Liberated from Storage

While it is indicative of the relative sluggishness of projective verse that Charles Olson would refer to his typewriter as a "personal and instantaneous recorder," he was surely right to suggest that it is "the PLAY of a mind we are after" and that it is precisely such play that alerts us as to whether there is a mind "there" at all. Front-runner for brightest and sharpest evidence of such play in the poetry of the early 1970s would be the series of wildly uncategorizable texts that Tom Raworth produced in those years—works that vaporize the boundary between notebook entry and poem, occasionally accreting into the prosoid blocks of Logbook (1977) and, now, There Are Few People Who Put On Any Clothes (which, although written in 1972, was only recently rediscovered by its author in a box liberated from storage).

To read There Are Few People—a work in customary To read There Are Few People—a work in twenty-three sections, none longer than a page—is to be accompanied by the whir of one's brain as it attempts to break free from the longueurs of customary use ("Some of the pieces are starting to fall into place, and that's a bit obvious"). Raworth's minutely recalibrated, hair-trigger juxtapositions of everyday experience verge on the lapidary (one thinks of Michael Myers's incomparable linoleum blocks), their interstices infused with a caustic yet somehow also tender mix of humor, urgency, and pathos:

I see—as we get nearer it gets bigger. And by the light from the burning exit plates we see over each doorway NO WAY, which we flip to a yawn around the ubiquitous o. Beeb beep. Doctor Who. Yes. What!—t.v. is now's way of greasing its function! O.K. I'll am right there. What's that! Insert myself as the foresight in the rear-sight of morning: aim right there. Yes doctor, the upper lip is quite numb. Them Chinks sure can use the needle. Ready to operate. Call a cancel meeting.

Family members come and go, commercials interrupt the TV show ("I'm making this noise so I don't hear that advert I don't like") and blunt observations, almost shocking in their throwaway profundity, stop us dead in our tracks ("No other animal keeps a picture of another animal outside its memory").

Raworth seems effortlessly to subject Olson's modest proposal re-perception ("always one perception must must must," etc.) to a quantum advance, not only locating "us" and "things" in the instants between perceptions (compare with film, especially Stan Brakhage's), but also suggesting that instants themselves are both slow and massive enough to distort perception on either side (as the last page of Logbook tells us, "all books are dead & we live where the edges overlap"). One result of the light speed at which Raworth is able to telegraph his thought is that time becomes a kind of fluid space ("Surely hours could be made flexible for the right person"). Even the fact that light has to travel is a drag—a situation that puts us, as Raworth has written elsewhere, "always / visually in the past."

NOTE: will the physicists ever explain how time acts in a poetry reading? Strange time-freaks attend them, wallowing in seconds becoming hours, hours becoming limping treks across a desert life without water. For poetry has succeeded in becoming almost totally uninteresting; and the only fragment of interest left is that which the colour and smell of gangrene has for a connoisseur.

Many claims have been made for the so-called materiality of language in the 35+ years since There Are Few People was written; so many, in fact, that one can be forgiven for thinking that the default mode of operation of the literary advance guard (again, so-called) is to single out an aspect of language, reify it, and then demonize the others in the hope of shaming readers into forgetting that they exist...