On Raworth's Sonnets

On Raworth’s Sonnets

Nate Dorward

From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s the major project of the British poet Tom Raworth was a series of sonnet sequences, whose main sections have been published as Sentenced to Death (1987), Eternal Sections (1993), and Survival (1994). My intention here is to elaborate some commentary on this project in the form of loosely thematic readings, in which I try to draw out and explore patterns of image and idea that can contribute to my and others’ understanding of these poems. If the context were a poetry more obviously discursive or settled than Raworth’s this might sound like an unexceptionable project; but such a task might seem both difficult and beside the point in relation to a poetry that destabilizes ideas of unitary meaning, of “content,” of a poem’s being “about” something. To give a sense of the style of these poems, and the challenges they pose to conventions of interpretation and commentary, I’ll quote one sonnet (I am using the word loosely: the poems are 14 lines long, but they are not conventionally metrical nor do they feature regular rhyme). Here is the opening poem of Eternal Sections:

in black tunics, middle-aged

in the stationery store

every gesture, even

food: to it

thought which breaks

stereotypes which constitute

extenuated to the point

none of the action’s promoters

the user experiences

no need of acting

dedicated to commerce

the history of our own

stiffness of manner

no longer aligned

How might one discuss poetry like this, at once so elusive and shifting, yet strangely familiar in its collage of recognizable idioms and situations? The poem’s phrases are unpredictably choppy or continuous, and sometimes seem assembled according to shape rather than sense. (Note, for instance, the parallel constructions involving “which,” “no/none,” “in,” and “of”; or the near mirror-image of “every” and “even” in line 3.) Yet the poem does tempt interpretation: its wry allusions to “thought” and “stereotypes” glance self-reflexively at the very acts of thinking and writing, and the last line points to the poem’s own realignment of once-familiar phrases. But it would seem that any act of “close reading” – of “reading for content” – would either be wilfully synthetic or merely document the trace of private associations (mine) that are both unstable and of doubtful value to another reader. So before moving to some commentary on the poetry, I want to frame that commentary by sketching in some of the concerns about contemporary poetry, and the way one talks about it, that acts of close reading might speak to.

In proportion to the length of Raworth’s career and the evident importance of his work to several generations of poets from the UK, North America, and Europe, there has been remarkably little substantial criticism about his poetry: I’d count about half a dozen articles once one discounts brief reviews.[1] I would guess that this critical lack is due to the poetry’s elusiveness, and also to Raworth’s characteristic unwillingness to frame his work with the trappings of commentary, poetics statements, interviews and critical appreciations of other writers that give critics some obvious purchase on the work. During the composition of the original version of this paper for a talk, I discussed my project with a number of my correspondents; quite a few admitted that they admired Raworth’s work but couldn’t really say much about it. I’ll quote one:

Raworth wd certainly be worth having a shot at; it’s certainly true that for all folks tend to regard him as the bees knees . . . very few people have much to say about him. & he of course doesn’t invite it – is thoroughly resistant in fact. Not that he’d mind folks doing it I think; just that he’s not going to spend time saying or writing things to make the task easier. Am caught in the same dilemma myself: I like much of the work (prefer I think to hear him read than work with the text) but don’t have much to say really. Maybe he appeals to the kind of attention that adverts get on tv. – ten second attention spans for snippets of often rather brilliant invention – & determinedly produces surfaces which engage & disappear on the instant. In contrast to folks who make surfaces that tease with the illusion of some codified substance & so refuse the kind of openness Raworth has which makes him willing to let go.

This informal account seems to me revealingly and usefully balanced between respect for the rapidfire inventiveness of the work and doubt about whether the work might repay more leisurely modes of attention – indeed, like many of Raworth’s critics, my correspondent strongly associates the work the poet’s notably brisk and well-honed performance style. Another correspondent of mine even went so far as to say that criticism was almost the wrong kind of response to the poetry, and that the most valuable “criticism” was poetry written in response to the work. I can sympathize with this position, but think that it would be damaging to avoid critical prose modalities entirely. If we are going to make high claims for a body of poetry – and there are many who would claim Raworth as one of the central poets of the last few decades – then we need to find out what people are getting out of the poetry. How have people lived with the work, over sometimes decades of engagement as readers, as listeners, and as poets inspired by it? Ultimately, if we really cannot articulate what we find valuable about the poetry, we should not be surprised if uninitiated readers decide that the poetry is deficient, or at least insufficiently substantial to warrant long and serious engagement.

The best discussions of Raworth so far were mostly produced in the 1980s – I’m thinking of pieces by Colin MacCabe, John Higgins, Andrew Lawson and John Barrell – and have been mostly concerned with the relation of Raworth’s radical poetic strategies to issues of language and subjectivity familiar from contemporary literary theory. Though none of these essays was written explicitly under the aegis of Language Poetry, which was just beginning to gain wider recognition at the time, one might loosely characterize all of them as preoccupied with “the politics of form,” a phrase often associated with Language “theory” of the period.[2] Despite the value of these critical accounts, I find myself worried by certain aspects of their formal and theoretical preoccupations. Such concerns subordinate the features of individual poems to the general impact of the work or its relation to general propositions about voice, subjectivity, language, and form. Indeed, John Barrell, whose essay “Subject and Sentence: The Poetry of Tom Raworth” is certainly the best piece yet written on Raworth, expresses some discomfort with his own approach: “This essay has been much more formalist than I usually like my work to be, offering no account of the content of Raworth’s poetry, or finding that content only in form” (407). “The politics of form” does not make fine distinctions between poetic oeuvres or poems within sequences, and one poetics of disjunction could often serve such arguments as well as the next; at best we could roughly group poetries according to their general formal features. Raworth has produced about 200 sonnets in the last two decades; do they all do more or less the same thing? Formally that is probably true: yet one may still ask how the poems’ impact changes by doing more or less the same thing with different materials.

Many essays on contemporary poetry quote a single poem or a short passage for a quick and contained “close reading” before extrapolating to the larger poetic entity. Such selectiveness works to undo close reading’s emphasis on particularity, by suggesting the arbitrary nature of the passage’s selection, as if any passage taken from the text would serve as well. I would like instead to engage in modes of reading that emphasize the particularity of poems, while also trying for a certain immersion in the work. Yet close reading is of course problematic in dealing with highly openended poetry, since close reading often carries buried within it ideals of a “complete” reading that are at odds with poetries that emphasize openendedness and arbitrariness. Brian McHale, in a review of Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s Poetic Artifice, once critiqued a Harold Bloom reading of Ashbery’s “As You Came from the Holy Land” by pointing out that it only took into account five phrases of the entire 48-line poem. Though McHale makes a fair point about careless or opportunistic reading (and I think McHale a better reader of Ashbery than Bloom), it would be misleading to approach poetry such as Ashbery’s in the expectation that every detail in the poem can or should be justified. (The endpoint of such ideals of justification is such monstrous acts of close reading as Helen Vendler’s The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, a book that squeezes significance out of every letter of a poem.) Concepts of the poem as an organic entity or as a machine made of words, and the ideals of wholeness, efficiency, and lack of superfluity embedded in such aesthetic metaphors, have little pertinence to the work of authors as diverse as Ashbery, Bob Cobbing, Jackson Mac Low, Tom Raworth, Clark Coolidge, and Maggie O'Sullivan. Exhaustive reading of postmodern poetries is neither necessary, nor possible; but this is not, of course, to devalue attentive reading.

Yet I would still wish to hang on to a certain skepticism concerning poetic arbitrariness and expanse, since one feature of much contemporary poetry that sometimes disturbs me is a flirtation with sheer length and homogeneity. To take one especially thorny example: I first encountered Bruce Andrews’ prose pieces of the mid-1980s in journals such as Reality Studios, and found them vividly energizing. These pieces were collected in the 309-page book I Don’t Have Any Paper So Shut Up (Or, Social Romanticism) (1992). The texture of the book is in a certain sense relentlessly particular in its design, but its noncumulative structure means that there is little to distinguish one page from the next; indeed, the book acknowledges this arbitrariness by arranging its pieces in alphabetical order. I’m less enthusiastic about the work in its new context, and indeed have made little headway in the volume. One of the vices of the openended text is that it can be literally so – that is, merely prolix. I don’t intend to single Andrews out here, except insofar as he is characteristically willing to push to extremes the techniques (of programmatic lengthiness and stylistic and formal homogeneity) that can be found in many other authors – other, often more satisfying instances might be Silliman’s Tjanting, McCaffery’s The Black Debt, Coolidge’s many book-length projects, Watten’s Progress, and Hejinian’s My Life and The Cell. Logically there is no necessary reason why a text that is disjunctive at a local level could not also be stylistically and formally disjunctive at a more general level, but such a roll-call suggests that in practice authors have found such techniques essential to their projects. This leaves me suspecting that a poetics of openness, disjunction, and readerly activity, with its usual emphasis on energetic local textual encounters, can take us only so far in dealing with texts which seem equally drawn to the white-noise or drone techniques found in contemporary music (or, as in the case of a book like Kenneth Goldsmith’s Fidget, to the example of conceptual art). Yet I remain uneasy here, in that I am unsure of the satisfactions of an aesthetics of texture and its minute variations, especially when they are left implicit by commentators dealing with a text at a high level of generality. I feel some hesitation, for instance, over a passage of Barrell’s essay concerning Raworth’s reading-style: “He reads at high speed and in a tone which is not exactly uninflected, but which has the effect of being so, because it gives almost the same inflection, and an almost equal emphasis, to every line. That equality of emphasis amounts to a refusal of all affect, a refusal which seems to offer the words of the poem as an empty succession of empty signs” (393). Though Barrell goes on to qualify this account a little, it seems to me one of the few unsatisfactory points in an otherwise convincing essay: first, because I do not think it accurately describes Raworth’s readings, which I find far more alive to the nuances of tone and meaning in each line, and second, because it verges on praising Raworth for monotony.

Having elaborated these critical concerns, I’d like to turn now to the poems. I will be working with material from Sentenced to Death. As will become apparent, my approach to “close reading” will be multiple, and not confined to the line-by-line interpretation of poems. This seems to me a useful way of responding to poems whose disruption of ordinary, consecutive reading habits encourages concentration on the epigrammatic force of particular phrases, but also invites an exploratory search for looser, farther-flung connections.

The title of Sentenced to Death is at once evocative and neatly literal: the first word of the sequence is “sentenced” (“sentenced he gives a shape”), the last is “death” (“after his mother’s death”). The word “to” in the title functions doubly, and in doing so is a mark of some of the matters I’ve been talking about. To speak of the sequence as simply from “sentenced” to “death” is to suggest that it is an arbitrary selection from a greater continuum – a chosen range or random sample. If so, is there any particular cohesiveness to this arbitrarily delimited set of poems? Or is this just a roughly homogenous swatch of material? Alternatively, in the grim legal idiom of the title, “to” points to intrinsic rather than arbitrary limits: the death-sentence leads inexorably to the execution. Here beginning and end are intimately and causally linked, rather than simply acting as brackets.

As the sequence’s title indicates, its poems constantly return to images of war, violence and death, which are frequently figured as the embodied result of the structures of political and technological power. But the word “sentenced” also glances towards the sequence’s preoccupation with matters of linguistic and aesthetic form. Words such as “form,” “shape,” “system,” “order” and “pattern” resonate throughout this and other Raworth sonnet sequences; and all these sequences are punctuated by moments of self-reflexiveness, in passages and whole poems that read like enigmatically jumbled statements of aesthetic theory.[3] The preposition “to” in the title might also suggest the way that movement is one of the key categories in Sentenced to Death.

I want to draw a few of these strands together by arguing that the sequence gestures explicitly towards the conventions of narrative, of a proper beginning and end and the quest that joins them; and that the sense of formal limits to the poems, and of the eventual limit to motion as it comes to rest, is linked to the theme of mortality. An explicit self-reflexiveness concerning beginnings and endings has always been present in Raworth, often even more explicitly than in Sentenced to Death: Catacoustics opens, “should i begin again”; “The Vein” “ends in a dramatic freeze” (Clean & Well Lit 28); at the close of “Blue Screen” things “finally run their course,” and the poem concludes with “the end of active thought” (Clean & Well Lit 60-61). Sentenced to Death’s opening poem says that “this new empire had begun,” speaks of “missionaries” (whose name contains the word “mission”), and talks about journeying (“no journey can be quite / anything any more”). As with Catacoustics’ “should i begin again,” this beginning is uncertain or reluctant, already doomed or “absurd,” but nonetheless inevitable as a “sentence” reaching its conclusion:

sentenced he gives a shape

by no means enthusiastic

to what he saw

this new empire had begun

slave trade

they were killed

his rabble

divined in one instant

coups d’état

regarded missionaries

as an elaborate plot

no journey can be quite

anything any more

pretensions would have been absurd

The first sonnet on the next page (the sequence’s fourth poem) opens on another appearance of the verb “to begin”: “curiously the whole thing had begun / in a fit of shame.” These beginnings and journeys set the stage for these poems’ evocation of colonialist explorer narratives set in Third World locations, narratives that form the most overt thematic link between the poems of the first third of the sequence. The fifth poem, for instance, tells of a exploring party making a “calm approach,” which is

forced to proceed

again by sickness

slept briefly on the sand

rush-bottomed rafts

steep rough climb

a red tent

no-one dreamed

The seventh poem follows someone participating in a “raid”; the eighth mentions a man who “approaches the village.” In these early passages of Sentenced to Death Raworth at once memorably evokes the physical arduousness of travel and gives these fragmentary journeys the slightly faded air of excerpts from an old exploration narrative. Sometimes they blend smoothly in with the sequence’s harsher, often overtly contemporary materials dealing with modern industry, culture, and espionage; sometimes they stick out as anachronisms (a good instance being poem 22’s “cannon-shot”).

The travel motif returns prominently at the end of the sequence, now transposed out of the realm of exploration narrative into a variety of other contexts. The sonnet that begins the second-to-last page contains first an emigration (“emigrated didn’t want / such warning”), modulates to a return (“returned to her apartment”), and then anticipates the end to movement: “moving toward a final state.” I hear in that phrase a multiple pun: the “final state” is in the largest sense death, but the “state” might also, as in the title of Tottering State, be the political state, an interpretation that sounds an ominous warning to any sentimental idea of homecoming: the “final state” is perhaps simply the state that finally accepts the emigrant who has been bounced unwanted from country to country. Yet the phrase also suggests self-reflexivity about the act of composition as it nears its end, the “final state” being the last, polished draft of a piece of writing.

In the next poem, we read:

the movement

said go to it and go home

through the dusty windy outskirts

Raworth’s ear here unfreezes the cliche of a political “movement” and sets it going in actual physical movement. With “go,” as elsewhere in the sonnets, a single word is given a shake through its repetition (cf. “anything any more” in the sequence’s first poem, or “no” and “none” in the first poem of Eternal Sections); “go to it” suggests incitement (“get to work!”) while “go home” suggests the reverse. The slightly aggressive edge to the command “go home” strips “home” of its comforting aura (compare its use in a political context: “Yankees go home!”). The poem that follows begins “we can be satisfied / coming down the street” and again approaches the final state:

reading between the lines

imagining how any letters

had a noisy tick

inevitable as death

Language is still subject to time and mortality, despite what Shakespeare might have said about immortalizing Mr W. H. in his sonnets’ lines; more to the point, perhaps those are letter-bombs ticking, lethally waiting to blow up in your face. The poem turns to another image of travel: “hard driving in this rain / through straws under the stars.” Raworth’s ear for cliche has picked apart the phrase “driving rain” and repackaged it as an image of motion. The syntax itself here warps the simultaneity of logical connection into a consecutive motion: the three phrases applied to “driving” – “in this rain,” “through straws” and “under the stars” – cannot be simultaneously true of “driving” and so must detail consecutive actions (you can’t see stars in the rain).

On the next (and last) page, the second poem mentions a “gate” and says of its male figure: “he found again the final entry,” which suggests both an entryway and an entry in some kind of book or notebook. The last poem of Sentenced to Death – the last entry in this particular self-reflexive book – concludes with an image of return (“moving back”) and of death:

fine shots, they expressed

the unlocatable punctum

of a being, body and soul

discovered a secret thing

in front of the screen

suddenly the mask vanished

some residual sensitivity

caught the boy’s hand

gradually moving back

back through time

a memory fabricated

against the privacy of stars

without intimacy

after his mother’s death

The first phrase – “fine shots” – returns us full circle to the sequence’s ambiguous opening phrase, “sentenced he gives a shape”: it refers to photographs, but also hints at the violence of gunshots. “[P]unctum” in the next line again touches on photography, writing, and violence all at once. The term is drawn from Barthes’ Camera Lucida, where it denotes the accidental element found in a photograph that arrests a viewer’s attention: the original Latin word means both a punctuation mark and “sting, speck, cut, little hole”: “A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)” (Barthes, 27). The phrase “discovered a secret thing” here seems to belong to a private narrative of discovery, but is colored by the sequence’s many narratives of explorers’ discoveries, espionage, and political secrets. The image of “stars” recalls the earlier poem’s “driving...under the stars.” There it perhaps hinted at the way stars used to be guides to navigation; here the “stars” are more likely the stars of the film or television “screen,” who try to protect their privacy from the paparazzi, a reading strengthened by the earlier allusion to photography. But the word also glances at rather more traditional ways to end poems: I think of Dante’s evocation of stars at the end of each book of the Divine Comedy. The word “fabricated” entwines the acts of creation and mendacity, leaving the poem and sequence split between an image of imaginative return through memory (“gradually moving back / back through time / a memory fabricated”) and a bleak sense of how the hard loss of a parent empties out any real sense of return. Raworth’s poem is in fact an assemblage of phrases from Camera Lucida: Barthes’ meditations on photography circle about the death of his mother, and his discovery of a single photograph of her at the age of five that, unlike all the other photographs he has of her, actually captures “the truth of the face I had loved” (67). Raworth’s collage is remarkably true to the feeling of Barthes’ book, despite its decontextualization of phrases (for instance, “caught the boy’s hand” is actually taken from a discussion of an erotic photograph by Mapplethorpe); yet the delicately mournful sense of closure registered in “without intimacy / after his mother’s death” is very much Raworth’s own.

I’ve been commenting on how the opening and close of Sentenced to Death self-reflexively speak on a number of levels about the act of beginning and the act of ending, but I’d now like to turn to one further feature of these beginnings and endings. The opening and close are both marked by the appearance of a male pronoun that brackets the sequence – “sentenced he gives a shape”; “after his mother’s death.” This is a conjunction of formal limit and the male pronoun that appears elsewhere in Raworth: for instance, in Catacoustics, whose final lines pan away from an image of a galaxy to a morose male figure:

cloud streams annular

from the dent

the twisted lens

diffuses senses of direction

‘i won’t think

while i’m being watched’

he sulks

This liminal male figure, who seems almost to stand over the poem, mournful or melancholy or wrecked, has of course a distinguished lineage in Modernist poetry: the combination of gendered persona and anxiety over beginning and ending places the sequence unexpectedly close to the canonical Modernist long poem. I am thinking for example of the speaker at the end of Eliot’s The Waste Land, self-reflexively brooding on the poem’s “fragments,” or the ending of Pound’s Cantos, where he surveys his “errors and wrecks,” and acknowledges that he “cannot make it cohere” (809). I am also thinking of the overarching male seers of such poems – Tiresias, or the speaker who views the unfolding entirety of TheCantos from the Dogana’s steps in Canto 3; I might also toss in Olson’s Maximus, the sounding of whose (male) voice coincides with the beginning of TheMaximus Poems: “I, Maximus of Gloucester, to You.” Both Eliot’s and Pound’s poems begin with the erasure of the singular voice through juxtaposition and collage; the poems contain voyages of sorts, yet the homecoming at the end is marked both by disaster and failure, and by the return of the voice, now forced in despair to resort to the idioms of prayer: Eliot’s “Shantih Shantih Shantih” (the peace that passeth understanding); Pound’s “Let the Gods forgive what I / have made” (816). This is a voyage of ambition and despair that for Raworth is already in the past, taken as read: his work instead takes its starting point from the condition of the wrecked singular voice, one almost Tiresias-like: “sentenced he gives a shape / by no means enthusiastic / to what he saw.”

By linking Raworth back to early Modernism I mean to suggest that the sonnets possess a virtue that I associate with Modernism’s loftiest ambitions – its aspiration towards inclusiveness, comprehensiveness. Raworth’s poetry has an unusually large range of reference and idiom and thought, and I value its incorporation of the radiating fragments of the contemporary world, the many languages associated with the sciences, literary theory, politics, pulp fiction, the media, computers, and technology. To say this is to suggest that Raworth may have more in common than appears on the surface with poets such as Allen Fisher or J. H. Prynne who have more overtly inherited the ambitiousness of Modernist poetics. The sonnets are in their own way a “poem including history” – or “the history of our own,” to quote the beginning of Eternal Sections, even if it’s a history that, as he puts it, is “the history of our own / stiffness of manner / no longer aligned” (that is, shuffled into new alignments rather than recovered or reproduced). I say this despite being conscious of how differently history is conceived in Raworth’s poetry. One of the most consistent stylistic signatures of Raworth’s work has been its penchant for the narrative past tense rather than the lyric present tense – a preference virtually unique in contemporary poetry, where even authors otherwise as far from the traditional lyric as Charles Bernstein or J. H. Prynne still ground their work in the present tense. Despite the disjunctiveness and modularity of Raworth’s poetry, its fundamental mode is narrative, far more so than in the work of the Modernists whose epic ambitions might seem more obviously to demand a narrative mode. Pound and Eliot were looking for poetic methods that might regain for history a kind of depth that Raworth has little interest in; a good example would be how the past-tense narrative of the Homeric translation that opens the Cantos (“And then went down to the ships...”) is cast forward into the present by the abrupt intrusion of the narrator: “Lie quiet Divus. I mean, that is Andreas Divus” (5). The hope here is that past and present may be brought into mutual illumination, and a new depth be uncovered. In Raworth the narrative is perpetually receding into the past, and if the tone is often melancholy or wryly downbeat it is resolutely unnostalgic; indeed, it is mocking of any such aspirations to depth.

My comments on the fragmentary persistence of the male Modernist persona in Sentenced to Death are also intended to suggest how issues of voice and persona are crucial to the work, despite the work’s strong tendency towards decentering. (I am thinking here of Colin MacCabe’s TLS review of Writing, in which he claims that Raworth’s poetry “dissolves the unity of the personal voice.”) It is of course true, if trivially so, that even decentered and disjunctive poetic writing will have a distinctive stylistic signature and in that sense a “voice”; nor is it surprising that decentered poetry by a male author should still bear the marks of a male subjectivity. But what I want to emphasize instead is the importance of pronouns to Raworth’s work as a whole. This importance is often in their interrelationship: if one strikingly consistent stylistic feature of Raworth’s oeuvre is its penchant for the narrative past tense, another is its frequent centering on a highly charged relationship between an unnamed and otherwise unidentified “he” and “she.” Just as Ashbery’s poetry often gains in continuity and speed when it spills outwards from the pronoun “it,” Raworth’s work has often, especially in the recent volume Clean & Well Lit, rushed to its conclusion by bouncing between alternating gendered pronouns (see, especially, the ends of “Blue Screen” and “Out of the Picture” in that volume). Such a pattern is present right from the start of Raworth’s career, and I’d like to turn for a moment to the first poem of Tottering State, “Waiting”:

she made it a

noise

            entering the room

as he sat holding

a cigarette              grey

smoke &

                   blue

he was too             sound

of children moving so

much outside he wrote

small she

spoke he

cut a pack of tarot cards page

of (shall we go she said) pentacles re

versed meaning prodigality

dissipation liberality un

favourable news

The disconnection between the “he” and “she” here is encapsulated in the ambiguity of the title: who is waiting for whom? The point is that it’s both: the man has been waiting for the woman, smoking and getting depressed – “blue,” as Raworth punningly puts it – in her absence; but once she has arrived he acts withdrawn, perhaps deliberately retaliating in irritation by becoming absorbed in the activities of writing and fortunetelling, making her wait in return. The poem beautifully encapsulates the irritabilities and frictions of even the most intimate relationship; rather than being expressed explicitly, they are made palpable through the poem’s syntax and lineation, which introduce pronounced delays (“waiting”) and uncertainties into the reading-process. The opening line, for instance, first invokes the idiom “she made it” – “she finally arrived” – and then cancels it: it turns out that she made “a / noise.” The peculiar vagueness of the word “noise” here (like “sound” later on) indirectly evokes the man’s irritability (“stop making noise!”) – an irritability expressed directly in other poems of this period like “A Pressed Flower.” The protagonists’ friction is most potently expressed by the woman’s bracketed interruption into the man’s train of thought. Is she trying to break his concentration (“to ease the ache to communicate,” as Raworth later put it in the 32nd sonnet of Sentenced to Death)? More likely, I think, the poem is enacting the familiar experience of delayed comprehension of an utterance: the man at first only registers that “she / spoke,” then later realizes what she said. Though the verse technique here is very different from Raworth’s later work, “Waiting” already anticipates the paired couples of Raworth’s poetry, couples typically positioned at points of disjunction, of mutual discomfort or incomprehension.

The Modernist past again seems oddly close here, in the combination of the paired couple and a backdrop of contemporary tedium, of killing time – “Waiting.” There is a long Modernist history of the idea of ennui, of course. Here the presence of the tarot cards suggests Eliot, either the strained domestic intimacy of the man and woman in part two of The Waste Land, or the tedium and alienated intimacies of “Prufrock”; indeed, the woman’s bracketed interruption in “Waiting,” “shall we go,” is a gender-reversed version of Prufrock’s invitation: “Let us go then, you and I.” Another possible precedent is the short stories of Hemingway, their characters often only minimally identified beyond “he” and “she,” and situated within evocations of contemporary tedium (see for instance “Hills Like White Elephants”); this particular link is strengthened by Raworth’s allusion to Hemingway’s story, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” in the title of Clean & Well Lit (an allusion first noted by John Kerrigan). Moving forward in the history of Modernist tedium, one thinks of course of the coupled tramps of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, repeating their hopeless command: “Let’s go.”

In Sentenced to Death the disjunction of “he” and “she” is often governed by the poems’ parodic versions of masculinity. We encounter the colonialist explorer with a “passion for glory,” “full of courage and shrewd decisions”; the person hungry for power who wants to see “his stylised head in profile,” perhaps as engraved on a coin; “the older and wiser man” who “is proud, hidden, never forgives”; “a deeply masculine solidity.” The scientists, politicians, explorers, spies, and public speakers who momentarily appear in the poems are almost always men. Female figures are more various and ambiguous figures in the sequence: for instance, the female writer of the eighth sonnet – “herself, her readers, her ‘characters’”; a woman with an irrational fear of cats who is being treated by a (male) behavior therapist (“he called out the fluctuations / confined to explaining / the phobic reactions / by decrease of the resistance / she touched a full-grown cat / to relieve her anxiety / remarkably neatly”); the female expert who authenticates a document in the second-to-last poem: “she assured him / glancing from the original / ... / it stands a fair chance / of legitimacy” – this figure perhaps linked to an earlier woman “studying the small print / flicking her fingers.” Enigmatic fragments of a narrative of a deteriorating domestic relationship appear in sonnet 32, which begins “she stood with coat open / suspicion replaced the wrathful mask”; her suspicion is met with “amused surprise / cold as glass against his temples.” But perhaps the most interesting appearances of female figures in Sentenced to Death come in what I consider to be its two moments of real pathos: one is in the final poem I quoted earlier, which ends “without intimacy / after his mother’s death”; the other comes from halfway through the sequence:

she should be so transparent

astride her chair asleep

when the gramophone stopped

when the trees’ shadows crept

she managed to shake herself free

with palsied indignation

odious deviations

simply ruin our lives

drain more blood

to try to make him hear

stone whenever

obliqueness will allow

faded canvas had been hung

elaborated, stronger

The woman here is not overtly said to be elderly, but details suggest that she is: the out-of-date “gramophone”; her tiredness, weakness, and possible illness (“palsied”); the use of the rather old-fashioned epithet “odious.” Just as the gentle repetition of “back” in the sequence’s last poem adds to that word’s pathos, here the repeated “when” clauses, and the unusually prominent sound-patterning (note the rhymes, assonance, and consonantal patterning that join the endwords of lines 1-7, or the internal patterning of a line like “astride her chair asleep”) give this poem a sense both of a temporary resting-place in a sequence otherwise so rapid in its movement, and of fragility. The male figure who appears in the second part of the poem seems rather like the man in “Waiting” in his disconnection and distraction: “stone” in this context has overtones of “stone deaf.” But a greater pathos may lurk here: is the man not listening because he is beyond reach? “Stone” may also be short for “dead as a stone,” and “drain more blood” certainly suggests some grave illness.

What I hope to have shown in the preceding pages is that acknowledging the modernist play of textuality in Raworth’s poetry need not discourage close attention to content and its patterns and echoes. I have attempted to outline a number of related features of the sonnets: recurrent motifs such as travel, exploration, and the play of gendered pronouns; the special narrativity of the work; the way that Raworth can be understood within a Modernist genealogy but also as distinct from it. Many of these concerns might provide starting-points for a more extensive consideration of Raworth’s career. I have already shown how the focus on gendered pronouns can link a recent book like Clean & Well Lit back to Raworth’s mid-1960s writing; similarly, the motifs of exploration, travel, and colonialism found in Sentenced to Death need to be traced through books like The Big Green Day, Lion Lion, and especially Logbook. Raworth’s attention to the acts of beginning and ending may be linked more generally to his interest in framing devices such as titles, captions, and quotation marks, evident in his use of poem-within-poem structures in Writing and Catacoustics and even in mordant joke-poems like “Reference” and “University Days.” These various connections across the oeuvre confirm that modalities of reading willing to place more stress on content and the particularity of poems are important to any attempt to come to terms with the range and significance of Raworth’s poetry.

Chicago Review 47.1 (spring 2001)

Notes

This paper is a version of a piece delivered at the Cambridge Conference of Contemporary Poetry in April 2000. I am grateful to the panel’s chair, Keston Sutherland, and the organizers of CCCP10 for their invitation. I would also like to thank Keith Tuma for his many comments on this paper at all stages; John Hall, Victor Li, Peter Middleton, and Will Montgomery for their thoughtful responses to the original version of this paper. I also wish to thank Chicago Review, where this first appeared in print, and especially Eirik Steinhoff for his editorial acumen, which greatly assisted in reshaping the talk into the published paper.

1. Since the publication of this piece I have edited a 288pp book of essays on Raworth which has added substantially to the body of critical writing; there have also been a few additional essays, notably Geoff Ward’s “Tom Raworth and the Invisibles” (Cambridge Quarterly 31.1 [2002]). Raworth’s Collected Poems have also appeared from Carcanet.

2. My point is perhaps reinforced by the comparative absence of critical work on Raworth since 1990. Aside from a handful of reviews, there has been little: arguably the most substantial piece is Simon Perril’s contribution to the 1998 CCCP exhibition catalogue of Raworth’s work, an essay that reads the sonnet sequences as a critique of the theories associated with early Language Poetry. The only other two essays to have appeared (that I am aware of) are Keith Tuma’s useful account of Catacoustics in his Fishing by Obstinate Isles (1998) and Peter Brooker’s less satisfactory “Postmodern Postpoetry: Tom Raworth’s tottering state” (1991). Peter Middleton gives a brief but thought-provoking account of “Rainbow” (from Clean & Well Lit) in his essay “Lyric Temporality” (2001).

3. I have in mind here most importantly the 21st poem of Sentenced to Death, “reversals of performance levels,” and the first poem on p.16 of Eternal Sections, “be scrupulously attentive”; but virtually any sampling of the sonnets, especially Survival, will turn up self-reflexive passages about thought, memory and writing.

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