It's hard to write about Raworth, and there is very little sensible written about him, because his poetry is so resistant to analysis.
thus was served
sharp edge
under control
casting
formed film's soul
what is perceived
of life among shapes
when memory
won't link to sense
takes dry leaves
this machine
adds the human touch
hope glides over lazy
drive under brigham
glorious heavy crimea
illuminated
no ledge jah see
(from: 'West Wind') It offers very little grip to existing terms of description. Much poetry has a shell which allows comparison and classification, and a core which is where the serious process of reading goes on, but which is mysterious and resistant to description; Raworth's poetry has no shell. He is a pure poet, and one who aims to keep us alert by reducing the predictable elements. There is no verbal account of the music of (say) Charlie Parker, only anecdote and enthusiasm. I don't think a stylistic description is necessary, I think rather that everyone should read this poetry; if I print this prose, it's because so many inaccurate and unenlightened criticisms of Raworth have been printed, and I want to counterattack; reputation is, then, a shell. I found the easiest approach was to look at A Serial Biography (1969), a relatively explicit prose text, and look for verbal gestures which might appear in the poetry. A diary, more directly about poetry, probably from around 1971, called Cancer, has been published (only) in separate parts: as Logbook, as 'Letters to Yaddo' in the volume Visible Shivers, and in the magazine Acts, no.5.
The earliest record of Raworth is as editor of a magazine called Outbursts, in 1961. He was printing the new thing rather than what was left over from the Fifties. He records getting started on modern poetry by buying, in 1958, a copy of Evergreen Review, because it had reviews of modern jazz in it. However, his first book, the relation ship, came out in 1967. Some thirty books, or pamphlets, have followed; let's note Tottering State (Selected Poems 1963-87). In the volumes I sampled, about half the poems have been reprinted in Tottering State. Of course, there have been other books since that selection. There is a tendency away from poems about personal relations to poems about problems of perception and interpretation: "And for ten years all I have done has been an adolescent's game, like the bright feathers some male birds grow during the mating season. I look at the poems, and they make a museum of fragments of truth. And they smell of vanity, like the hunter's trophies on the wall (...) I have never reached the true centre, where art is pure politics." (Cancer) Recently, he has also begun to make and exhibit collages, Dadaist in inspiration, organised in series.
Raworth's notes show him preoccupied with the relationship between past and present, and especially with the displacement of a rhythm. This love of minute discrepancy derives from the rhythmic feel of jazz, a set of anticipations constantly revised by their actualization. Here, time, experienced as attention and affect, is an artificial set of lines where the rule of music and the local rules of the piece locate expected beats. The drummer constantly slides from under the pattern. Raworth is constantly displacing affect to force a re-orientation.
"They were taking up the paving stones along the street. The skin is so thin; the earth and trees so powerful. With one heave the houses could all come down. So easy to wear a groove in the brain; the same relays click each time." (Serial Biography [SB]) So the problem is boredom. 'Relays' (Reed relays) were electro-mechanical components used in telephone exchanges, up to about 1980. Raworth's poetry always has the virtue of unfamiliarity. If you dial a new number, it may not exist and there may be no-one at the other end; poetry also picks its combinations from the world which exists and so can be shared by the reader. But closure would cause the associative process to shut down, insulted. 'My life takes place from minute to minute. It expands through the gaps that people make. If there is something warm there I sense it. If there is a weakness in the wall I must push through. (...) The networks of lies are as deceptive as acid. The religion behind it all. (...) To force me to build a wall, to force me to make a second, a third secret life. That plants the seed of destruction.' (SB). Raworth's poems punch through these claustrophobic walls more or less at every line. The idea of new and arbitrary combinations leads us to another school of art: Surrealism. In fact, I believe this French influence to have been of overwhelming importance in his development.
The most obvious device in Raworth is the juxtaposition: almost every line ends with a jolt as we jump to the next line. It's like watching a landscape from the window of a moving bus. Nothing ever starts from zero, but the popularity of the jump cut in literature began with the Surrealists around 1920, and when Raworth uses it as a dominant device he invokes the whole history of Surrealism. You may use the same scissors each time, but each juxtaposition has a unique effect. It's curious that the same basic method should go on working for so many decades when it's been exploited by so many different people. But after all, surprising links are competing with unsurprising links, which are used thousands of times more often by any count. Certainly, everyone's moved on from the pure Surrealism, where there is no connection between elements and they are juxtaposed just for the frisson; but, even though I believe that logic has returned, I can't explain the scenario of many of Raworth's poems. There is a lack of carry-over from one line to the next. It is unclear what the information is going to be used for, so storing it is a puzzle: even though this is the basic activity of reading. Arguably, prose is organised so that we know exactly what each piece of information is for, a logical argument flows throughout, so that carry-over is maximised, but new information has little autonomy. In this case, Raworth's is the most poetic of poetry. Its shape cannot be described more efficiently by anything except itself.
Surrealism had, in addition to its essential shock tactics, a number of habits which form a kind of tradition among Surrealist poets. Because they are recognised by a cultured audience, they do not need to be made explicit. One of these is the humiliation of authority. In Jacques Prévert's famous poem, 'Tentative de description d'un dîner de têtes a Paris-France', about a banquet at the Presidential Palace (1931), French dignitaries of the time are reduced to grotesques, puppets with the tongues of parrots. So, often the incongruity of Surrealism is scathing satire, ridiculing the conventions of a society run by idiots. This is one of the underpinnings of Raworth's work.
Something popular in the late Fifties, when Raworth was starting as a writer, was the Theatre of the Absurd; a version of Surrealism. The first absurdist play, Ionesco's La cantatrice chauve, started from the absurdity of everyday speech, which he found in a manual for learning English from: the small change of daily domestic conversation here takes on a frenetic, golem, life, as the happy family self-destructs. Mercilessly, the dramatist exposes the gap between thought and language, between desire and behaviour. Raworth's poems are miniature absurdist dramas, a reduction of the machine of discrepancy, sarcasm, startling, ridicule to the span of a few lines. We could consider his pessimism about language alongside Beckett and Pinter; he and Pinter are of comparable stature. Of course Pinter writes dialogues, whereas we think of poets as writing monologues; the distinction is misleading, the thread of the poet's voice describes a relationship, it describes a social volume, and the features of that thread have to be extrapolated to relationships. If a poet writes without awareness of the other person's reactions, he is naive; if he writes critically about a relationship, as a novelist or playwright would, everyone is very shocked and calls him a bad person.
We often find in Serial Biography the idea of toughness, in head-on competitions. The ability to make fierce verbal put-downs is valued. 'Don was the most generous person I ever met. He'd give anything away, down to his last cigarette. And the most vicious fighter. It was from him I learned to always strike the first blow when the tension mounts... and once that's done, to never relax the pressure.' Perhaps we should see Tom Raworth as an opponent, his works always graced by an unseen victim. The loser supplies the words which he intercepts and recombines. The dandy uses the elements of clothing he finds around him, but only with the motive of showing others up, of excelling. He takes clothes or occasions from society and does not give them back. There's always the possibility that Raworth is mocking the reader's lack of intelligence. The conflicts arise because society is a comprehensive network of areas of authority, bounded and supervised. A Serial Biography sees that authority as malevolent. The poem is then a contest between the poet and authority figures. Some of his prosodic gestures are also measures for winning an argument: insistence, curtness, lack of qualification, wit, feigned indifference to the person being insulted. A great deal of his poetry can be heard as sarcastic. He takes other people's words and turns them inside out. Some books may be made up entirely of sarcastic quotes from other people, with the poet vanishing inside the text in the same way as a playwright does, not using any character as his own voice within the play. What triumphs, is not eliminated: Raworth's poetry is marked by a personality and its mood swings; but also self-description is one of his artistic vetoes.
Another Surrealist manner is a kind of relaxed erotic bliss. Surrealism contains a version of the good life, found it possible to write about integration with the loved object as well as separation. In fact this school was in many ways a direct continuation of Apollinaire: as soon as he got bored of one thing he moved on to another, and his insouciance and jumps of theme anticipate the flights of Surrealism. The flâneur's relation to various objects laid out in successive shop-windows is inevitably under-determined. Ideological purity would here deny the status of Surrealism to its classic texts like Le paysan de Paris (Aragon) and La vie immédiate (Eluard): they aren't 'automatic', they describe personal experience, they continue the nineteenth century. Surrealism has permeated modern poetry because it was adaptable and tolerant of mixture. Eluard:
Villages of lassitude
Where the girls have bare arms
Like gushes of water
Youth grows in them
And laughs on the tip of its toes.
Villages of lassitude
Where all beings are the same.
('L'univers-solitude'). It's not necessary to be unhappy and to find the world incomprehensible. Eluard includes as many features of everyday life as possible in his reverie of living together, without ever demystifying it: 'Oaths with no reason, everything being already sworn to. No more worries. Serious without worries, without oaths. We do not laugh, because we have nothing to forbid ourselves. We love each other among the fragments of woken-up life: schoolrooms, quarrels, money threats, usual presences, the kitchen, the table, work, journeys, clothes. And even nakedness does not dazzle us, it doesn't take any effort for the light not to be troubled by itself, for the grey sky not to melt into a blue one. This girl whom I discover as I fall asleep, like a star black in the forgetfulness of the day, only knows about herself what I don't know about myself. Her very soft skin responds to the pleasure which she takes in my caresses, but only responds from the summit of her virtue. Neither winning, nor losing, nor risking, nor being certain. Will is no longer the mask one takes off, nor the eyes as they open. She does not ask me to abdicate, nor to hold fast. I am handed over, really handed over, to the reality of a mirror which does not reflect my appearance.' (Eluard, from 'Go to sleep', Dors). There is a lot of Surrealist writing in this register of domestic intimacy, and it may be one of the tunes from which Raworth started to develop his difficult and original jazz. Free association and insouciance are basic to his work. We associate Raworth's playful love lyrics with a new sophistication and relaxation about sex and romance which came about (apparently) in the sixties, along with contemporary changes in cinema, clothes, and popular music. However, the history of styles tells a different story, pointing to French poetry of the twenties and thirties, not to the King's Road. The swinging bit of Swinging London came after nouvelle vague cinema and the sexuality, vulgar or not, of films by Vadim and Louis Malle; Roger Vailland, a novelist who had been associated with Surrealism, wrote several scripts for Vadim in the fifties and sixties. The bite-size Surrealism of Pop poetry came wholly from Prévert. I suppose the impression of being new and liberated from the history of literature did exist, and was quite false; but Surrealism did make it possible to write very short, direct, popular poems, and this was a way of getting away from the weight of English literary habits. The thrust wasn't for artistic originality, but to alter the basis of culture by appealing to a new generation of educated people, a new sociological formation; it was compulsory to be young, informal, hedonistic, and quick reacting. Perhaps this selfconfidence is an implied criticism of pre-existing poetry as awkward and selfconscious about intimacy, and puritanical about the need for organisation and rationality in art. This instantness, when laid out as hundreds of very rapid cuts making up a long poem without explanations, could become avant-garde and strenuous, and perhaps this was how Raworth's later style came about.
The image of the spy is important in A Serial Biography. The style reminds me of Len Deighton, and his hero, Harry Palmer. Palmer was an expert in technology, of working-class origin, put down by gentleman bosses. Spies trade in information, microfilm, glimpses amounting to proof; Raworth's poetry is also made up of snatches of information, integrated by deductive rules of wintry rigour. He could be transcribing snapshots from a Minolta miniature camera. Russia and the USA could also be the authority to be resisted. This interest in secrecy and stealth could also be a clue to why he's so hard to analyse. There is a scene in The IPCRESS File where Palmer meets his boss, an old-fashioned military gentleman, at a military band concert; Palmer's disgust for that kind of music is lip-curling, and it's tempting to imagine the official English poets of the sixties as gentleman bosses, well-dressed and obsolete, governing a garden-world of the ridiculous. Raworth always goes for technique, for applied intelligence, rather than appealing to shared literary traditions.
The spy throws away the intended and elaborated message of propaganda, and seizes on the unconscious, self-betraying residue which the speaker has failed to conceal. Raworth has invested energy in cutting rather than in building sentences and other large structures. Stress is put on control. This impulse may have started from experiences which are overwhelming; when art offers you the means of capturing and controlling the painful object. Detachment — literally, cutting — brings autonomy. Cutting experience up destroys the theatre of ideologies; it is a filtering process which clarifies the mysterious environment. The fragments of obsolete scenery drop to the ground. "I'm going on the vague assumption that if I can completely and correctly describe myself, then that self will wither and blow away. Unless when you have created your self you die." (Cancer)
"It was easy to produce clever little exercises, puns, twisting of words, while it was nearly impossible to capture any emotion or feeling. Then when I started I had all those years of I I I ME ME to wash out. Like the rusty water from the tap at first in a long-empty house." (SB). Getting rid of I is odd when mass taste demands that the poet write about the Self and nothing else. Dismantling this theatre of the self brought speed, alacrity, the ability to react to new events.
In A Serial Biography the protagonist (or one of them) is shut in a sensory deprivation chamber, perhaps as part of an experiment, perhaps as part of an exercise in cognitive disorientation such as forms the centre of The IPCRESS File, IPCRESS being an acronym for a specific kind of torture. But the boredom is also the working condition, the state of having a job and knowing that it will go on for ever, or for as long as you do. The cut is a way of interrupting the monotony, losing the memory of it so that when it comes back it isn't so recognizable as monotony.
Other parts of SB are descriptions of such jobs; and of the exit through pulp: 'Now Rinkoff is not true. He was the hero of an endless book I began to write in 1959 with Nigel Black. We were working for a company of pharmaceutical manufacturers and would type out a chapter a day on memo paper, sending them to one another through the internal mail system.' Pulp is important as a background to Raworth's poems. 'LOVE John Garfield, Deanna Durbin, Margaret Lockwood. Scenes recalled from old films, separately, or pieced together between them.' Strange how the point of the 'endless novel' was to not end, to soak up all the dead hours of a dead-end job; but the poems are ceaselessly interrupted, never relaxing into narrative. Should we see Raworth as a genius of cuts or a genius of connectives?
Pages 29-30 and 34 of SB have descriptions of Elizabethan wars in Ireland (more exactly in Munster), of an incident in the Easter Uprising, of an eviction (presumably nineteenth century). I don't know if Tom Raworth has the same Catholic Irish mother as the hero of SB. Anyway, his view of the past doesn't involve benevolent English aristocrats, gracious living, the stable rural society where everyone has their place, that kind of thing. American poetry has been affected by the loss of cultural memory, the immigrant condition; but lots of people in England are immigrants. Lots of British poets are the children of immigrants. A lot has been written about the clinging of the Irish to the past, but so many Irish have made clean breaks and started from zero in the new place where they found themselves. Maybe this is the 'jump cut', the severance of a family from its country and its 'montage' into a new one. If what they teach you at school is utterly different from what they tell you at home, you get used to incongruity, to 'montage'. Raworth has no expectation that society will make sense. Protest was predominant in the sixties, led by people who'd been teenagers in the fifties, equally rebellious then but easier to ignore. Maybe they disputed cultural authority because it was visibly corrupt; or because it belonged to old people and they were young; or because it was based on self-denial and repression, and they were caught up in the new, hedonistic, sexually liberated, ethos; but another reason could be that they were Irish and the authorities were too visibly English. I don't see any point trying to disentangle these strands.
Perhaps the result of cutting the text into strips of a few words is to disguise the sociological markers which identify speakers, once they have spoken a few dozen words, as belonging to a social formation. This shredding deprives the reader of a habitual reaction. The poems are like a narrative film cut up so that the rules underlying behaviour cease to be obvious, and become unnatural. Raworth, a working-class writer, was resolved from the very start to avoid solidarity and sentiment, knowing that those would establish a mortgage on his work from which he could never buy it back. Perhaps, if he did use pathos, it would turn into the ballad I have mentioned: the humble family mercilessly evicted from their cabin on a cold night, they spend the night out and the father dies before morning. 'My father died/ I closed his eyes/ beside the cabin door.' I don't think Raworth would speak out in favour of 'working-class culture', I don't think he would go on a Saint Patrick's Day parade either. So when he finally writes 'colourless nation/ sucking on grief' it has maximum impact. The poem ('West Wind') goes on
a handbag
strutting between uniforms
such slow false tears
sunlight tattoos
each cheek
with three brown dots
the state as
the status
quo
The whole is as convergent as a Raworth poem will ever be, racked by persistent themes of deceit, poverty, and control.
Raworth lacks interest in scholarship or in poetic tradition. These are notes he just doesn't play. Yet they're brilliant escapes from boredom. Always this gap between Raworth and the literary milieu, even after he'd become a revered senior figure. Neither general ideas, nor finished linguistic devices, had the dynamic quality which his constantly moving point of attention required. Autonomy of design was reached by a preparatory work of disintegration.
It is paradoxical that someone who has tried to eliminate the ME factor from his poetry should have produced work which is completely distinctive, unmistakable, untainted by any outside influence. I would talk about stripping away the superficial layers of the self to find deep identity. We could point to an analogy in speech patterns; Raworth's writing is not a London dialect, as his speech is — this was information he chose not to broadcast with every syllable. Pronunciation is conventional, not aesthetic. But the cadence of his poetry reflects the way his brain works, scanning durations, reaction speed, his distinctive cognitive patterns, in the way that a film editor's style is personal and distinctive, although they do not appear on screen. This speech pattern is deeper and more revealing. Most poetry has no style at all, it is choked and retarded by irrelevance; but poetry offers liberation only by inviting us to shed a sociological identity for an aesthetic one. Any reflections on the inadequacy of unreflective writing can only distract us from the perceptible qualities of Raworth's poetry which make it so acute and so elegant. Two elements are the fastidiousness which polishes and purges the constituent phrases, rhythmically and semantically, until they are perfectly smooth and light; and the athleticism which makes the line constantly skim forward, every line presenting new information and none saying something confused or obscure. Only a technique of microscopic precision could allow the montage method to be built up into works of large scale, such as Writing and Ace.
Raworth doesn't have much to do with the previous exponents of Surrealism in England, for example Barker, Gascoyne, Roger Roughton, or Hugh Sykes-Davies. There is certainly a resemblance to other poets of the sixties (Lee Harwood, Spike Hawkins, etc., conveniently collected in section Ten of Lucie-Smith's anthology), making short montage/Surrealist poems. It's hard to separate out his influence from this general atmosphere, but names like Alan Halsey, Kelvin Corcoran, Adrian Clarke, come to mind:
one missing stochastic effect
dose level decay pathway
traffic and pedestrians measurement
bivouacked disintegrates luxurious foliage
power block concrete slabs
unstable in the forests
(Clarke, from Ghost Measures). But no-one comes close to his purity of method. Asa Benveniste, however, does genuinely resemble Raworth, and deserves to be considered in the same breath.
Art evolves in the absence of constraint, it is in the logic of hedonism to advance and become more abstract and profound, even if we call hedonism selfish and sensuous; simply by listening to rock and roll enough, you lose your ability to respond to it, and move out to jazz, which is a more information-rich, less sentimental, environment. For me, Raworth's trajectory, in his career and within individual books or poems, is obvious and like thousands of other people; it astounds me that people, such as reviewers, can't even guess what he's up to, and find his work empty or random. But think of Steve Lacy, who has set Raworth's poems to music; Lacy began as a New Orleans revivalist in the fifties, made some albums in that style, jumped forward to the forties and spent twelve years playing the compositions of Thelonius Monk, in order to understand them; then moved forward, into something even less tuneful, less emotive, more purist, than Monk. It's true that Lacy's music isn't a commodity with mass appeal; but it's easy to follow once you get away from missing predictable melodic patterns and sticky love songs. Raworth's mature style is easy once you get over indignation and formal nostalgia and start listening for what's there. Insisting that every poem fit the same criteria is linked to believing that all people everywhere are in the same psychological situation, with only a few items changing. Raworth isn't writing for mass circulation, but it distresses me that people whose own taste is for poetry, and so for small circulation commodities, should be so normative and inflexible when it comes to a new rhythm in poetry.
Raworth wrote a long series of fourteen-line poems, published as Sentenced to Death (in the book Visible Shivers, and partly again in Tottering State), Eternal Sections, and the Equipage pamphlet Survival (1994). The total is by my reckoning 181 poems, or 2534 lines—a large-scale achievement for someone who began as a minimalist abandoning all logical connection.