Tom Raworth (1938–2017) was described by Geoff Ward in his obituary as a ‘leading figure in the British poetry revival of the 1960s’, who ‘brought the radicalism of the Beat, New York and Black Mountain schools in postwar American poetry to bear on British writing. Ditching closed form and metre, capital letters and punctuation, he wrote with a quickfire lyricism that elevated snapshot and spontaneity over the grand projects of high modernism.’1 He was known for the rapidity of his reading style, and the variety of the form of his books; he had taught himself to typeset and print in his early twenties, and with Barry Hall founded Goliard Press in 1965, publishing Charles Olson among others. His massive Collected Poems was issued by Carcanet in 2003, and a selection, As When, was edited by Miles Champion for Carcanet in 2013.
16 August 2009 at 07:43
Dear Judith, Dear Michael,
Back a couple of days from China and slowly getting over both jet-lag and culture-shock.2 An interesting trip, both the festival (though that had its longueurs of speeches – one of the organisers is the Vice-Governor of the Province (and also a ‘poet’) so there was much repetition down the hierarchy of officialdom: he also wants the festival (this time with 42 foreign poets and 168 Chinese) to be the ‘biggest in the world’.... and to ‘establish the poetry brand for Qinghai Province’: so you can imagine) and the trips in the region... to the ancient Ta’er Monastery.... to the Qinghai Lake (the largest and highest salt water lake.... relic of an ancient ocean now stranded at 4000 metres above sea level.... a sort of contradiction as of course it is ALSO ‘sea level’)... and to the Yellow River high above the new hydroelectric dam. As in any such large group there were congenial souls among the time-servers. Fred Wah, the Canadian who goes back as far as Olson and Buffalo; the German poet Ulf Stolterfoht; Miroslav Kirin from Croatia; Dora Ribeiro from Brazil; Karlis Verdins from Latvia; and my old friend the Chinese poet Huang Fan from Nanking. There were so many poets that readings took place at the same times in different venues so I missed the one possibly interesting moment when the woman Israeli poet complained that she couldn’t read anywhere alcohol was being served; then that if they couldn’t change that she must read first and leave; read; stayed; and then when the Lebanese poet read a piece based on the shooting of a Lebanese child by an Israeli soldier, stormed out complaining that poems like that should not be allowed and she would be writing to the Chinese and Israeli Governments. Again, because of the numbers of poets (and the Chinese poets, well-mannered, were always reading AFTER the foreign poets in the groups) people were asked to limit their reading to five minutes. Not difficult, one would imagine... I mean watches have been invented and are quite cheap. But you both, and I, know poets. So many times no Chinese poets got to read. I remember one evening when the Greek poet (one of those always posed on a chair with an invisible arrow pointing at him saying ‘look how handsome I am’) got up. A poem to Medea. I listened for five minutes, went and had a beer or two with a friend, came back half an hour later... and he was still going strong. And with the Chinese translation to follow.
Well, enough. In this clip you can see me unveiling the ‘poetry wall’. I am ‘famous English poet Tom Raworth’.... to my right is ‘famous Estonian poet Jaan Kaplinski’.3
And what I wanted to do was:
(a) send you our address at least for the next three months (below); and
(b) ask if two copies of the Collected could be sent to me here, set against any future income – as I gave my one remaining copy to the Brazilian poet and will need something to take to the US in mid-September to read from.
With good wishes to you both (and to the press); and apologies for going on and on... but the images are still fresh.
Tom
27 August 2009 at 18:19
I love the photo of famous poet! China must have been a considerable shock to the system, in every sense.
So pleased about the book.
The academic term is about to begin again, a prospect that becomes more shadowy each year. At least I’ll have a couple of days in New York, and I’ll be seeing Miles Champion for the first time in twenty years.4
All best
Michael
27 August 2009 at 18:40
Dear Michael,
Good to hear from you. Yes, there was indeed a moment when, up by Qinghai lake, near the 4,000 metre mark, I realised I was at the exact edge of what I could physically do.... I was at the edge of the lake with Dora Ribeiro, a Brazilian poet living in Beijing... and we tried to play ducks and drakes... the two swings of my arm were exactly enough to tell me I couldn’t do one more. It was that close.
I wonder (which would be a remarkable fortune) if you’ll be in New York the week of September 28th to October 4th which is when I’ll be staying (if it works out for Rachel) with Miles and her in Brooklyn. I expect we won’t coincide... but enjoy the trip. Miles has been a good friend to me for many years and I’m delighted he’s writing again. I think the years at the Poetry Project, dealing constantly with ‘poets’ and their egos, made him so glad not to be there that even poetry became (apart from his love of it, and constant reading) something to be approached with caution.
I’m a little weary, getting settled in to our first home (even though temporary) for more than a year. It is the first time I’ve lived anywhere directly in front of the ocean and I delight in long dawn bike rides along what one can of the edge.
warm regards,
Tom
*
Among experimental writers, which is what Tom Raworth still seems to me to be, the kind who raises different questions of form and language each time you approach him, the way in is often laughter. He is among the best-loved poets we publish, with a wide following in the UK and abroad, and he toured and gave readings and remained one of the most penniless poets I know. There was continual concern, in the years when we published him, for his health and his material survival with Val, his wife, a dear companion. Much of my correspondence with him touches or centres on medical and material issues. In 2009 his emails had as postal address:
He provided an American and a British cell phone number, since he often went to the United States to give readings.
There were also issues of archaeology: Philip Terry unearthed translations Raworth had done of Vicente Huidobro and Hans Arp fifty years earlier. Professor Arthur Terry had been Raworth’s external examiner when he completed his translation project at Essex. I had hoped he would like his work enough to let us feature it in PN Review, but he didn’t. In fact his contributions to the magazine were only two: a tribute to his old friend Ed Dorn, which he read at the launch of the Dorn Collected Poems in London, and a single poem.
John Ashbery, Planisphere
Caroline Bird, Watering Can
Thomas A. Clark, The Hundred Thousand Places
Gillian Clarke, A Recipe for Water
Fred D’Aguiar, Continental Shelf
Jane Draycott, Over
Anthony Dunn, Bugs
Padraic Fallon, The Circles of Archimedes
Ford Madox Ford, Provence: from minstrels to the machine, edited by John Coyle
Mary Griffiths, Pictures of War, afterword by Stella Halkyard
Gwen Harwood, Mappings of the Plane: new selected poems, edited by Chris Kratzmann and Chris Wallace-Crabbe
Andrew Johnston and Robyn Marsack (eds), Twenty Contemporary New Zealand Poets: an anthology
Gabriel Josipovici, After and Making Mistakes
Venus Khoury-Ghata, Alphabets of Sand: selected poems, translated by Marilyn Hacker
Katharine Kilalea, One Eye’d Leigh
Thomas Kinsella, Prose Occasions: 1951–2006, edited by Andrew Fitzsimons
Chris McCully, Polder
Paula Meehan, Painting Rain
Sinéad Morrissey, Through the Square Window
Frank Ormsby, Fireflies
Jeremy Over, Deceiving Wild Creatures
Petronius, Satyrica, translated by Frederic Raphael
Peter Pindar, Laughing at the King: selected poems, edited by Fenella Copplestone
Richard Price, Rays
Robert Rehder, First Things When
Fiona Sampson (ed), A Century of Poetry Review
Norm Sibum, Smoke and Lilacs
Muriel Spark, Curriculum Vitae
C.K. Stead, Collected Poems: 1951–2006
Charles Tomlinson, New Collected Poems
Marina Tsvetaeva, Bride of Ice: new selected poems, translated by Elaine Feinstein
Arto Vaun, Capillarity
Robert Wells, Collected Poems and Translations
Matthew Welton, ‘We needed coffee but…’