potentially

I'm on the move again, so probably will only manage a few distracted posts over the next few weeks, and this one is the first of them.

*

I'm very slowly feeling my way into reading Tom Raworth's poems with something more than distant and theoretical admiration. I'm influenced, probably much too influenced, by the (what seem to be) pregnant formulae of J.H. Prynne's comments on the back cover of As When, the 2015 Raworth selection chosen by Miles Champion. Here are his first two sentences:

Tom Raworth's mind has from the start been quick as a weasel, moving fast to the nub of the matter with a vivid trace of words on the run and in cool balance across their gathered darts. So adroit are these motions that they leave no residue along the edges or like some cloud above the centre; it's quite hard to implicate an author or presiding opinions because the profile is not blurred by such moody shadows. 

That's an awful lot of metaphors. And some kind of stuck needle with "start", "quick", "fast", "on the run", "darts", "adroit", and so forth. But "vivid trace of words" definitely resonates, and so does the "hard to implicate an author or presiding opinions", at least as a challenge.

For, yes, there's a critical question about modernist projects, but it's also my immediate issue, which I'll baldly express as How autobiographical are Tom Raworth's poems? Because where I am right now, my reading is emphatically "blurred", not indeed by a distinctly implicatable author nor by distinct presiding opinions, but by wondering if the indistinctness really means absence, or was absence ever the intention anyway, or should I even be thinking about this?





air breaks

flowers despair

colours withdraw

heat

abandons me

brain

no longer cares

to serve

words

refuse pattern

loved them

introduced

new friends

now

they desert me 

(from MESSAGE BOTTLE)



this harmless obsession
is all i do

this house without binoculars fades
look into the watch
bombs flash from the place's shadow

still toys i'm out of the game now

(PIETY)



this day i rest by my information
looks good anywhere becomes audible

basil rathbone is one of my favourite actors
i can always read graham greene and joe brainard

(from WELL)



sometimes the subtle night of sleep bores
music remembered places followed to despair
facades no substance aids my mood
i walk more clumsily
plane falls
in flames
o possible beauty          o lady
to trust without power
no end to reach
sun throws smoke shadows brown
across the page
my father was in burma during the war

(from EURODE)



this is where instincts norm
balloon said
unfriendly
i don't care what i watch

so it's been me and unreal
for a while
mapping
was learning how to say it faster

(from I AM SPECIOUS, HERR KOMMANDANT)



I'm thinking too much about the doing of these poems. I'm too clearly seeing " i " as the poet Tom Raworth, addressing a half-real half-imaginary audience of poet-readers. I might guess at opinions, but I certainly sense the shape of a personality (prone to boredom, moody, snappy, humorous); and either he, or I, am a bit wrapped up in the blank paper, the Olympia typewriter, the cigarette ash on his fingertips, and his artistic mission or lack of it.

It's not really what I want to see.

But I like "NOW THE PINK STRIPES" and some of the other early poems.





NOW THE PINK STRIPES


now the pink stripes, the books, the clothes you wear
in the eaves of houses i ask whose land it is

an orange the size of a melon rolling slowly across the field
where i sit at the centre in an upright coffin of five panes of glass

there is no air               the sun shines
and under me you've planted a quick growing cactus









I'll keep reading!