Writing, and: Tottering State: Selected and New Poems, 1963-1983, and: Tractor Parts (review)

reviews 145 Writing by Tom Raworth. Berkeley, CA: The Figures, 1982. 33 pp. $6 (paper). Tottering State: Selected and New Poems, 1963-1983 by Tom Raworth. Great Barrington, MA: The Figures, 1984. 232 pp. $11.50 (paper). Tractor Parts by Tom Raworth. Peterborough, U.K.: Spectacular Diseases, 1984. 3 pp. 25 pence (paper). In their introduction to The Penguin Book ofContemporary British Poetry (1982), Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion claim that their selection presents the public with "a body of work . . . which demands, for its appreciation, a reformation of public taste" (11). They justify this by suggesting that "as a way of making the familiar strange again, [these poets] have exchanged the received idea of the poet as person-next-door, or knowing insider, for the attitude of the anthropologist or alien invader or remembering exile" (12). But this exchange leaves intact the fundamental structure of knowledge and observation which defines the dominant mode of British poetry. The work of the poets represented in this anthology— Seamus Heaney, Tony Harrison and Craig Raine, amongst others—is linked so closely to that ofpredecessors like Philip Larkin and Donald Davie that this conventional anthologists' claim for radical newness masks the conventionality of the selection as a whole. Indeed, a striking feature of the anthology is its continuity with the "new Philistinism" diagnosed by Donald Allen in his 1960 essay, "Literary Little England" (reprinted in To Keep Moving [1980]). Allen noted how the British poets restricted poetry to the regional, accepting "only poetry which comes exclusively from daily situations and emotions" (52) and rejecting the cosmopolitan literary modernism celebrated in Allen's own anthology. Adapting Althusser's remarks in Lire Ie Capital, we can term this dominant anti-modernist mode of British poetry empiricist. In this mode, poetry is viewed as a process which takes place between a given object and a given subject and in which language is assigned a purely instrumental status. For the role of language is to secure the given nature of that empiricist process of observation. David Trotter shares Allen's awareness fo the self-imposed limits of much British writing and suggests that the dominant definition of the poetic has suffered a dangerous narrowing . In his recent study, The Making ofthe Reader: Language and Subjectivity in Modern American, English and Irish Poetry (1984) he describes the dominant definition of the poetic: "Having scanned experience for a significant detail, the poet will reproduce the detail by means of a comparison, which is what the reader will recognize as the poetic part of his activity. Poems are, in the first instance, metaphors or similes" (246). Metaphor and simile share the same stable relation to the instrumental notion of language. Their implicit or explicit "as if draws attention to the poet's greater degree of linguistic mastery, leaving unquestioned the ordinary speaker's mastery of ordinary language. The cultural dominance of this empiricist poetry is a part of the dominant ideology of language as instrumentality; as cultural commodity it distinguishes itself from ordinary language only by its greater degree of linguistic mastery. Culturally dominant then, this empiricist mode is precisely residual in regard to the philosophical and theoretical developments of recent years in which an idea of language as discourse has come to oppose the view of language as instrumentality. What might a poetry which challenged that dominant empiricism be like? What could a poetry which refused an instrumental version of language offer as pleasure? And what might be the politics of such a post-structuralist practice? Tom Raworth's work—a major selection of which is now available in Tottering State (TS), Writing and Tractor Parts— offers stimulating responses to such questions and suggests that Raworth may be the major British poet of his generation—although in that difficult and dynamic category, the emergent. Raworth's opposition to the dominant mode of British poetry and its linguistic empiricism can be gauged by the attitude toward language in a poem such as "Lie Still, Lie Still": 146 the minnesota review paranoia is seeing how language works what it means the face of a wolf glares back through the glass (TS 70) Paranoia is here the recognition of the subject's...