Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Technique: Dialogue: Saying
- 1 The Movement Poets and the Movement Orthodoxy in the 1950s and 1960s
- 2 The British Poetry Revival 1960–1978
- 3 Starting to Make the World: The Poetry of Roy Fisher in the 1960s and 1970s
- 4 Keeping the Doors Open: the Poetry of Lee Harwood in the 1960s and 1970s
- 5 The Persistence of the Movement Orthodoxy in the 1980s and 1990s
- 6 Linguistically Innovative Poetry 1978–2000
- 7 What Was To One Side or Not Real: The Poetry of Tom Raworth 1970–1991
- 8 Creative Linkage in the Work of Allen Fisher, Adrian Clarke and Ulli Freer during the 1980s and 1990s
- 9 The Ballet of the Speech Organs: The Poetry of Bob Cobbing 1965–2000
- 10 Be come, Be spoke, Be eared: The Poetics of Transformation and Embodied Utterance in the work of Maggie O'Sullivan during the 1980s and 1990s
- Bibliography
- Index
7 - What Was To One Side or Not Real: The Poetry of Tom Raworth 1970–1991
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Technique: Dialogue: Saying
- 1 The Movement Poets and the Movement Orthodoxy in the 1950s and 1960s
- 2 The British Poetry Revival 1960–1978
- 3 Starting to Make the World: The Poetry of Roy Fisher in the 1960s and 1970s
- 4 Keeping the Doors Open: the Poetry of Lee Harwood in the 1960s and 1970s
- 5 The Persistence of the Movement Orthodoxy in the 1980s and 1990s
- 6 Linguistically Innovative Poetry 1978–2000
- 7 What Was To One Side or Not Real: The Poetry of Tom Raworth 1970–1991
- 8 Creative Linkage in the Work of Allen Fisher, Adrian Clarke and Ulli Freer during the 1980s and 1990s
- 9 The Ballet of the Speech Organs: The Poetry of Bob Cobbing 1965–2000
- 10 Be come, Be spoke, Be eared: The Poetics of Transformation and Embodied Utterance in the work of Maggie O'Sullivan during the 1980s and 1990s
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The Speed of Writing
In 1989 Tom Raworth commented on the focus and purpose of his poetry:
At the back there is always the hope that there are other people … other minds, who will recognize 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.
The implications of this poetics will be felt throughout this chapter, which traces Raworth's career as it navigates both the years of the British Poetry Revival and of Linguistically Innovative Poetry; his work has been of importance to both groupings. Marjorie Perloff additionally reminds us that Raworth has been ‘a kind of elder statesman’ to the American language poets.
After writing the poems examined in Chapter 2, Raworth worked through the implications of attempting to expand his range, in serial texts that are less immediately phenomenological and more imbedded in the language as it is produced than the early work. They are meditative, logopoetic in Pound's sense: of the intellect moving among words, as well as being self-referential and self-definitional. ‘Tracking (notes)’ states
we
are
now
The isolation of each word questions the assumptions ordinarily placed upon the plural personal pronoun, the important verb ‘to be’, and the nature of time. The last of these haunts a number of Raworth's works of the early 1970s, not least of all because spontaneity and process raise issues about temporality. The poem seems to be asking where ‘are we now?’, a question that he elsewhere poses in social and aesthetic terms:
things of your time are influenced by the past. the artist can only go on from there and see the situation as it is: anything else is distortion … i stick with de Kooning saying ‘i influence the past’ – and it is not important for the work of a time to be available in the mass media of its time: think of dickens on film, dostoyevsky on radio.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Poetry of SayingBritish Poetry and its Discontents, 1950–2000, pp. 171 - 193Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2005