RAWORTH, Tom

---

Nationality: Irish. Born: Thomas Moore Raworth, South East London, England, 19 July 1938. Education: University of Essex, Colchester, Essex, 1967–70, M.A. 1970. Family: Married Margaret Valarie in 1959; four sons, one daughter. Career: Fiction instructor, Bowling Green State University, Ohio, 1972–73; resident poet, Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago, 1973–74; visiting lecturer, University of Texas, Austin, 1974–75; poet-in-residence and member of the English faculty, King's College, Cambridge University, 1977–78; visiting lecturer and poet-in-residence, University of Cape Town, South Africa, 1991; visiting lecturer, University of California, San Diego, 1996; visiting distinguished writer, Columbia College, Chicago, 1999. Founder, with Barry Hall, Goliard Press, 1965–67; editor and publisher, outburst, 1961–63, Before Your Very Eyes!, 1964, and Infolio, 1986–87. Awards: Alice Hunt Bartlett prize, 1969, for The Relation Ship; Writers' bursary, Arts Council of Great Britain, 1970, 1977; Cholmondeley award, 1972; Poetry Skipper gold medal for Services to International Poetry, Italy, 1999. Address: 99 Norfolk Street, Cambridge CB1 2LD, England.

Publications

Poetry

The Relation Ship. London, Goliard Press, 1966.

Haiku, with John Esam and Anselm Hollo. London, Trigram Press, 1968.

The Big Green Day. London, Trigram Press, 1968.

Lion Lion. London, Trigram Press, 1970.

Moving. London, Cape, and New York, Grossman, 1971.

Tracking. Bowling Green, Ohio, Doones Press, 1972.

Pleasant Butter. Paris and Northampton, Massachusetts, Blue Pig Press, 1972.

Act. London, Trigram Press, 1973.

Back to Nature. London, Joe Di Maggio, 1973.

Cloister. Paris and Northampton, Massachusetts, Blue Pig Press, 1975.

Common Sense. San Francisco, Zephyrus Image, 1976.

The Mask. Berkeley, California, Poltroon Press, 1976.

Sky Tails. Cambridge, Lobby Press, 1978.

Nicht Wahr, Rosie? Berkeley, California, Poltroon Press, 1979.

Lèvre de Poche. Durham, North Carolina, Bull City Press, 1983.

Heavy Light. London, Actual Size Press, 1984.

Tottering State: Selected and New Poems 1963–1984. Berkeley, California, The Figures, 1984; as Tottering State: Selected Poems, 1963–1987, London, Paladin Grafton Books, 1988; revised edition, as Tottering State, Oakland, California, O Books, 2000.

Lazy Left Hand. London, Actual Size Press, 1986.

Sentenced He Gives a Shape. Tenerife, Spain, Zasterle Press, 1989.

From Eternal Sections. Dublin, Hardpressed Poetry, 1990.

Eternal Sections. Los Angeles, Sun and Moon Press, 1993.

Survival. Cambridge, Equipage Press, 1994.

Silent Rows. N.p., Massachusetts, The Figures, 1995.

Frames. Riva san Vitale, Switzerland, Giona Editions, 1995.

Clean & Well Lit. New York, Roof Books, 1996.

Meadow. Sausalito, California, Post Apollo Press, 1998.

Landscaping the Future. Bologna, Italy, Porto dei Santi, 1999.

Other

A Serial Biography. London, Fulcrum Press, 1969.

Betrayal. London, Trigram Press, 1972.

Logbook. Berkeley, California, Poltroon Press, 1977.

Four Door Guide (poetry and prose). Cambridge, Street Editions, 1978.

Visible Shivers (poetry and prose). Oakland, California, O Books, 1987.

Translator, What Day Is It, by Liliane Giraudon. Rosendale, New York, Womens' Study Workshop, 1985.

Translator, Between the Eyelashes, by Dario Villa. Colchester, England, Active in Airtime Press, 1993.

*

Bibliography: "Tom Raworth—An Exhibition" by K. Nolan and P. Riley, in Cambridge Conference of Contemporary Poetry 8, Cambridge, England, 1998.

Manuscript Collections: Special Collection, University of California at San Diego Library, La Jolla, California; Special Collection, University of Connecticut Library, Storrs, Connecticut.

Critical Studies: In The British Dissonance: Essays on Ten Contemporary Poets by A. Kingsley Weatherhead, Columbia, University of Missouri Press, 1983; by Kit Robinson, in Dictionary of Literary Biographies, Detroit, Gale, 1985; by John Higgins, in Minnesota Review (New York), 26, 1986; The Flight of Syntax: Percy Bysshe Shelley and Tom Raworth, London, Birkbeck College, 1990, and "Subject & Sentence: The Poetry of Tom Raworth," in Critical Enquiry (Chicago), 17(2), winter 1991, both by John Barrell; "Post-Modern Post-Poetry: Tom Raworth's Tottering State" by Peter Brooker, in Contemporary Poetry Meets Modern Theory, London, Harvester Press, 1992; "Difficult Poetry: Tom Raworth and the Frame of Postmodernism" by Colette Guldimann, in Pretexts

(Capetown, South Africa), 6(2), 1997; "… The Endless Deployment of Writing" by Simon Perril, in Cambridge Conference of Contemporary Poetry 8, Cambridge, England, 1998.

Tom Raworth comments:

My aim was and continues to be to write what I find interesting to read as, and after, I write it.

*  *  *

In 1989 Tom Raworth commented on the focus of his poetry: "At the back there is always the hope that there are other people … other minds, who will recognise something that they thought was to one side or not real. I hope that my poems will show them that it is real, that it does exist." That his intention has remained constant does not mean that the poetry has not changed.

Raworth was part of the growth of an experimental British poetry during the 1960s and was active as a publisher as well as a poet. His early poems follow the dictum of Charles Olson's projectivism that "ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION" without reflection, qualification, or discrimination, although Raworth's effects were often comic and surreal. The presentation of sharp detail and rapid relocation of point of view created indeterminate lyrics and fictions. Throughout the decade improvisatory intuition was pitched against reductive knowledge: "imagine /being /and not /knowing."

In "Stag Skull Mounted," written in 1970, the diaristic serialism leads the perceptions toward their own deletion. The text becomes increasingly minimal until it arrives at the inevitable entry "word," a blank entry, and the entries "poem" and "poem /poem," which satisfy reductive definitions of a poem.

Raworth's own redefinition occurred in a series of long poems ("Ace," "Writing," "Catacoustics," and "West Wind") written between 1972 and 1983. The short lines, often single words, stretch down the page, at times a discrete series of perceptions or found materials, at other times part of a loose paratactic movement of meanings, with abrupt shifts and interruptions, that avoid clear thematic resolution. The analogy with edited strips of film is often made. The meaning of such work is partly the experience of reading it, which can include the experience of hearing Raworth himself. He delivers his poetry at a tremendous speed. It is as if the "film" has to be projected at a certain speed to animate the stills of each line into movement, though it is a movement best intuitively sensed rather than intellectually grasped. As one poem has it,

feeling
speed
of thought
take
it off
make
it firm
lay back
play back
cracked energy

"West Wind" turns the method to more political purposes. Raworth was resident in the United States for much of the 1970s, and the return to Thatcherite Britain ("colourless nation /sucking on grief") is rendered with qualities of anger and compassion as well as with humor.

Oddly, the series of 153 austere poems written between 1986 and 1990 and published in Visible Shivers (1987) and Eternal Sections (1993) repress these qualities and return to a challenging obliquity. Working against the constraint of fourteen lines, the poems present rearrangements of perceptions, found materials, and narratives, although the expectation of each draws the reader in. They play with this anxiety by being both empty and overdetermined, the effects of both being caused by self-interruption. An implicit utopianism is declared by such a method, since they hold the sequence open as an "eternal" saying and reading, something that cannot be reduced totally to what is said upon the page. Because no poem or line is typical, the works are difficult to quote from, but in the following excerpt the loosely hinged lines hint at the inadequacy of reductive systems of knowledge even while subjecting the expression of this doubt to the method of the sequence, which is fueled by the doubt:

such division into subjects
consequences of a failure
defined by humanist criticism
must be understood always
with the same concern in mind
a different style of beauty
may appear to be a contradiction

Both of these books were published in the United States, and Raworth has been an influence upon, and has been influenced by, writers associated with the language movement. A second edition of his selected poems, Tottering State, was published in Britain in 1988, where it received little official recognition, although it was well received among members of the lively avant-garde, who recognize Raworth as their most important poet. Clean & Well Lit, which collects poems from the 1980s and 1990s, shows an extension of the methods developed in the shorter poems, particularly in the significantly entitled sequence "Emptily." A third edition of Tottering State was published in 2000, significantly, like the first edition, in the United States.

—Robert Sheppard