Tottering State Selected Early Poems 1963-1983
Tom Raworth
publisher: O Books, 2000
isbn: 1-882022-38-6
price: $15
Hot on the heals of the American publication of fellow Englishman J.H. Prynne's Poems is the expanded edition of Raworth's underground classic selected early poems, originally published by The Figures in 1984.
Ranging from the author's debut volume, The Relation Ship, to his major long poem "Writing" (not included in the original selection), Tottering State is a colorful, resonantly sunlit window on the work of a writer considered by many American poets (such as Robert Creeley) as the best living poet in England.
Indeed, the American affinities -- along with echoes of French poets like Pierre Reverdy -- are most visible in his earlier work. At times he seems like a more cerebral, dark version of Ted Berrigan, or maybe a departure from Ashbery of Some Trees into more formally wilder territories, but this is never to the detriment of fun, a zen-like openness, and a English rapier's wit.
His cerebral quality comes through in the precision in his choice of imagery, his modification of the moods of conversation, and the surrealist dive into absurdities arriving at just the right moment to both deepen his sentiment and render it more painterly:
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
[31]
The philosophical underpinnings -- always that of a layman, never venturing far into "theory" unless it's to present it as possible in normal conversation -- bubble to the surface of the work when least expected, as in an anecdote about a child that has eaten green crayons (which remains, like a solipsism, the same green upon reaching the other end), to the quick-stab poem "University Days," which runs in its entirety: "[this poem has been removed for further study]". [76]
Nowness, thisness, hereness, but also you-ness, I-ness and witness, are the axes around which such linked sequences as "The Conscience of a Conservative" revolve, with such choice moments of telescoped, daily life as the following:
o
hand
make a circle
how
the wound
snaps shut
[103]
In such poems, Raworth seems as full of child-like amazement and blissful, paratactic perceptions as another New York poet, Joseph Ceravalo, though he surehandedly connects it to a private/public sense of responsibility with soft-spoken but forceful opinion.
In the later work collected in Tottering State, he seems to have entered adolescence, as the long, slender word streams in poems such as "That More Simple Natural Time Tone Distortion," push the once retreating poet into a more directly politicized, consequently more filmic than painterly, consideration of time. He almost illustrates Bergson's once-radical request that we not divide time into weeks and days, but a stream of contingent moments:
slow
low
thump
long flame
dry
flash bur
just
move
tree browns
to south
our horse
white
no trace
of action
in memory
and fear
but this
is
clear
this area
this never
ending
song
to last
gasp
cold colours
enough
flashes
to leach him
out
[134]
If such extreme forms suggest a relationship to the Language poets, it is there, but that would be to miss the humanism in Raworth's work, the persona he has slyly created for himself of the benevolent, however mischeivous, tourguide to the here and now in its many ambivalent disguises. Only Raworth, too cynical to be Zen but too wise to be despairing, shows how interesting this this this can be.
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