Tom Raworth: July 19, 1938 - February 8, 2017
Non sequiturs for Tom Raworth
This one time I met Tom I said ‘I can’t stand those poets who use lower case ‘i’ for the first person pronoun.’ I was an idiot then and I’m an idiot now. ‘Neither can i,’ Tom replied graciously.
To make matters worse, the reading Andrew Lawson and I had arranged for John Wilkinson and Tom in Oxford competed with a thousand other events and consequently there was an audience of one.
That wasn’t the only embarrassment: sections of Eternal Sections were the first poems published in fragmente 1 (1990), including the line ‘one’s initial reaction is stunned belief’. According to the typescript I should have set the line as ‘one’s initial reaction is stunned disbelief’. I told Tom I was sorry for the error but he said he preferred it to the original and was going to keep it for the finished sequence.
Which he did.* I know of no other poet whose response to the semi-random process of composition was so genuinely free from authorial amour propre. The ‘intention’ is one with the poetry itself: an act of ‘laconic egolessness’ (to quote a much-quoted remark by Geoff Ward).
But then Tom was too cool to get on a high horse when it came to textual matters. If he did, ever, I never saw it. As a far too earnest young man meeting Tom at the University of Essex’s 25 Years of Writing gathering, I found his louche manner initially disconcerting, yet a few minutes of conversation revealed kindness and generosity and insight. Tom treated me as a compadre although much of what I said must have been pushy and crass. His conversation was reserved because he preferred to listen. When talking, he was really listening.
And this was the basis of his poetics. I sat with him at the beginning of a long day of scholarly papers and readings at The University of New Hampshire. All the time he was making notes: not critical notes but fragments of the discourse heard, and fragments of audience remarks overheard. The thesis of an address was less important than its turn of phrase - as long as its turns had some kind of rhetorical grip that could be decontextualized and recontextualized by a poem.
My folder for that event in 1996 contains a sheet of yellow foolscap on which was scrawled:
Anthony / Tom
There is not a face I recognize in the the room (down the hall this floor) where
I’m ‘going off’ at c.9:30 so if you’re not tied to the Celtic come & hiss S
The ‘Celtic’ must have been a panel featuring Trevor Joyce, Marisa Januzzi, David Annwn, and Harriet Tarlo, to which we were already committed. The handwriting on the note is Stephen Rodefer’s, which is most peculiar because he wasn’t scheduled to ‘go off’ that day. Or even to come on: in fact he wasn’t scheduled to appear at the conference full stop. I have a recollection of Rodefer breezing into the room to float that yellow sheet into my lap but by all accounts he wasn’t there.
Which just goes to show how faulty memories can be and how easy it is for a memento to induce conflation of times and places. The evidence of the note is there yet the evidence appears to be wrong. So I’m wary now of remembering being in a lift with Tom while a poet son of a poet intoned ‘And the motorcade sped on / The motorcade sped on.’ The poet son of a poet might have been Anselm Berrigan.
In Cambridge, I lent Tom some books. Not long afterwards I found I dared not ask for them back because someone told me he was gravely ill and not expected to survive. This pronouncement turned out to have a great many points of ellipsis. Twenty years later, I’m happy to say, he was still with us. When in February this year I heard the news of Tom’s death, I half-thought it was another false alarm. It was - and then it wasn’t. All I could think of in stunned belief and non-response was the motorcade chant, which sounded arch at the time, and now seems elegiac.
*Tom Raworth, Eternal Sections, (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1993), 52.
This one time I met Tom I said ‘I can’t stand those poets who use lower case ‘i’ for the first person pronoun.’ I was an idiot then and I’m an idiot now. ‘Neither can i,’ Tom replied graciously.
To make matters worse, the reading Andrew Lawson and I had arranged for John Wilkinson and Tom in Oxford competed with a thousand other events and consequently there was an audience of one.
That wasn’t the only embarrassment: sections of Eternal Sections were the first poems published in fragmente 1 (1990), including the line ‘one’s initial reaction is stunned belief’. According to the typescript I should have set the line as ‘one’s initial reaction is stunned disbelief’. I told Tom I was sorry for the error but he said he preferred it to the original and was going to keep it for the finished sequence.
Which he did.* I know of no other poet whose response to the semi-random process of composition was so genuinely free from authorial amour propre. The ‘intention’ is one with the poetry itself: an act of ‘laconic egolessness’ (to quote a much-quoted remark by Geoff Ward).
But then Tom was too cool to get on a high horse when it came to textual matters. If he did, ever, I never saw it. As a far too earnest young man meeting Tom at the University of Essex’s 25 Years of Writing gathering, I found his louche manner initially disconcerting, yet a few minutes of conversation revealed kindness and generosity and insight. Tom treated me as a compadre although much of what I said must have been pushy and crass. His conversation was reserved because he preferred to listen. When talking, he was really listening.
And this was the basis of his poetics. I sat with him at the beginning of a long day of scholarly papers and readings at The University of New Hampshire. All the time he was making notes: not critical notes but fragments of the discourse heard, and fragments of audience remarks overheard. The thesis of an address was less important than its turn of phrase - as long as its turns had some kind of rhetorical grip that could be decontextualized and recontextualized by a poem.
My folder for that event in 1996 contains a sheet of yellow foolscap on which was scrawled:
Anthony / Tom
There is not a face I recognize in the the room (down the hall this floor) where
I’m ‘going off’ at c.9:30 so if you’re not tied to the Celtic come & hiss S
The ‘Celtic’ must have been a panel featuring Trevor Joyce, Marisa Januzzi, David Annwn, and Harriet Tarlo, to which we were already committed. The handwriting on the note is Stephen Rodefer’s, which is most peculiar because he wasn’t scheduled to ‘go off’ that day. Or even to come on: in fact he wasn’t scheduled to appear at the conference full stop. I have a recollection of Rodefer breezing into the room to float that yellow sheet into my lap but by all accounts he wasn’t there.
Which just goes to show how faulty memories can be and how easy it is for a memento to induce conflation of times and places. The evidence of the note is there yet the evidence appears to be wrong. So I’m wary now of remembering being in a lift with Tom while a poet son of a poet intoned ‘And the motorcade sped on / The motorcade sped on.’ The poet son of a poet might have been Anselm Berrigan.
In Cambridge, I lent Tom some books. Not long afterwards I found I dared not ask for them back because someone told me he was gravely ill and not expected to survive. This pronouncement turned out to have a great many points of ellipsis. Twenty years later, I’m happy to say, he was still with us. When in February this year I heard the news of Tom’s death, I half-thought it was another false alarm. It was - and then it wasn’t. All I could think of in stunned belief and non-response was the motorcade chant, which sounded arch at the time, and now seems elegiac.
*Tom Raworth, Eternal Sections, (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1993), 52.
Anthony Mellors