Raworth’s recent photographs, which deserve more attention than they have received.
All of these activities are worth mentioning beside Raworth’s practice as a poet, as is the prose of A Serial Biography3 and Earn Your Milk,4 with its remarkable compression. The work of Kurt Schwitters, which had little use for boundaries between art forms, was of interest to Raworth early on, and, like Schwitters, Raworth has moved easily among art forms and regularly mixed them. His books include drawings by Jim Dine, Joe Brainard, Frances Butler, and Barry Hall, and several feature his own images and doodles. The wit and high spirits on display in his early poetry depend upon his ability to seem not to take poetry or art too seriously. For example, the long poem “West Wind,” which concludes his selected poems, Tottering State,5 follows its line “let’s have a song” with hand-drawn tic-tac-toe-like squares, a circle put in the upper right corner of one square and “another heavy rainstorm” handwritten across the bottom. This droll doodle interrupts the poem, as if the poet had been momentarily distracted or bored — even as elsewhere there are many lines bitterly clear in expressing Raworth’s anger with Thatcher’s policies.
Most of Raworth’s books have been designed and published by friends in the USA and Britain. Jonathan Skinner has discussed the large landscape design of Writing,6 and The Big Green Day7 and Logbook8 are often mentioned as striking books, but many of Raworth’s books deserve notice for their design. Paul Brown of Actual Size Press in London made Heavy Light9 small enough to tuck in a pocket; the book’s size is suited to its contents — short poems, many of them about poetry or what has counted as poetry. They include “University Days,” which jokes about the way that the academic study of poetry makes poetry akin to a museum artifact; and a final poem puckishly titled “READ ME,” the text of which is simply “thanks,” lower case, in Raworth’s handwriting.10 Other books seem tokens of visits and friendship, which might describe the little square book Landscaping the Future11 produced in Italy in an edition of 108. Raworth’s practice has come to be exemplary of the anti-institutional, community-based values such publishing reflects.
Raworth’s other activities have also worked to sustain communities across continents. He has probably given as many readings as any poet of his generation — many have remarked on the speed of his delivery; fewer on its precision. At the same time, he has written little prose about poetry. Raworth has had several short or visiting academic appointments but nothing like an academic career, though for several decades now his poetry has been of interest to scholars. The line “courtesy of some professors” flashes by in his long poem “Meadow.”12
Raworth seems to have ignored much of what immediately preceded him in English poetry, including the poetry of the Movement, with its anti-modernism and cult of common sense and little England. He was aware of but not part of the English modernism promoted by The English Intelligencer and other publications; his friendship with J. H. Prynne and Andrew Crozier did not prevent him from parodying that famous worksheet. While the so-called “British Poetry Revival” was heating up, Raworth was living in the United States and Mexico. He has never been part of a movement in poetry, though he has been claimed by several of them. His earliest poetry shows the influence of the work of American poets including Robert Creeley and Kenneth Koch, but his stronger affiliations have resulted as much from personal as aesthetic affinities.
Raworth was fortunate to have his work noticed quickly — there is no substitute for early success, Hugh Kenner once remarked — when his first substantial collection, The Relation Ship,13 won an award from the Poetry Society and went to two editions. This was during a period in 1960s London when the convergence of popular music and poetry offered poets brief access to an audience beyond the established literary presses. Having poems in Michael Horovitz’s anthology Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground in Britain14 and, with John Ashbery and Lee Harwood, in a book published in 1971 as part of an influential Penguin series15, also helped his work find readers. But it has been Raworth’s ability to keep moving among communities of small press poets in North America, Britain, France, and Italy, to keep finding interesting younger poets and editors starting presses, that has mattered in the long run. Movement is another important motif in his writing, as is its opposite, stasis.
At this point it makes some sense to speak of early and late Raworth, the early work lighter and more comic and intimate — “not so much reliant on a subjective agency as played through the subjective sensorium shaped by the writer’s close human relationships,”16 John Wilkinson writes of Ace17 — and the later work, the books after Tottering State, more relentless as record of social damage. Raworth’s poetry has journeyed from the lower case “i” to a place where the “I” is often absent, which is not to say that it ever has lacked access to what lyric poetry has at its disposal. Several critics have remarked on the affectlessness of Raworth’s later work, which does describe some of it; but read from front to back, there are more lines about the moon in Raworth’s poetry than in the work of many poets of his generation, as there is also more rhyme. To undermine my too-simple division between early and late work here is “Coffee Tobacco Hemp” published in 2013:
plants measure length of night
but not cucumber
winter stoat in moonlight
as we slumber18
This will not count as a stellar example of defamiliarization, nor is it affectless. This is song airy enough to be Elizabethan.
Raworth’s early poems are very familiar with the movies and television and detective fiction and most forms of popular culture. Logbook sends up the marginally literary genre of its title as it remembers English seafaring. A good few of the early poems have colorful titles obliquely related to what follows. Many contain self-reflexive passages about poetry and poetics, and sometimes, as with Tracking,19 these seriously sketch the aesthetic concerns of the poetry. The earlier poems tend to be short or composed in short sections with asterisks separating them, allowing for redirection and movement. In the later work, line breaks do the work asterisks did earlier, and whereas the early work usually stays close to the vernacular, the later work has also absorbed the discourse of elites. Raworth’s later poems persistently redirect pathways of sense-making so that readers must reconsider what they have just read; they arrange incomplete but carefully paced and precisely rendered phrases in ways that proliferate meaning without allowing readers to settle into a sentence. The shorter fourteen-line poems, like those included in Eternal Sections (which can also be viewed as sections of a longer work, as the title indicates), feature especially abrupt breaks in the sentence, though longer poems such as “The Vein” (1991) and “Out of the Picture” (1996) use related techniques. The language of some of the later work is such that some readers have thought Raworth has cut up found text, but as often as not these fragments of administrative, art-theoretical, and other discourse have been remembered or generated and arranged. The following poem is typical of the discourse in Eternal Sections, if more continuous than some writing in the book:
of a knowing discourse
counter to the laws of logic
in classical or market capitalism
it works or it does not
at the same level
in these fragmented texts
of a pure code-space
between expression and content
the same time is already history
without a mirror
the abstract posture
will be difficult to ascertain
on the recording surface20
The later poetry has been viewed as a political response to reified language, literature, and knowledge as it preserves British society; Andrew Duncan provocatively links Raworth’s working-class origins with his longstanding critique of an Olsonian poetics (he was Olson’s first British publisher) and of the idea of the poet as scholar.21 But much as Duncan thinks that Raworth is breaking up bureaucratic syntax in his later work, others have read the jokes and doodles of the earlier poetry as part of an effort to skewer the highbrow pretensions of poetry. There are continuities between a more playful and mocking earlier poetry and later writing associated with political or cultural critique, though it should be said that it is rare for a Raworth poem to be topical or to name its targets in the way that “West Wind” identifies Thatcher (as “the handbag”). Is it merely that Raworth’s rejection of boring or pretentious behaviour and writing has been extended into a more comprehensive account of the alienating experience of British life and institutions? In any case, Raworth’s suspicion of specific practices in contemporary poetry remains. “In fact, whenever I hear the word ‘poetry’ come on the radio my hand automatically switches [it] off,” Raworth told an audience at Birkbeck College while recording his poems for the Rockdrill series from Optic Nerve (2003), expressing his skepticism about the actorly voice that reading poetry for radio often seems to require. I do not know if the resulting CD was ever played on the radio — certainly not on a station heard by many. And yet his work manages to get around.
1 Visible Shivers (Oakland: O Books, 1987).
2 Eternal Sections (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1993).
3 A Serial Biography (London: Fulcrum, 1969).
4 Earn Your Milk (Great Wilbraham: Salt, 2009).
5 Tottering State (Great Barrington: The Figures, 1984).
6 Writing (Great Barrington: The Figures, 1982).
7 The Big Green Day (London: Trigram, 1968).
8 Logbook (Berkeley: Poltroon, 1976).
9 Heavy Light (London: Actual Size, 1984).
10 Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2003), 138.
11 Landscaping the Future. Illustrated by the author. With Italian translations by John Gian and Rita degli Esposti. (Bologna: Porto dei Santi, 2000).
12 Ibid., 530.
13 The Relation Ship (London: Goliard, 1966).
14 Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground in Britain (London: Penguin, 1969).
15 Penguin Modern Poets 19. With John Ashbery and Lee Harwood. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971).
16 John Wilkinson, “Tripping the Light Fantastic: Tom Raworth’s Ace,” in Removed for Further Study: The Poetry of Tom Raworth, ed. Nate Dorward (Toronto: The Gig, 2003), 146.
17 Ace (London: Goliard, 1974).
18 “Coffee Tobacco Hemp,” Chicago Review 58: 1 (2013).
19 Tracking (Bowling Green: Doones Press, 1972).
20 Collected Poems, 419.
21 Andrew Duncan, The Council of Heresy: A Primer of Poetry in a Balkanised Terrain (Exeter: Shearsman, 2009), 112–124.