Safety First: Intuition and Intelligence in Tom Raworth
When thinking about Tom Raworth’s poetry from the mid-to-late 60’s, it is instructive to hold in mind Charles Olson’s conception of poetics that he put forward in his 1950 essay “Projective Verse”: “[it is] the kinetics of the thing [a poem]. A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it…by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader” (New American Poetry 1945-1960 ed. Donald Allen, 387). To Olson, poetics was, by the 1950’s, at a revolutionary point in its formation. It transcended, finally, all of its previous formalist hang ups; it moved away from the domineering influence of the early and late British romantics and had entered into a new contract with its aesthetics that demanded that the poem be a thing that was generative and, as Olson wrote in that same essay, “OPEN verse” (387). Olson, though, was responding to an American poetics that was still attempting to sort out a reasonable aesthetic position for itself after the wake of the high-modernist explosion of Williams, Pound, Stevens, Stein, and gang, a poetics looking to extend the experiment of early American modernism in new directions—to make it new-er.
Raworth, in the late 60’s in England, faced a different challenge, coming as he did at the tail end of the reconstituted formal Hardyism of the The Movement poets, Larkin, Gunn, et al., on the one end of the poetic spectrum, and the poeto-tailismitic line, then being practiced by Hughes, Hill, et al., on the other side. Facing both of these current traditions in poetics practiced in the mainstream at the time, Raworth would have to create a system of composition that would allow him to, as he writes in his poem “South America”, “make rules the next generation can break more cleverly” (l. 6). To such an end, Raworth developed a poetry that moves, as opposed to the The Movement’s formalism or scholastic historism of the Hughes and Hills camp, toward a poetry wherein “intelligence shall not replace intuition” (“Wedding Day” ll. 6-7), a poetry that enters into an ‘open’ field of poetics and moves along lines of reasoning that shies up to the intuitive, the reflective, and reflexive. The end result in Raworth’s early poems is a field that does not work to define operational forms of meaning, that is, the poems do not work to intelligence the world, but instead, present a composition which moves rapidly from statement to statement, image to image, and look toward grammar and punctuation as visual markers for a breath rather than as a system of codifying the rational formation of a phrase. As a result, Raworth’s poems of that period cannot, and in fact defy, a reading that relies on a parsed and systematic approach. In fact, even Olson’s dictums on poetics came over too heavy for Raworth who, when asked about Olson, responded that to write a poem he had “to be completely empty and then see what sounds” (Tom Raworth: An Exhibition quoted from Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry, Oxford 614 ). What Raworth’s early poems show is action toward a new form of meaning making, meaning making that is based on the movement of thought, feeling, and the figure of language.
Raworth’s poem “Wedding Day” exhibits a number of these qualities concerning the construction of meaning. The poem opens with a line that works as a kind of repeated refrain with variation, “noise of a ring sliding onto a finger” (l. 1). The line does a number of things to open the environment of the poem. First and foremost, it introduces one of the primary sensory markers that will recur in the poem; “noise” will be the single word that will connect the above mentioned refrains which are, in addition to the above: “noise of two cine-cameras” (l. 15) and “noise of a bike freewheeling downhill” (l. 26). What is immediately noticeable about the three lines is that the sense appealed to, that is sound, is not the sense that the image itself is adjusted to: sliding a ring onto a finger should be visual or tactile, cine-cameras do make a wiring sound but they are machines that capture visual images, and again the bike going downhill (notice there is no suggested rider) is a visual phenomenon. Though this is far from a synesthasic effect, there is a cross-pollination of sense and data, events which are registered on the visual plain are here being presented as sonic data, but much of the poem is about the slippage of language and how that sliding of connotation creates different modes of understanding.
The next line points toward the slipping around of language, “supposing he did say that” (l. 2). Here there is just the suggestion that something was said and that something was meant by it, but that at the same time, there is the possibility of misinterpretation—suppose he did say that, what would it mean. This is a field of hypotheticals that is presented again further on in the poem: “i wonder what’s wrong with her/ face, she said, because/ there’s nothing wrong with it really” (ll. 16-18). In these lines, there is a history of speculation that has begun outside of the poem and is never carried through in the poem itself. The information that there is, maybe, something wrong with her face, is presented as if has come through a line of rumors and half-informations. The ‘she’ of the statement discusses the face as if it should have some malformation, but that malformation is unknown to the ‘she’, and if there was a problem with the face, it is no longer recognizable. Information is being presented with a slant not only by the poem but between and through the persons inhabiting the poem. There is the suggestion of events but there is no singular, defining, force of meaning construction; rather, it is the intuition of an event, not the intelligence of an event.
Meaning, then, can do just as much work revealing an object or event as it can to conceal. There is in the intuitive valuation of information a lack of dichotomy, and in that, systems of good and bad, valuable and worthless, art and pop, are no longer tenable; there can be no intelligenced right and wrong. The fog in stanza two moves across the landscape in such a manner, “we came by the front/ sea fog twisting light above the pebbles/ toward the cliffs towards the sea” (ll. 3-5). Notice how the fog moves in all directions at once and inhabits what it passes over equally. The movement of the fog is multi-variable and takes no singular perspective or preference but moves both toward the sea and away from the sea toward the cliffs. Of course, at the same time that the fog moves over the landscape, it also obscures the landscape, that is, it replaces the features of the landscape, the sea, the cliffs, with fog. This process is again another iteration of the sensory and lexical morphology mentioned above. The landscape has become unrecognizable, has undergone a metamorphosis which will then be replicated in the following stanza when a presumable groom or guest changes physical experience, “he// came from the toilet wearing/ a suit, people/ didn’t recognize him” (ll. 9-12). Intuition allows for these morphologies to occur and for them to occur with no inscribed meaning enforced upon them.
Though there is no overt summing up of meaning or gesture which will represent a holistic value to the poem and the images it presents, there is the suggestion of a tone of danger across the whole of the poem. Following the progression of the poem, one sees the seas, fog, cliffs, unrecognizable figures, disfigured faces all culminating into the final few lines which begin take this steady increase of anxiety and bring it further to the fore: “through the window we watched the frigate’s/ orange raft drifting to shore” (ll. 21-22). The image comes into the poem innocuously, there is no great tempest or event that leads into the image. The image simply appears into the field of view of the poem and then is noted. The two things that are important about the image are: the ship is a frigate or war vessel and: any orange raft that would come from a frigate would either be a landing raft or a lifeboat, but the poem gives no agency of control to the raft, it is not sailing toward the shore, it is lifelessly “drifting” toward the coast. The image suggests not just the body of a war with the frigate but also suggests that the frigate has jettisoned a lifeboat without a crew or without a living crew. All in all, throughout the poems suggestion of objects mobalized without control or will, there is the gesture toward a crisis, an anxiety, but it is never brought to bear, it is not the ‘meaning’ of the poem to give the reader a sense of a right or a wrong in the argument, in the war, or in the bike tumbling down a hill.
All of the above is good and fine in understanding the gesture of a poem like “Wedding Day” but does little to draw out what is important about the composition and end result of such a poem. More instructive is a poem written some two or so years later like “You’ve Ruined My Evening/You’ve Ruined My Life” which takes its opening seven line stanza and refigures its language, its syntax in particular, to recombine and re-value its meaning, so that its opening line, “i would be eight people and then the difficulties vanish” and repeats it with the following two variations at the beginning of it next two stanzas which read, respectively: “i would be eight people each inhabiting the others’ dreams” (l.8) and “i would be eight people with the rib-cage of an elephant” (l. 15). These motions of sliding language make up the whole of the poem which is constantly in a state of giving a new valuation to the previous lines, much like a villanelle, but that the form is open intuitive and measures out its directionality as it sees fit, feeding each combination of words and meaning as it meets them. In many ways it can be seen as a poem that sees the process of composition as its foundation for discourse.
Raworth’s process can be most readily seen in his song poem “Poem Poem” which he says “dates from a time he I thought I could document the poetic impulse” (University of Pennsylvania Reading 2006). “Poem Poem” is played on a glockenspiel and moves away from, at its start, any recognizable minor or major chord tonalities, and instead moves through notes irregularly spaced in their tempo and register, presenting a pattern-less collection of notes that hold very little relation one to the other. Later in the piece, pieces of scales will emerge in the tonal echo of seemingly less random notes, a gesture toward a musically “reasonable” meaning, or a collection of phrases which hold to a singular pattern recognition. The piece continues in this vein for close to two minutes where progressive harmonies appear for brief moments and are taken over while the their sound still resonates by notes in removed octaves. The whole composition speaks to the process of composition of a poem for Raworth, as he notes in his preamble to playing the piece, which is a collection of rapid phrases either speaking to what has come before or what will come or in its own register isolated from the movement as a whole.
This movement between and through phrases is what sets Raworth’s poetry off; this is the impetus. It is to pick up disparate parts of language and phenomenon and place them before each other, to let meaning form out a hyper-reality which can not be codified, grammeratized, or rationalized into a solid whole. Raworth’s poetry begs that their be no solid point of completion, that forms and images, allusions and sound, rebound off one another in such a manner as to belie the work of intelligent reading. Raworth’s poetry will not create tidy packages and set the poet up as meaning maker, as a tool for weddings and funerals and anniversaries. Raworth’s poetry is an art that is in opposition to completion. His is a poetry of process and of growth.
