Beepbada Beep Beep

 

 

Cancer, Tom Raworth (Carcanet)

In the 1960s Tom Raworth’s earliest publications, apart from work in magazines, were (as far as I know) more often than not what Ian Sinclair has described in The London Review of Books as “a succession of crafted and customised books, objects so desirable . . . that, in memory, they seem edible.” They would, I guess, have been very limited editions, often hand-set and handmade and, to quote Sinclair again, “An early Raworth was just what it said it was: an exhibition of itself. Fifty or so pages of the poet’s time.”

I have on my bookshelves some later Raworth publications: short print run chapbooks from small presses long-defunct. When Carcanet published Raworth’s Collected Poems in 2003 it weighed in as a heavyweight almost 600 pages, some 35 years’ worth of work coming at one relentlessly, page after page after page, with nothing in the way of breathing space. While it was unarguably wonderful to have the work available to read, the individuality of those chapbooks and pamphlets and longer collections, and the holding of them in one’s hand and delighting in them as concrete objects as part of the experience, was inevitably lost.

Carcanet are to be thanked and congratulated for publishing Cancer, about which their website says

Cancer is Raworth’s ‘lost’ book . . . originally to have been published by Frontier Press in 1973. After Frontier’s funds ran out, the typescript was returned to its author, and its opening section, ‘Logbook’, was published as a standalone volume byPoltroon Press in 1976. Revised versions of Cancer’s other two sections were published separately in the 1980s; the original versions of both – the ‘Journal’ as written in the opening months of 1971, and the letters Raworth sent to Edward Dorn in the spring of that year, during his residency at the Yaddo artists’ retreat in Saratoga Springs, New York – are published here for the first time.

Those familiar with Raworth’s oeuvre will be very pleased to have this work available, and that its three parts are adequately separated and given room to breathe so that the relentlessness of the earlier Collected is avoided. Indeed, “Logbook” is in the Collected, but whereas in its original form the work is 10 intentionally discrete pages, there they are jammed somewhat mindlessly into the ongoing rush of all the other stuff. In Cancer you get it as it should be.

Of this book’s three parts, “Logbook” is, in fact, the one that can perhaps best be described as a recognisable “piece” with a determined “form”, whereas “Journal” and the “Letters From Yaddo” are – what’s the word? – perhaps more fluid and, as I believe was the case with the letters, intended to maybe become something, or part of something, else. And forgive me, but that rather tortuous sentence is symptomatic of the difficulty one often encounters in trying to describe Raworth’s writing.

On the face of it, “Logbook” purports to be ten pages of a logbook rescued from an unspecified ship’s presumably ill-fated voyage. The first of those pages (page 106) begins thus, in mid-sentence:

would have explained it. But asymptosy seems destined to leave it to Vespucci. The
two styles fight even for my handwriting. Their chemicals, even, produce nothing
more than wax in the ears and an amazing thirst. That seems to ‘even’ things, for
those who regard it as a balance, or think the wind blows one way. The third day of
our voyage was perilous. multitudinous seas incarnadine. But the small craft that
came out to meet us contained us and went sailing into the sunset, carrying only ten
pages of my logbook (106, 291, 298, 301, 345, 356, 372, 399, 444 and 453), slightly
charred by the slow still silent instant.

The astute among you will have noticed some of what’s already going on here. The next page begins:

beepbada beep beep. Or the pages. Or the faces in the trees’ silhouettes at night.
Around us was the countryside of Whimsy where, huddled around leaping orange
fires, the natives let their cigarettes dangle unlit in their mouths, thinking only petrol
 or butane could light them.

And if those bits lead you to think, Alright, there’s some possible seafaring narrative lurking in here, then think again. “Page 345” has

But a burst of happiness comes (at the same instant as the t.v. blurts ‘Cliff Richard in
Scandinavia’) on turning over in my papers a letter which arrived this morning from
your point scout Joe. ‘You’re goina find me / out in the cuntry’ sings Cliff. The
audience laughs. Do you remember the author of The Incredible Max? He is here too, on the telephone. But residual beams flicker ‘teen titans’, and the beautiful codex: ‘So you girls want to do your thing in my shop? Well, let’s play it by ear and see what kind of “vibes” occur.’ Against which can only be set the thought of the New Band of Gypsys: Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Col. Nasser, Erich Maria Remarque and John Dos Passos.

So much for the sea. “Journal” (January – March 1971) is around 15 pages of dated entries that range from thoughts about poetry:

     Or poetry as armchair – only the basic chair, or the thing so
              alien it says ‘try me’, is interesting. the others just
               changing the upholstery or covers.

to an overheard bit of broadcast radio:

Dylan’s ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ as background music to crop
         spraying on Farming Today 

and something found:

         from copy of Tit-Bits found on the train:

    1. Game           -po-t
    2. Verse            po-t–
    3. Explosion    –po-t
    4. Placard       po-t–
    5. Picture       p-ot-
    6. Guard         p-ot—

and all sorts of other stuff, snippets of this, fragments of that. News. Thinking. What comes to mind. It’s words. Written down.

Raworth’s letters to American poet and friend Ed Dorn from the artist’s retreat at Yaddo, where one gathers he was not especially happy (“Adrift and alone for two days now inside my head with no shore on which to land.”) are equally wide-ranging as far as content goes. Traditional and/or conventional letters they’re not: in addition to what he’s up to – which is generally not much: according to his description of a typical day it’s mainly writing letters, wandering around for a bit, and eating –  “Yesterday I did nothing but walk around this room, walk around the lakes, lie on my bed.” – there are poems, fragments from his notebook, dream, and memoir –

The sergeant explained to me all about travel and then asked me what I wanted to join. The Parachute Regiment, I told him. He told me I didn’t weigh enough. When I left the office I had an appointment for a medical, and a reservation in the rifleregiment. But I never took it up: at the medical the doctor told me I had a hole in myheart, so I spent the next few months on the dole waiting to go into hospital. 

 thoughts  about art and writing –

           If it’s done with truth and love and no wish to profit, in any  sense, then it will take shape. The final thing I find in any art that moves me is the clear message: ‘there is no competition because I am myself, and through that the whole.’

– and he even transcribes a letter he’s received from his father, with everything thrown in, including the address (“8 Avondale Road, Welling, Kent. 17th April 1971”). Raworth was obviously bored out of his skull, but his brain was working overtime.

Which brings us – or it does as far as I’m concerned – to what we might call ‘Tom Raworth’s project’ – or, to put it another way, what on earth was this bloke up to? No doubt academics and the like have had their field days with it, while I’m more than happy to admit I almost certainly don’t get it all. But, for what it’s worth, here’s my two penn’orth:

There’s a thing Raworth says in one of the Yaddo letters:

So I scribbled it all down as it was because I realised that’s what a writer is and you can only use yourself in the most truthful way possible.

Then throw in how he read his work in public. The first time I saw him read was in the late 1970s, at the University of Essex (he was reading with Ed Dorn, as it happens). I was very new to the world of poetry, and didn’t really know anything, and very little about Tom Raworth. I recall he stood at the podium, gripping each side of the stand, only letting go his grip in order to turn a page, and he read at breakneck speed, with no introductions, no inter-poem flim-flam, nothing but the words, rattled out fast, one after another, no qualifications, no sense that one word was more important than another, no time for the listener to stop and think. It was a little bit like being run over by a train, only with words. Frankly, I didn’t know what to make of it. (And, while I think of it, it strikes me that this is how to read Raworth, at least at first: fast. You can always go back and read it again more slowly.)

These days I’ll go along with someone who talks about Raworth’s speed of thought, the writing down of immediate perceptions, the bits and bobs of consciousness . . . I also know that somewhere Raworth said ‘I just put down what fits and doesn’t bore me to read’, and his avowal of being “a fast reader, but with a lousy memory. I like everything to sink into a sort of compost.”

On the other hand, I don’t care all that much for explanations. I don’t think Raworth did either. In 1991, I invited him to contribute to my little magazine, joe soap’s canoe. We had actually met by this time; he read for me at a reading series I was then running. I was planning an issue wherein I asked poets to contribute a poem and write a commentary on it, and on their process. Raworth began his contribution like this:

            Dear Martin,

I thought I’d pretty clearly stated my method in El Barco del Abismo over twenty years ago, and I don’t think it’s changed much. Perhaps it’s more juggling than attaching now. So what I’ll do is give you the context of the last poem I wrote a couple of days ago.

He then went on to describe an evening and the following day spent with friends (he was in France at the time), dining, wandering around, jotting down an occasional line or two on a scrap of paper, thinking this and that, and hearing of the death of a friend, and before going to sleep playing (his terminology, my italics) with the scraps of lines he’d accumulated during the day, and there it was, a little poem, and if that’s an explanation of anything, of how it “works”, then so be it.

When the Collected Poems came out I reviewed it, and concluded my review with this:

I just spent this afternoon with “Ace”, and it strikes me how I feel very relaxed reading these poems: I’m not struggling to understand them, and I’m not trying to find a narrative line, or even a reason for any of it at all. What I’m doing is surrounding myself with the words. Enjoying being with them. Reading a few lines and getting one “meaning”, then reading them again and finding something else. And enjoying it.  Okay, I might be missing loads, but there’s lots of time left to read it again. And again.  I think Tom would rather we enjoy the process of reading poems than be able to explain it.

And that’s what I think one has to go back to. The enjoyment. And you either buy into it or not. You don’t go to Tom Raworth for recognisable storyline poetry or narrative, for the poet’s opinion about this, that or the other, for similes and metaphors, or any of the traditional or conventional poetic strategies traditionally and conventionally served up. Look at those journal entries; look at what he notices. See the words.

I think it’s also worth saying that lots of other poets have tried to write like Tom Raworth and rarely, if ever, have they managed to pull off quite the same trick. But that’s another story altogether.

The last time I saw Tom was a few years prior to his death. I was visiting my son in Brighton, and Tom and Val, his wife, gave me a very pleasant little lunch in an apartment they were borrowing from a friend, overlooking the promenade in Hove. The sun shone in through the big windows, the sea was being the sea, and we chattered about this and that, including how we had both been telephone operators for, in his case, the old GPO, and in mine for both the GPO and BT. When we talked about reading and writing Tom was keen to emphasize the pleasure principle, the anti-boredom principle, about which we were in wholesale agreement. I hold on to that memory still. Remember:

            I just put down what fits and doesn’t bore me to read.

 

 

© Martin Stannard, 2025

 

 

 

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