Johns Hopkins University Press

This article is the first analysis of the importance of Mexico for the postwar neo-avant-garde British poet Tom Raworth (1938–2017). Focusing on his poetry of the late 1960s and early 1970s, it traces the centrality of Mexico, Latin America, and Spanish to Raworth's work, beginning with connections forged in the internationalist intellectual milieu at the University of Essex in 1967 and concluding with his brief residence in Mexico City in the summer of 1973. Drawing on extensive new archival material, it centers on Raworth's friendship and correspondence with the Mexican writer José Emilio Pacheco (1939–2014). The article demonstrates how these exchanges gave political impetus to Raworth's experiments with the institutional forms of language-learning and how Raworth's critical engagement with Nahuatl in 1968 enabled the temporary reconciliation of linguistic experiment with decolonial politics through a critique of state violence and imperial time. Lastly, it argues that Raworth's interrogation of writing itself in the early 1970s was articulated through the "Mexican" tropes of the mirror and the mask, which provided Mesoamerican analogues for his concern with linguistic instability and the limits of expressive selfhood.

In the poem "Self," published in 1984's Heavy Light but composed in this typescript draft in winter 1971/72, the British poet Tom Raworth (1938–2017) makes a wish:

i wish i were myself – mexican – que te vaya bienwithout dreams – forgetting to write

(Raworth Papers, Box 5)

How and why Raworth's evasive lowercase lyric speaker might have arrived at such a "mexican" conception of "my / self"—a bifurcated linguistic fiction of national identification expressed as self-estrangement, across the enjambment—is the subject and story of this article. At the time of the poem's composition, in the winter of 1971/72, Raworth had recently studied for and abandoned a BA in Latin American Studies and completed a specially tailored MA in translation at the University of Essex,1 where he had met and befriended the Mexican poet, novelist, and journalist José Emilio Pacheco (1939–2014), whose poetry collections Los elementos de la noche (1963) and El reposo del fuego (1966), along with his Holocaust novel Morirás lejos (1967), had established him as one of the major young figures in Mexican literature of the 1960s. As I demonstrate in this article, those experiences initiated for Raworth a profound [End Page 4] yet skeptical identification with Mexico, which was sustained by his correspondence with the Pachecos into the early 1970s but complicated by post-68 political failures and repression.

The subjunctive mood of the wish and the poem—made explicit by the Spanish, "que te vaya bien," or fare-thee-well2—is characterized by latency. Potentially realizable practices, such as inspiration (dream) and composition (writing)—oneiric and automatic creative modes that draw on reserves of latent content, characteristic of the historical avant-gardes—are neglectfully disavowed by lack and forgetfulness. The act of writing—perhaps Raworth's principal subject in the 1970s—is suspended between anticipation and impossibility. If "i" were to be "my / self – mexican," then the subject might possibly be reformulated through a neo-avant-garde interrogation of the linguistic fabrication of the writing "self," fissured by deconstruction yet grounded in the experiential and the quotidian. As I argue, Raworth's poems of the early '70s seek to evacuate the literary trappings of the very "self" that the poem expresses as a subjunctive wish. This position, arrived at as part of a broader turn to language in the 1970s, is articulated through Raworth's evolving interest in Latin America, and especially Mexico, from the mid-1960s, embedded initially within the internationalist intellectual milieu at the University of Essex.

Drawing on new archival materials, I demonstrate how Essex's internationalism and Raworth's reciprocal exchange with Pacheco gave vital form and political impetus to his experiments with the institutional forms of language-learning, with Indigenous language as a critique of state violence and imperial time, and with the literary tropes of the mirror and the mask. This article concentrates on poems by Raworth dating from his time as a reluctant student at the Universities of Essex and Granada in 1967–70 (drafts of which were frequently enclosed in letters to Pacheco) and on poems from the same period included in Lion Lion (1970) and Moving (1971). The final section moves to the summer of 1973, which the Raworths spent in Mexico City and where Raworth wrote The Mask (1976), whose opening poems reaffirm gestures of transcontinental friendship and solidarity with the Mexican poets whom Raworth had met at Essex.

THE UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX

In an afterword on the conference series "Poetry in Expanded Translation" in Poetry Wales, Zoë Skoulding observes that "the [End Page 5] legacy of the British Poetry Revival has not been as international or multilingual as the energies that brought it about in the first place" (Skoulding 2018).3 This article redresses some of this critical imbalance by telling the story of Raworth's friendship with Pacheco and long-standing interest in Mexico. A decidedly internationalist figure on the British neo-avant-garde poetry "Revival" scene since the 1960s, Raworth looked almost from the first beyond the largely monolingual scope of transatlantic exchange. As Simon Perril notes, his mid-1960s job as a French-speaking telephonist at London's Continental Telephone Exchange, "surrounded by the babble of multilingual conversations," offers a compelling way of understanding Raworth's writing in terms of a map of aural networks (Raworth 1990, 5; Perril 2003, 119). Indeed, it is not too much of a stretch to see Raworth here "practicing what will be his poetic mode," as Marjorie Perloff puts it, managing "the accidental 'connect' and 'disconnect' between overheard utterances" (2003, 141). Beginning with his editorship of Outburst (1961–63), Sophie Seita has shown how Raworth's editorial work connected international little-magazine and small-press networks between poets writing in different languages; Infolio (1986–91) boasted contributors from seventeen different countries (Seita 2017, 24–25). As this suggests, Spanish was not the only language community with which Raworth engaged: friends and fellow writers in French, Italian, Swedish, and Hungarian constituted an international small-press community sustained by correspondence, generosity, and extra-capitalist modes of circulation and exchange. But in the formative decade 1965–75, learning and translating from Spanish were central to the evolution of Raworth's poetics. The decolonial energies of Latin American poetry enabled the elaboration of an internationalist late-modernism beyond European or transatlantic affiliations, combining avant-garde experiment and revolutionary struggle.

Raworth realized poetry could be as interesting as jazz when, in 1958, he stumbled upon Evergreen Review No. 2 ("The San Francisco Scene") in Zwemmer's bookshop on Charing Cross Road (Raworth 2009, 104). But his horizons quickly extended to encompass a fully hemispheric American poetry. Two years later, Raworth encountered Edward Dorn's cowboy poem "Vaquero"—whose title indicates the Mexican origins of much Western iconography—in the first issue of Between Worlds: An international magazine of creativity (1960–62), edited between Puerto Rico and Denver by Gilbert Neiman. Coming [End Page 6] across the Western Spanglish stylings of "Vaquero" in this transnational textual space impelled Raworth to initiate correspondence by asking Dorn for contributions to his magazine Outburst in November 1960; he later found the poem printed again, as he told Dorn in a letter of February 11, 1961, in "an old copy of Evergreen (No. 5)" while rummaging "in Charing Cross Road bookstore" (Dorn Papers, Box 51, Folder 7/11/60). Raworth remembered Between Worlds as "a magazine possibly unique in having the postal addresses of contributors instead of tedious biographical notes" (2013, 9). The practical usefulness of being able to contact contributors represented an invitation into an international community whose politics of generous solidarity, "between worlds," anticipated longer-lasting projects such as Margaret Randall and Sergio Mondragón's internationalist poetry journal El corno emplumado (1962–69), edited from Mexico City with a grandly ambitious hemispheric outlook. And indeed, in 1965 Randall accepted an early Raworth poem for El corno's fifteenth issue (July 1965), "There Are Lime-Trees in Leaf on the Promenade." Hesitant about submitting work for publication, "i can't really see whether it works," Raworth worried in a letter to Dorn on May 31, 1965, "but i did send it to el corno, the first time i sent anything anywhere, so i'll see what happens" (Dorn Papers, Box 21, Folder 344). If, in the first half of the 1960s, Raworth's late-modernism was internationalist through both aesthetic and political conviction, then already it looked to Latin America as the region of the world where the avant-garde and political vanguard seemed to make common cause in the figure of the poet-militant.

By the mid-1960s, these concerns coalesced with poet and critic Donald Davie's aim to create a multilingual community of scholarship and practice at the University of Essex, founded in 1961 at Wivenhoe Park, near Colchester. In its early years the University of Essex represented an extraordinary educational and political experiment. Its first vice-chancellor, the Hispanist Albert Sloman, looked kindly on interdisciplinary collaboration, and its MA in Literary Translation was the first in the country (Boll 2016, 53). Essex was a key center for the expansion of Latin American Studies in Britain, expressing the need for an intellectual response to the profound sociopolitical questions raised by the Cuban Revolution of 1959 (52). In 1968 the literary critic Jean Franco was appointed professor of Latin American Studies, again the first in Britain. "The walls between subjects were to be taken down," as Marina Warner (2014) [End Page 7] remembers the noble intentions that motivated the Department's genesis: "English Literature was to be read alongside Russian and American, North and South, all in their original languages."

Donald Davie invited Raworth to take a degree at Essex on the strength of his first book, The Relation Ship (1966); Brotherston stressed to Dorn in an undated memo (later passed on to its subject with a handwritten note) that Raworth's application would be well-received "if he were […] interested In Latin America" (Raworth Papers, Box 9). Davie headed up the new Department of Literature and, making the most of the expansive moment, also arranged for Pacheco to spend the 1967/68 academic year at Essex as Visiting Fellow, a post held the previous year by Dorn. Writing to Pacheco in formal Spanish on January 11, 1967, Davie assured him that neither perfect English nor a university title were necessary, being much less important than his poetic work (Pacheco Papers, BoxB-001291, Folder 3). As one of the department's Hispanists and a major figure in the development of Comparative Literature, Gordon Brotherston—an expert in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica and collaborator with Dorn on several major translation projects—took over the logistical arrangements from March until the Pachecos' arrival in September 1967 (Pacheco Papers, BoxB-001291, Folder 3). More importantly, in a letter of May 24, 1967, he sought Pacheco's advice about purchasing Mexican literature, newspapers, and magazines for the new library, thus building up Essex's intellectual resources in a deliberately international direction (Pacheco Papers, BoxB-001291, Folder 5). In a letter to Pacheco on March 22, 1967, Brotherston enclosed course materials for the Latin American Studies program to which Pacheco would contribute, within the umbrella of

Estudios Comparativos, cuyo objeto es la comparación de la sociedad y la civilización británicas con la sociedad y la civilización de otras regiones escogidas, alcanzándose así una visión más profunda de la realidad británica, y además, conocimientos más perfectos de las otras regiones estudiadas.

(Pacheco Papers, BoxB-001291, Folder 5)

Comparative Studies, whose purpose is the comparison of British society and civilization with the society and civilization of other selected regions, in this way achieving a deeper vision of British reality and, as well, more perfect knowledge of the other regions studied.4

The grandeur of this vision was to be translated into practice by a group of British academics with revolutionary leanings. Jean Franco [End Page 8] and the young scholar Mike Gonzalez, especially, supported Latin American national liberation struggles in the global context of decolonization and Tricontinental solidarity. Brotherston's interest in Indigenous literatures articulated a comparable politics that sought to understand the continuity and deep history of Mesoamerican culture on its own terms. This collective advanced a politicized Latin American studies in Britain, welcoming and learning from engaged writers such as Pacheco, whose poems about Essex were, as he wrote Raworth from Mexico City on January 4, 1968, "llenos, como te imaginaras, de una enorme nostalgia por Inglaterra—i.e. por algunos lugares y algunos amigos de Inglaterra" (Pacheco Papers, BoxB-001292, Folder 6; "full, as you might imagine, of a great nostalgia for England—i.e. for certain places and certain friends in England"). This "nostalgia incesante" ("incessant nostalgia") for the "amigos ingleses" ("English friends") made during his time at Wivenhoe Park was a constant in Pacheco's recollections of Essex after his year as Visiting Fellow came to an end, as he wrote the Mexican poet Marco Antonio Montes de Oca, then himself in Essex, in November 1969 (Pacheco Papers, BoxB-001291, Folder 3).5 If in Essex "estuve en Arcadia" ("I was in Arcadia"), as Pacheco remembered much later, then it was the subsequent knowledge of the presence of death in the garden that confirmed Wivenhoe Park as a locus for nostalgia and model of artistic community. As we will see, upon returning to Mexico in summer 1968, the "dragón de la política" ("political dragon") was poised to strike (Pacheco 2008).

Pacheco's friendship with Raworth was of great importance to both poets. His regard for Raworth's poetry was such, he told him in November 1968, that "no creo que exista en Inglaterra y en tu generación un poeta mejor que tú. He releído tus libros y cada vez los encuentro más excelentes" (Pacheco Papers, BoxB-001291, Folder 4; "I do not believe that in England and of your generation there exists a better poet than you. I have re-read your books and I find them each time yet more excellent"). As their mutual friend Gonzalez wrote Pacheco in January 1969, his translations of Raworth's poems—which Gonzalez consulted at the Raworths' house in comparison with the English originals, in a touching image of collective reading—seemed to him to have been composed by Pacheco in Spanish (Pacheco Papers, Box B-001291, Folder 7). So alike were they in sensibility, as Pacheco relayed Gonzalez's observation to Raworth on March 27, 1969, that a "tipo de comunicación no-verbal" ("kind of nonverbal communication") existed between them [End Page 9] (Pacheco Papers, BoxB-001292, Folder 1). Gonzalez's description of the unspoken connection between the two poets is closely echoed by Cristina Pacheco, in email correspondence with the author of this article on 31 October 2020, who remembers the friendship between Raworth and her husband as "una especie de diálogo entre dos silencios que se desvanecieron a través de la poesía" ("a sort of dialogue between two silences that faded out through poetry"). This cluster of relationships, forged between Dorn's arrival as Visiting Fellow in autumn 1965, via the campus uprising of May '68, and into the early 1970s, later spread out geographically. But its members frequently referred back to what Pacheco described nostalgically to Raworth in November 1968 as "el oasis de Wivenhoe" (Pacheco Papers, BoxB-001291, Folder 4; "the oasis of Wivenhoe").

With Gonzalez headed to Mexico filled with enthusiasm for what he described to Pacheco in January 1969 as the starker alignment of advanced literature and political struggle against the forces of empire (Pacheco Papers, BoxB-001291, Folder 7) and Jean Franco being invited to Cuba in January 1969 as a short story judge of the tenth Casa de Las Américas prize, as Raworth informed Pacheco in December 1968 (Pacheco Papers, BoxB-001291, Folder 7), by the end of the decade the community formed at Essex looked to revolutionary América for a synthesis of political and artistic meaning adequate to the moment. I now trace Raworth's work in these terms through his correspondence with Pacheco between 1968–73, from Granada to Mexico City.

GRANADA "IN NAHUATL"

During his second term at Essex, Raworth spent April and May 1968 in Spain, at the University of Granada, ostensibly to improve his Spanish. The experience was, he wrote the poet Lee Harwood, "a load of shit" (Raworth 1968). Yet despite its staid late-Francoist environment, Granada yielded the bulk of the poems that would comprise his third collection, Lion Lion, published in 1970 by Trigram Press with the dedication "For Ed Dorn, Piero Heliczer, and José Emilio Pacheco." These poems were concerned with the processes and politics of language learning, offset, in the volatile Days of May, by subordinate resistance to the proper ordering of Spanish as an imperial language, both on the Iberian Peninsula and in the Americas. Such an oppositional attitude was perhaps conditioned by social experiences of everyday prurience and repression in Granada, which [End Page 10] Raworth reported humorously back to Brotherston in May 1968 (Gordon Brotherston Papers). Yet Raworth looked, too, beyond the stultified codes of late-fascist Spain to the abstract visual signs of Moorish architecture and to a first invocation of the Mexican Indigenous language Nahuatl.

In Spain in early May 1968, Raworth tried out his Spanish in a handwritten note to excuse not having written Pacheco a proper letter, due to work at the University of Granada being left to the last minute. "En vez de escribir una carta ahora, les envío todo el trabajo que he hecho despues de salí [sic] de Inglaterra" ("Instead of writing a letter now, I'm sending you all the work I've done since I left England"), he wrote, enclosing poems later included in Lion Lion: numbers one, two, and three of the "Provence" sequence, "King of the Snow," and "The Lemon Tree" (Pacheco Papers, BoxB-001291, Folder 5). Mexico and Mexican literature remained in view, however, with Raworth reporting enthusiastically to Pacheco on May 20, 1968 about reading Juan Rulfo's experimental prose fiction: the novel Pedro Páramo (1955) and the story "Nos han dado la tierra" ["They Have Given Us the Land"] in the collection El llano en llamas (1953) [The Plain in Flames] (Pacheco Papers, BoxB-001291, Folder 6). Rulfo's haunted tales of the west-central Mexican state of Jalisco's burning plain, in which violence and patronage conspire to deny the redistributive demands of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920), may have rhymed for the student of Spanish with the heat-baked Andalusian landscapes that open "The Lemon Tree," where "across the bare plain dogs pass in the sun / pepsi-colon say the signs and breakW-ater" (Raworth 2003, 57). The decadence of Franco's dictatorship is here expressed as a commercial lassitude manifested by misreading the landscape's signs.

Such polysemic play, error, and reinterpretation are integral to Lion Lion's account of language learning, a process in which ordinary activities are cut through with continual recourse to dictionary and grammar book:

i am learning spanishbut in granada we buy before we trytiene gracia he said: gracia (f) grace,attraction; favour; kindness; jest,witticism; pardon, mercy; pleasantmanner; obligingness, willingness.(pl.) thanks, thank you

(Raworth 2003, 58) [End Page 11]

For the language-learner, any apparently daily linguistic exchange, such as here, in a shop or market stall, is a source of both discomfort and possibility. Consulting the dictionary only adds to uncertainty, as latent meanings of the flexible idiom "tiene gracia" (it is funny, it is charming) concatenate out from the most everyday expressions, leading to generative misunderstandings. Here, the lexical journey maps the association of grace with thanks onto social hospitality and levity of manner—at odds with the notoriously dour granadino temperament, which Raworth complained to Brotherston on May 17, 1968, made it hard to find people with whom to speak in Spanish (Gordon Brotherston Papers).

The form of the vocabulary list also underlies the poem "Lemures," which sardonically extrapolates an entry for "L" from its title's Spanish plural form of "lemur," bringing together "lovat" (a muted green shade in tweed and tartan), "lemniscus" (a bundle of sensory fibers in the brain stem) and "franz lehar," the Austro-Hungarian composer (Raworth 2003, 52). As in several poems of this period, the juxtaposition of disparate elements suggests ways of sequencing language other than coherent exposition by a speaking voice. Connections between these words might be governed by an obscure process combining chance and codified selection. But the different sensory dimensions to which they appeal—touch and texture, the material composition of neurological processes, and music—sketches the lexical coordinates of the way the brain processes language, in which words span a spectrum between the symbolic and the auditory. The lowercase subject introduced in the third line then dispenses with the resources of reference, exclaiming "i can't consult it any more," before a process of remembering takes over in the second stanza, introducing another, more distant language:

it's all coming back to me, thanksthat skill again nowand in nahuatl

Nahuatl is the Uto-Aztecan language family of the Nahua peoples of the Valley of Mexico, most associated with the Aztec empire, the last pre-Columbian Nahuatl-speaking civilization. The "skill" that is "coming back" in Nahuatl suggests the return of cultures overlaid by the continuity of the Spanish colonial enterprise: first the inhabitants of Al-Ándalus then the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Across Lion Lion, modern Spain is cut through with images [End Page 12] associated with the waves of historical anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic, and anti-Republican violence that lie close to the surface.

At this point, as the mysteries mount up, it helps to return to Raworth's title. While their folk origins are somewhat obscure beyond literary references in Horace and Ovid, "lemures" appear to have been unburied spirits or wandering ghosts in Roman popular mythology (Thaniel 1973). Vengeful and amorphous vagrants, they were exorcised by the ritual familial practice of Lemuria. Because they did not receive funerary rites, lemures lack a tomb or a votive inscription. Not inscribed onto the register of the dead, they exist in a dimension beyond orderly language and the patriarchal family and state. These unruly ghosts, then, are "coming back to me," but in the language of another "pre-modern" culture—that of the Mexica. The formal codifications of Spanish and the Latin alphabet are latter-day linguistic impositions over what the poem presents as submerged precursors hostile to institutional logics of power and order and, in the cliché that cannot quite be outdistanced, as avatars of countercivilizational violence. I will return to this point when considering Raworth's second, more sustained experiment with Nahuatl in correspondence with Pacheco, following the massacre of student protestors at Tlatelolco, Mexico City, on October 2, 1968.

Themselves emblems of such violence, the lions that prowl across the book's snowy, light-drenched dreamscapes are associated with childhood and might be "transitional objects," Peter Middleton suggests (2003, 17). But in Granada they assume more particular resonances, which in "The Lemon Tree" crystallize around the Patio de Los Leones at the heart of the Alhambra, the Moorish fortress and palace that was the last redoubt of Muslim Spain. But it seems clear, too, that these motifs operate as points in a network of undeclared meaning that the opening poem, "Lion Lion," warns the reader might not be so easily deciphered as the Spanish words and phrases in the language-learner's reference books:

but nobody can understand the writingin the book they found in the lions' lair

This forbidding meta-poetic prologue warns the reader off hermeneutic maneuvers that seek to fix meaning at any one of the levels at which it might seem to rest: the biographical, the historical, or the linguistic layer negating both with an inscription beyond understanding. One such script could be imagined as the Alhambra's [End Page 13] Nasrid friezes, which decorate "the lions' lair" with ornate symmetrical and repetitive patterning. Indeed, Muslim Spain was a long way from the oppressive reality of the present-day Iberian Peninsula, Raworth joked in a May 17, 1968 letter to Brotherston: "The Alhambra's o.k, but who built it?—Arabs!" (Brotherston Private Papers). The Alhambra's nonfigurative friezes, which in the eyes of late-nineteenth-century design theorist Owen Jones looked ahead to both modernist Orientalism and formal abstraction, may have appealed because their visual grammar seemed to bypass the expressive self-articulation embedded in language use.

If the Alhambra suggested rhymes between medieval Islamic art and modernist abstraction, then Dada, Cubism, and Surrealism more directly shaped what Raworth had "pretty clearly stated" as his method in the lecture-hall poem "El Barco del Abismo," written in Granada but not included in Lion Lion (Raworth 2009, 166). The poem is organized by an italicized prose key below, which date-stamps each line within the activities of the period May 9–14, 1968, giving a private account of the week when the student-worker uprising gathered pace in France, leading up to the General Strike of May 13. The poem's title, runs the gloss, is culled from "Sr. Martínez Ruiz' Latin American History lecture": "I was so impressed I stopped listening" (Raworth 2003, 42). This sets the tone for the drift of document and attention, limited by the coordinates of "boredom," "trust," and "fun," which peg out Raworth's magpie method (Alpert 1972, 39). The first line was written on a coach during an excursion to an avocado plantation; the scene of the second is midnight of the same day, an hour which occasions introspective estrangement when faced with "my image i do not recognise in the mirror"; "That was a strange day," runs the crib. And so on. Lines from a poem by the poet's four-year-old son, a semi-legible fragment of a letter, and again, the haphazard felicities of the vocab book highlight the arbitrariness of systems of language just as well as contemporaneous structuralist theory. In place of alphabetical organization, in this case the words are ordered by theme: lexical permutations of "el sabotaje" (sabotage) have been grouped with "camuflar" (to camouflage), while in the same book "in a list of words to do with crime, police, the law, etc. was the Spanish for 'tapered trousers'" (Raworth 2003, 42).

For the interwar avant-garde, such comic and surreal juxtapositions in found language, scrapbook and collage media, and the transgression of the limits of intelligibility had served political ends not easily distinguishable from aesthetic strategies designed to [End Page 14] discomfort. As Harwood points out in the foreword to his translations of Tristan Tzara, the "marriage" of the dialectical goalposts of Surrealism and Marxism, of dream and revolution, was not inconsistent in the Parisian Communist circles of André Breton and César Vallejo (2005, 10). Indeed, Harwood notes, Dada was motivated by the "insistence that words and actions should be the same, that value should again be returned to a language emptied of content, and that poetry itself should create a permanent atmosphere of openness and active change" (9). In Lion Lion, this milieu is invoked by the poem "South America," whose Parisian setting locates itself in the temporary artistic home to Latin American poets and painters Vicente Huidobro, César Vallejo, and Diego Rivera in the 1920s and '30s. Peter Robinson proposes that the poem was prompted by Raworth's translations of the Chilean avant-garde poet Vicente Huidobro (1893–1948) for the Penguin Book of Latin American Verse (1971).6 This location of the poem within the twin contexts of Raworth's live interest in and translation of Latin American poetry and Paris's central role in the global uprisings of 1968's Days of May are reconciled in "the poetry of South America by Vallejo and Neruda," in which "'historical' avant-garde styles and a commitment to revolutionary change most coincided" (Robinson 2003, 64).

In May 1968, the impetus to reconcile the avant-garde with the political vanguard was pressing. Later in the month, trying to get up to speed with the rapidly unfolding events, Raworth complained separately to Pacheco (May 20, 1968) and to Brotherston (May 17 and 23, 1968) that no one was telling him very much about the situation in Essex because they assumed he already knew what was happening (Pacheco Papers, BoxB-001291, Folder 6; Gordon Brotherston Papers). What news did get through would have indicated that things were coming apart quickly, hastening the internal contradictions of the new University's intellectual and political project, which was pushed beyond interdisciplinary internationalism by a radical student body seeking immediate revolutionary change. Essex was "el Berkeley de Inglaterra" ("England's Berkeley"), as Pacheco (2008) saw it. Although already arranged before the uprising, Davie's departure for the US later in the year marked the limit of the Department of Literature's compromise between a scholarly ideal and the political demands of a revolutionary moment. As Miles Champion notes, the student occupation of Essex, combined with news of the Paris barricades from David Ball, led Raworth to attempt to organize a meeting on campus at Granada (2015, xxiv). [End Page 15] Even this moderately dissident gesture was too much for university authorities, and Raworth "left rather hurriedly after a little political trouble" having "passed my Spanish Exam," as he explained the situation to a doubtless sympathetic Margaret Randall in July 1968 (El corno emplumado Correspondence, Box 6, Folder 15).

In this letter to Randall, Raworth—knowing his audience—enclosed "Venceremos," Lion Lion's penultimate poem, a companion piece and response to Dorn's 1965 poem "Song: Venceremos (for latin america) (for préman sotomayor," which dissects US neocolonial adventurism in South America. Raworth's "Venceremos" is dedicated to Mike Gonzalez: enthusiasm for Latin American decolonial politics within the Essex circle is indicated by these gestures of reciprocal solidarity and in-group reference points. Signaling a turn both toward and away from the politics occasioned by the events of May '68, the poem lugubriously undercuts the rallying optimism of "¡venceremos!" (we will triumph!), the Spanish Republican slogan popularized by Latin America's Canción Nueva (New Song) protest song movement and associated with Guevarist insurgency. The stone lion of the Alhambra has now become a specter of decolonial vengeance, another unsated spirit like the lemures: "death came," but "the audience stayed sitting" while

entering their pores he seized each one of themas they began to cough, to move again, to lap the snow

In this Situationist allegory, a passive audience offers itself on the altar of spectacular violence. In dialogue with the contemporaneous cultural critique of Raoul Vaneigem's The Revolution of Everyday Life (1967) and Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle (1968), these lines present entranced consumers who are themselves literally consumed and dismembered by the lion, which inhabits their bodies while intimating a more visceral ending with the bad pun "pores," suggestive of the cuddly menace of its big-cat paws. The poem's title suggests that the lion has been brought to life as a Guevarist avenging spirit, which wages insurgent struggle on the front of culture—but it is impossible to tell whether this characterization is itself committed or sardonic. Indeed, in this era of decolonial and counter-cultural uprising, such violence was just as likely to be dispensed by states against the revolutionary agitations of their own citizens. In the Mexican context, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party, PRI) regime's bloody suppression of [End Page 16] the student movement at Tlatelolco, the Plaza de Las Tres Culturas (The Square of the Three Cultures: Aztec, Spanish, and modern Mexican), would anchor the next stage of Raworth's poetic engagement with Mexico.

AFTER TLATELOLCO

After the massacre at Tlatelolco, Pacheco wrote Raworth on November 17, 1968 that Mexico was going through "tiempos particularmente difíciles" (Pacheco Papers, BoxB-001291, Folder 4; "particularly difficult times"). On October 2, 1968 the Mexican government ordered the military to fire on unarmed student demonstrators gathered at Tlatelolco; estimations of the number of deaths vary enormously and even basic details remained unclear until the pertinent section of the General Archive of the Nation opened in 2002 (Scherer García and Monsiváis 2004, 7).7 It was not primarily Raworth with whom Pacheco would dissect the causes and consequences of the massacre, however, but with his more militant Essex contact Mike Gonzalez. Seeking to understand the inexplicable events of October 2 in a letter to Gonzalez of October 18, 1968, Pacheco identified three main forces within the student movement: the student vanguard; the "amorfa e inidentificable" ("amorphous and unidentifiable") forces of corruption and reaction within the deep state, in alliance with the CIA; and

estos que podríamos llamar girondinos […] resueltos a morir matando, a inmolarse en la hoguera para que todo arda y de las llamas surja el mundo nuevo. Aquí el guevarismo se une a la mitología náhuatl (los dioses suicidas, la tierra que se deshace y se rehace cada 52 años) y los lugares comunes sobre el mexicano—los mismos que tú y yo rechazamos con el argumento de que la psicología individual no era aplicable a los pueblos—parecen comprobarse: ?no [sic] hay un evidente desprecio por la muerte? Recuerda que en mayo te decía que si lo ocurrido en París sucede en México no hay cuatro muertos sino cuatrocientos, y te hablaba de mi temor a la "tradición" de la violencia, "tradición" que no existe en Cuba ni en Argentina.

(Pacheco Papers, BoxB-001291, Folder 7)

those we could call Girondins […] resolved to die in battle, to immolate themselves in the fire so that everything is set alight and from the flames emerges the new world. Here Guevarism is joined with Nahuatl mythology (the suicide gods, the land that is destroyed and remade every 52 years) and the commonplaces about the Mexican—the same that you and I reject with the argument that individual psychology isn't applicable to a people—seem to prove [End Page 17] themselves: is there not an evident disdain for death? Remember that in May I told you that if what happened in Paris were to occur in Mexico there wouldn't be four deaths but rather four hundred, and I told you of my fear of the "tradition" of violence, "tradition" that does not exist in Cuba nor in Argentina.

The kind of collective psychologizing to which Pacheco refers was crystallized by Octavio Paz's 1950 volume of essays, El labertino de la soledad [The Labyrinth of Solitude], translated by Lysander Kemp for Grove Press in 1961. The dominant narrative of indigeneity that Paz describes is that of state-sponsored mestizaje (mixture), expressed as a hybrid, mestizo, "Aztec" modernity. As in Raworth's Lion Lion, the violence spiraling out of and in response to protest and decolonial struggle is understood not only in the immediate political context but in reference to cultural time and cycles of return that reveal "Guevarism" as the latest iteration of the blood rites that comprise an essentialized version of mexicanidad ["Mexican-ness"]. On November 17, 1968, Pacheco wrote to Raworth that, in the immediate aftermath, the situation called to mind lines from Haniel Long's Interlinear to Cabeza de Vaca (1936), which Raworth had lent to him in Essex: "Into flowers, jewells [sic], blood, plunges the Aztec to forget. Nothing to live for but the round of sacrifice and ritual, the battlefield, the music of sad poets. To destroy the roots of life, what powers equals [sic] fear?" (Pacheco Papers, BoxB-001291, Folder 4). This "Mexican" violence is the primordial language of power in its necropolitical guise (Scherer García and Monsiváis 2004, 144).

In place of direct commentary on the political violence, Raworth's handwritten reply of November 21, 1968 took the form of a further poetic experiment with Nahuatl. "I'm sitting in the library, top floor, looking out over the university. And I just wrote you both a poem":

The Official Cookery Book Says        (for José Emilio and Cristina)TLATELOLCOTLEIQUE?    TOTOLIN    TETL    TLAXCALLIAXCAN?        DISPARADOR        CABEZA DEL PERCUTOR        BALA [End Page 18] VOILA!TOTOLTETLAXCALLI

(Pacheco Papers, BoxB-001291, Folder 7; Raworth 2003, 48)

Later titled "Extract from the Mexican Government Book of Home Cooking," Raworth's parody takes aim at the Mexican state's repression at Tlatelolco by targeting nationalistic pride about official cuisine as a vital component of identity. In the published version Raworth's comic trilingual triangulation—including a cookery-ese international French—asks the reader to decode the recipe, as in "El Barco del Abismo," using a key below the poem:

Tlatelolco: the Square of the Three Cultures; Tleique?: what things?; Totolin: chicken; Tetl: stone; Tlaxcalli: bread; Axcan?: then?; Totoltetlaxcalli: omelette.

Any dutiful cook or reader will bring together all the ingredients and implements before they begin: chicken (and so egg); stone (molcajete and tejolote, mortar and pestle for grinding, hence tetl, stone); and tlaxcalli (maize tortilla, the functional equivalent of bread). But the recipe's method is replaced by the violent Spanish interjections "DISPARADOR" ("trigger"), "CABEZA DEL PERCUTOR" ("hammer head") and "BALA" ("bullet"). These guide the reader's culinary procedure to another layer of translation, into the English proverb that you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs, an expression used to justify repression of the kind the poem obliquely addresses. (The phrase's translational origins in counter-revolutionary violence can be traced to its passage from French to English in the 1790s, but it was given new meaning during the Cold War when it described the violent excesses of both revolutionary states and US-sponsored dictatorships.)8 Raworth's playful deployment of Nahuatl in dialogue with Pacheco is positioned as external to and distant from the contemporaneous politicization of Nahuatl in an emergent Chicano poetics. But set within a continuum of experimental practice, it sits at an angle to what Jim Keller identifies as "Aztec-Chicano serial poetry," developed by Mexican-American poets who found in the Aztec codices a formal "model of a highly complex, pictorial and poetic serial form of political dissent, an ancient, pluralist mythology capable of inspiring the contemporary formation of a new transnational imagined community" (2009, 24).

For Raworth, Nahuatl perhaps encoded a different sort of resistance and transnational community, in which the linguistic challenge to the reader enacts an uneasy politics in parallel with the [End Page 19] contemporary emergence of ethnopoetics in the United States, but without the problematic drive to anthologize and "give voice to" Indigenous writing. Rather, the status of Mesoamerican words in his late '60s poetry suggests the working-through of relations between language, decolonial politics, and state power, in conjunction with Pacheco. Raworth returned to the Mesoamerican theme in "How Can You Throw It All Away on this Ragtime?"—a poem enclosed in a May 11, 1969 letter to the Pachecos expressing serious doubt about the worth of his writing (Pacheco Papers, BoxB-001291, Folder 4). This poem stages one of the scenes of interrupted attention that are frequent in Raworth's poetry, as the "sound track" of memory "cut flickered to the past connection" for a listening mind. The everyday recollection of the first couplet, however, is superseded in the next by a deeper temporal echo:

the twelfth period begins with one lizardcold blades of itzcoliuhqui

The "twelfth period" in the 260-day Aztec tonalpohualli (count of days)—part of the Mesoamerican calendrical architecture divided into twenty trecenas or periods of thirteen days—is that of One Malinalli (Grass), and is associated with Itztlacoliuhqui, the deity of frost and lord of the thirteen days delimited by One Lizard and Thirteen Vulture. The god's Nahuatl name refers to blades of stone or obsidian and by extension the spines of desert cactus, owls, and darkness (Martínez and Mikulska 2016, 18). These "cold blades" are the means by which the deity brings life to an end and ushers in winter, an important marker in the agricultural year (Brotherston 2003, 74). In the tonalamatl divinatory almanac based on the 260-day calendar, One Lizard, or Cipactli, stands at the saurian prehistory of Mesoamerican time, a "hazard" whose "telluric strength" has the "capacity to raise skyward whole strata of earth as they were raised by the gods at the start of creation" (Brotherston 1992, 226). In turn, Pacheco's invocation of "the land that is destroyed and remade every 52 years" in his October 18, 1968 letter to Gonzalez maps the longer duration of the 52-solar-year Calendar Round onto the eruption of political violence into modern historical time.

"Who entered whose history?" Brotherston asks in his 1992 study Book of the Fourth World. Mesoamerican configurations of time, he contends, amount to "the most effective means of resisting the imperial sum through which the Fourth World is 'discovered' and [End Page 20] simply added to the other three." Raworth's invocation of the tonalpohualli anticipates Brotherston's scholarly injunction to "recognize its [the Fourth World's] local historiography, […] the rhythms and phases of time they propose" (Brotherston 1992, 103). This insistence on temporal sovereignty is further suggested by a fragmentary text enclosed to Dorn in the "Letters from Yaddo," Raworth remarking, "it is really scandalous how we jump up and down on the international date line. i follow the sun—and they call them the backward nations" (2009, 83). Against the developmental logic of imperial time, Raworth's heliotropic affiliation aligns him with the temporal rhythms of this América, extending back into a pre-Columbian hemispheric continuity beyond nation and offering an alternative political vocabulary for its present and future. Around the pivotal year 1968, the ambivalent decolonial currency of Nahuatl appeared to offer a resolution to tensions between political commitment and the neo-avant-garde turn to language—albeit in a playful manner that keeps contemporaneous ethnopoetic voicings of indigeneity and emergent Chicano nationalism at arm's length.

On a more prosaic level, at the end of the decade the Americas represented for Raworth an escape route from English small-mindedness, the slavishness of the academy, and the precarity of remunerative work. "I look with increasing boredom on everything I've ever written," he wrote Cristina Pacheco in June 1969, "and search it in vain for anything real" (Raworth 17 June 1969). After the uprisings of 1968, Essex was dull and increasingly institutionalized; Ana Luisa Vega, translator and wife of the Mexican poet Marco Antonio Montes de Oca—who, like Pacheco, was invited as Visiting Fellow—eventually succumbed to what Raworth joked to Pacheco in April 1970 should be called "Essex depression" (Pacheco Papers, BoxB-001292, Folder 3). Raworth's mistrust of institutions in general and higher education in particular led him to feel, as he told Pacheco in March 1969, that he "should never have snapped at that University illusion" (Pacheco Papers, BoxB-001292, Folder 1). In May 1969, a year on from drifting off to lectures on Latin American history in Granada, education seemed to be repeating and emptying clichés of the historical avant-gardes, unaware of the irony: "i sat yesterday watching 143 students writing in their notebooks things like 'dada' was against universities and they will no doubt write beautiful examination papers" (Pacheco Papers, BoxB-001291, Folder 4).

Raworth's letters to the Pachecos at this time express profound uncertainty about the value of his writing, or writing at all, of the [End Page 21] sort frequently cited in "Letters from Yaddo" two years later, in which he described his 1960s work to Dorn as a "museum of fragments of truth" that "smell of vanity, like the hunter's trophies on the wall" (Raworth 2009, 115). The Pachecos offered a disillusioned Raworth practical support and friendly concern during the spring and summer of 1969, urging him to do the special MA offered by Brotherston, despite his reservations about academic endeavor and constant financial worry. This at least could be remedied in the short term by the maligned but tolerated hackwork with which Pacheco was too familiar. As well as translations, Pacheco advised in August 1969, Brotherston could be a contact for reviewing gigs at the Times Literary Supplement, and Dorn for well-paying North American magazines such as Evergreen Review, which "te aceptarán gustosamente poemas y artículos" (Pacheco Papers; BoxB-001291, Folder 4; "will accept your poems and articles with pleasure").

In the years following the Pachecos' departure, the Raworths made plans to visit Mexico, always frustrated by poor health or lack of funds. If a never-realized reading tour that had looked likely in spring 1969 were to make any money, he wrote the Pachecos in December 1968, "I'll try and get down to see you. Otherwise Val and I will see what we can do next summer" (Pacheco Papers, BoxB-001291, Folder 7). Opportunities in the US came through in 1970 and the following years. During a solitary spell as a fellow at the Yaddo writers' colony in upstate New York in spring 1971, the relative proximity of Mexico was seen through the frozen frame of a stereoscope, as he told Dorn:

I went into the house, and in a nest of drawers found a stereoscope and hundreds of pictures. I spent two hours staring into those worlds, picking the sepia pictures at random. Going from "10802—Snow-Crowned Popocatapetl and Ixtaccahuatl Guarding Cathedral, Puebla, Mexico" […] to "Cuban Lovers—Courting Through The Barred Windows."

These miniature windows into other worlds enabled the nineteenth-century armchair tourist to travel by looking through doubled lenses at a pair of stereoscopic images so that the right- and left-eye views of the scene are sutured in the stereo window at the center of the picture. On the reverse of the images, explicatory text provided the connoisseur with contextual detail to better understand the image: the colonial city of Puebla, south of Mexico City, is known as "The City of Angels" due to its concentration of churches [End Page 22] and can be found situated on "a beautiful plain bordered everywhere by the enrapturing splendour of mountain majesty. […] From here can be seen three of the world's greatest extinct volcanoes, Popocatapetl, Ixtaccahuatl and the peak of Orizaba" (Raworth 2009, 106–7). This antiquated technology of the leisure economy is too framed and fixed for Raworth's post-Cubist eye, its fragmented perspective joined too easily by the hashing together of contiguous visual fields. The stereoscope offers a facile, mechanically repeatable fusion that might masquerade as the truth at the center of language, "where art is pure politics," which Raworth lamented to Dorn that he had not yet been able to approach in ten years of work (Raworth 2009, 115). False center or otherwise, perhaps the glimpse of Mexico through the viewfinder was enticement enough. Two years later, in summer 1973, the Raworths drove from what Raworth described to Brotherston in April 1972 as the "drastically boring" Bowling Green, Ohio, where they had been living, to Texas; from there, they took the train down to Mexico City (Gordon Brotherston Papers; Raworth 1990, 8).

THE MIRROR AND THE MASK

The Raworths' exodus from "ohio, not an allegory" is documented by "A Fall in French Furniture," a poem included in Act (1973):

isn't that breath takingmexico rattles rhymically

my lifeinside a mirrored spheremy skin mirrored

The figures of mirror and mask govern the poetry Raworth wrote in Mexico, which can be seen as a bridge between the lyric work of the 1960s and the skinnier, faster, extended sequences dating from the mid-1970s, Ace (1974) and Writing (1982). They refract any familiar literary dualism associated with these tropes into a fragmented concern with self, multiplicity, and nonidentity—terms negotiated in reference to ideas of mexicanidad and the poet's divided sense of "my / self – mexican." Mexico was central, therefore, to the crisis of stable relationships between language, identity, and world explored in Raworth's work of the early 1970s.

The Pachecos met the Raworths at the station, and the Montes de Oca helped with finding a house at Calle del 57, in a working-class [End Page 23] barrio east of the center between the airport and the Formula One circuit, two emblems of 1950s Mexican modernity. The neighbors accepted them as non-Americans who were not wealthy. One of the children, Bruno, lined up for beans and went shoe-shining in the mornings with a friend named Chuco (Raworth 1990, 8–9). "What I see of the 'artistic/literary' world looks rather how I imagine post w.w. I middle-Europe to have been," Raworth told Dorn on August 2, 1973: "beautiful mornings and rainy afternoons" (Dorn Papers, Box 21, Folder 344). But the Raworths' spell in Mexico was cut unexpectedly short by a domestic gas explosion in which Valarie was badly burned; after applying the aloe-vera-based treatment Verde Brillante, her face "looked like the jade Palenque mask in the museum" (Raworth 1990, 9). This natural home remedy, Valarie estimates, combined with the kindness and everyday visits of the Pachecos—especially Cristina, who "could not have been a more loving and generous friend"—healed the burns better than the expensive American hospital's more "advanced" methods could have done (V. Raworth, email correspondence with the author, November 2, 2020). Running out of money, the situation was saved by a timely job offer at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago: Ted Berrigan was going to Essex for a year, and Raworth could fill his post. This stroke of fortune was nonetheless a source of regret. "Mexico was great, really for me, for us all," Valarie wrote the Dorns on September 12, 1973, after arriving in Chicago: "Aside from the big boom [the explosion] I really liked it; The kids were great & played outside in the gutter all day, ate tacos, went on the Metro & were generally very self-sufficient" (Dorn Papers, Box 21, Folder 344).

The Raworths' hasty departure by air to Texas in August 1973 is documented by handwritten notes on an Aeroméxico feedback slip, which include drafts of the poems "Language," "On My Holidays," "Los Angeles," and "The City," followed by numbered handwritten clean copies of six poems in the same green ink, adding to the above "The Only Sound in Dallas was the Mexican Beans Jumping" and "Mexico." These and other drafts in Raworth's Mexican papers would be distributed across collections from the 1970s and '80s. But the bulk of the Mexican work went into a new sequence of poems called The Mask, which Raworth remembered writing "with pleasure […] by a first-floor window at a carved wooden desk, lit at night by a lamp in the shape of a polar bear" (Raworth 1990, 8). The Mask makes heavy use of the asterisk as a typographical division that plays on the figure of the star in cinematic discourse. Another friend [End Page 24] from Essex, John Barrell, observes that its first poem, "The Conscience of a Conservative" (dedicated "for José Emilio and Cristina"), employs "the discontinuous processes of cinematic narrative, frame by frame, sequence by sequence, to raise questions about whether we can lay claim […] to a continuous identity" (1991, 390). The asterisks manage disjunctive shifts between "frames" or stills that encourage reflective space and time around language and allow each stanzaic cluster to hover between discrete and continuous modes (Perril 2003, 123–24). In subsequent work this half measure would be removed, allowing enjambments to do this mediative work as the lines spill down the page.

The first two poems in The Mask were written out longhand in the Mexico City notebooks of July–August 1973: "The Conscience of a Conservative" and "Ulysses: or Trotsky's Death," dedicated to the Montes de Oca (Trotsky was assassinated in his house in the south of Mexico City in 1940). While there are few substantial differences between these handwritten versions and the printed poems, two versions of a prose draft of "Ulysses: or Trotsky's Death," toward the rear of the July notebook, fill out the conceptual areas around the pared-down lines in the poem itself. The fifth stanza ("what changes / in the reflection / of colours" [Raworth 2003, 164]) is elucidated by the first paragraph, which asks

what changes in the reflection of colours? in the reflection of shape? what are the contents of emotion behind (why "behind"?) the mirror. "He looks at himself so much he wants you to have his face."

(Raworth Papers, Box 4)

There were "plenty of mirrors" in the house at Calle del 57 (Raworth 1990, 8). This accidental fact may have prompted continued self-examination, extending that project from the "Letters from Yaddo," where Raworth proposed to Dorn that correctly describing the "self" would cause it to "wither and blow away" (Raworth 2009, 125). In The Mask, notation cedes to reflection as the principal mode of self-evacuation: the "glass / before a mirror / in space" of "Ulysses: or Trotsky's Death" points to the "reflection" of artistic forms—"shape," "colours"—but as mutability, rather than echo (Raworth 2003, 164). The mirror stands not for binary reflection between original and copy, self and representation, but is just another angle in a process of refractive change without conclusion, more akin to its Mesoamerican ritualistic meaning as a reflective surface that grants not insight and self-knowledge but dark and uncertain intimations. [End Page 25] This is the mirror in its Mesoamerican aspect as the deity Tezcatlipoca, the clouded obsidian mirror, who was also the plumed serpent Quetzalcoatl's double and "archopponent" in the foundational Toltec myth of the vanished god (Brotherston 1992, 156). Likewise, in the Popol Vuh, the creation epic of the K'iche' Maya, the figure of the "face of a mirror that is breathed upon" stands for divine limits placed on human vision and understanding (Tedlock 1996, 148).

Mirrors can be "sites of translation, deformation zones," argues the poet Don Mee Choi in her essay on translation's "power-takeover" that reveals speech to be a "motherless" occupied territory (2020, 10, 6, 7). They are "translation surfaces," she writes, "site[s] of various reflections, languages […] where things are already mirrored, re-represented" (13, 10). If the mirror of language reflects multiple versions of the self, processes of translation refract these versions beyond the dualistic loop of self and other. "As a foreigner, as foreign words myself," writes Choi, "I seek incomprehensibility—a mirror image of myself." (17).

The mirror is implicitly counterpointed by its figural opposite in The Mask, both as a projection and concealment of "face." Its title might well itself reflect Paz's chapter on "Mexican Masks" in The Labyrinth of Solitude, or indeed the "jade Palenque" death mask of the Mayan ruler Pakal the Great, which the Raworths had seen at the National Museum of Anthropology and later compared with Valarie's jade green face when daubed with "Verde Brillante." In Paz's pessimistic reading, for the self-divided Mexican the mask is no longer a metaphor for the symbolic relationship, as it had been before colonization, a shamanistic articulation through which the divinities communicated social order amongst humans and nonhumans (Markman and Markman 1989, xxi). Instead, Paz writes, the "remote" modern Mexican uses "his face" and "his smile" as social masks, which maintain a "barbed and courteous" solitude in which "everything serves him as a defense: silence and words, politeness and disdain, irony and resignation. […] everything can hurt him, including words and the very suspicion of words" (Paz 1985, 29).

Raworth refracts Paz's binary interior/exterior conception of national-psychological identity in "Ulysses: or Trotsky's Death," finding "no faces / only facts / and facets," a fragmentation suggesting multiple possible versions of "my / self – mexican" (Raworth 2003, 164). His friend and contemporary Douglas Oliver, who also attended Essex as a mature student in the 1970s, assessed the intent behind his own writing as showing that "any political flaws in the [End Page 26] public arena also reside in the "self"—in "myself"—and therefore inside the area of the poem-as-art too" (Oliver 1996, 1). Moving into the 1970s, British poets, including Raworth, who were concerned with the fragmentation of lyric identity turned away from the political disappointments of the late '60s and toward language in a dialectical move that sought to efface the "I" by embedding it within a radically indeterminate poetics of pronominal drift. In the case of Raworth, however, the "political flaws" in the "public arena" of Mexico's experience of '68 combined, in Mexico City in the early 1970s, with figures of interiority culled from Mesoamerican deep histories and the state discourses of mestizaje and mexicanidad. In the "July 18, 1973" notebook, clusters of lines from "Ulysses: or Trotsky's Death" are jotted down into rough columns under the first prose paragraph, quoted above, and around the page. But the majority of that page is taken up with a second prose paragraph that contains the kernel of the poem's central concern with time, identity, and language:

Lingering in consciousness. The heat. Using words totally without trust their shapes, sounds, reverberations, echoes, similarities seem sufficient. Trust in meaning leaves no space: digging to find a time cache from the future. What I seek is a blur—not the clarity of simple-mindedness but a permanent space open to every change of language. My existence must be minimal in its force: to emerge from my dream briefly: to write: to dream awake.

(Raworth Papers, Box 4)

Perhaps again picking up on Paz's description of the "remote" Mexican's uneasy relationship with "words and the very suspicion of words," here the liberation from "trust in meaning" allows words to be no more or less than the material patterns of their "shapes, sounds, reverberations, echoes, similarities" in unending flux. Fixity of duration—"boredom"—must be eluded because, as The Mask's "Coda" makes clear, "time is frozen light," and, as a sun-follower, light is Raworth's figure for endless mutability or "fun" (Raworth 2003, 201).

The refusal to freeze time, as it had been fixed in the image of Puebla framed by the stereoscope's viewfinder at Yaddo, repudiates the archaeological modernism practiced on both sides of the Atlantic. As he had told Alpert the year before, in place of "questing after knowledge," in the manner of Pound, Olson and Prynne, Raworth sought only "to be completely empty and then see what sounds" (Alpert 1972, 39). Digging to find a "time cache from the future" unearths only a repository of congealed violence, which the poem [End Page 27] enacts in the visual-phonetic play on "time / cache / time / ache": the time capsule forced into graphological alignment with the pain of historical duration (Raworth 2003, 164). But the suspicion remains that identity cannot exist otherwise because "i: / am / in the past" (170). Writing, as a refraction of self, constitutes a textual betrayal of the present by fixing it, however momentarily, in time, translating light into history.

Raworth's "Mexican" poems of the early '70s like "Self" and, differently, The Mask, develop the poetic theorization of the radical instability of speech acts in his previous collection, Act. They do so not in the academic register of the new critical theory but in a practical mode premised on, to borrow from J. L. Austin, doing things with words. What is the difference between "my / self – mexican" and the "i" that speaks it but that which is "in the past" of already-used language, which as soon as spoken is emptied of content and discarded like the hull of a nut? Caught between past, present, and future, this deliberately minimized subjecthood, Raworth had written Pacheco on March 21, 1969, explained why "I can't use capital letters in poems because I've never really found the beginning" (Pacheco Papers, BoxB-001292, Folder 1). The Mexican work develops this concern with identity, language, and self-estrangement, which in 1968's "El Barco del Abismo" he figured as "my image i do not recognise in the mirror" (Raworth 2003, 42). In The Mask, language games such as the reversal of words perform a temporal rewind, the "Retape" legible within the visual mirror image, "epateRetape," which resists smoothly linear comprehension by manipulating both the signs and the time of reading (Raworth 2003, 163). Like Choi, Raworth "seek[s] incomprehensibility—a mirror image of myself" (Choi 2020, 17), in order to evacuate identity in search of the emptiness that is the truth at the center of language, "where art is pure politics" (Raworth 2009, 115).

Mirror and mask are emblems not of duality but a kind of prismatic reflection beyond binaries of self and other, language and world, in which words cannot be trusted as stable sources of identity but cannot be wholly abandoned, either. They do not index interiority but point outwards beyond individuation toward selfhood as a linguistic construction, as collectively formed through reciprocal correspondence, or in the decolonial terms of Mesoamerican cosmology, as ritual practice. As though looking through a clouded glass, or the dark mirror of translation, Raworth's poetics of the late '60s and early '70s worked through and with Mexican-ness in order to [End Page 28] act out its own estrangement from itself. As I have shown, however, if this fundamental drive toward darkly clouded semantic resistance in Raworth's aesthetic impulse was shaped by Mexico, then it was leavened by the sociality of translation, correspondence, writing, and friendship with Pacheco and others—transcultural media of exchange watchfully resistant to seamless or instrumental regimes of linguistic transfer, reference, and order.

Daniel Eltringham

DANIEL ELTRINGHAM is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of English at the University of Sheffield, working on postwar and contemporary comparative poetics, ecocriticism, and translation. His monograph, based on doctoral research, is Poetry & Commons: Postwar and Romantic Lyric in Times of Enclosure (Liverpool University Press, 2022). He has published work from that project in Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism and Textual Practice. He is coeditor of a forthcoming special issue of Green Letters on "militant ecologies" and co-organizer of a reading group on the same theme. He is also co-organizer of the conference "Poetry in Transatlantic Translation" (Sheffield and Bangor, 2022), the symposium "Poetics in Commons" (Sheffield, 2019), and ASLE-UKI's biennial conference, "Cross Multi Inter Trans" (Sheffield Hallam, 2017). His poetry and translations have been published in a range of journals and anthologies including Ecozona: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment; Dispatches from the Poetry Wars; Protean; Cambridge Literary Review; Black-box Manifold; Poetry Wales; Plumwood Mountain; and Colorado Review. A chapbook of his translation of Alonso Quesada's Scattered Ways was published by Free Poetry (Boise, 2019) and his poetry collection, Cairn Almanac, was published by Hesterglock Press (Bristol, 2017). He coedits Girasol Press, a small publisher that explores handmade poetics and experimental translation.

NOTES

I acknowledge the generous support of The British Academy, whose Postdoctoral Fellowship enabled me to conduct this research. My thanks to Valarie Raworth, Cristina Pacheco, and Gordon Brotherston for permission to reproduce quotations from letters by themselves, Tom Raworth, and José Emilio Pacheco; to the Special Collections library staff at Princeton University, The University of Connecticut, New York University, The University of Sheffield, and The British Library, particularly Melissa Watterworth Batt at the Dodd Center (UConn) and Amanda Bernstein at the Small Press Poetry Collection (Sheffield); and to Lúcia Sá. My thanks also to Rebecca Kosick, Miles Champion, Adam Piette, and Leire Barrera-Medrano, whose comments on the drafts were invaluable, and to the two anonymous reviewers. A version of this article was presented at the virtual colloquy "Avant-Gardes @ Zero Hour: European, American, Transnational" (April 7, 2021). Sam Ladkin set this hare running for me.

1. During his Essex years, Raworth translated poems for Con Cuba (1969), a compilation of Cuban poetry edited by Nathaniel Tarn; revolutionary prose in John Gerassi's Towards Revolution: The Americas (1971); the bulk of the sections covering Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, and Peru for the Penguin Book of Latin American Verse, edited by Enrique Caracciolo-Trejo (1971); and, for his MA thesis, the Chilean surrealist Vicente Huidobro's prose collaborations with the German-French artist Hans Arp, Tres novelas ejemplares (1931), published by Face Press as Save Your Eyes in 2017.

2. In Raworth's Collected Poems this phrase is printed, probably erroneously, "¡que te vayas bien!": an uncommon grammatical usage with a different semantic emphasis (2003, 130).

3. The "British Poetry Revival" is a loose term used to group the resurgence of neo-avant-garde poetries in Britain since the 1960s, first proposed by Tina Morris and Dave Cunliffe in Poetmeat (1965) and formalized by Eric Mottram in the title of the conference "The British Poetry Revival (1960–1974)" at the Polytechnic of Central London (1974); see Eric Mottram (1993) and Robert Shepherd (2005, 35–76).

4. This and subsequent translations from Spanish are mine unless otherwise indicated.

5. See the Essex poems "Copos de nieve sobre Wivenhoe" ["Snowflakes over Wivenhoe"] and "El río Colne en Wivenhoe" ["The River Colne in Wivenhoe"]. Essex had a reciprocal impact on Pacheco, whose intercultural exchanges Isabel Gómez (2019) has theorized through gift, and María Elena Isibasi Pouchin (2019) in terms of Pacheco's work as poet-translator. Pacheco translated four of Raworth's poems for the 31st and final July 1969 issue of El corno emplumado ("The Others," "Two Haiku," "I Die of Thirst Beside the Fountain," and "You've Ruined My Evening / You've Ruined My Life"). In turn, Edward Dorn and Brotherston translated Pacheco's "Árbol entre dos muros" as Tree Between Two Walls, a chapbook published by Black Sparrow Press in 1969.

6. The manuscript of Raworth's translations of Huidobro and Arp was discovered in a cupboard by the poet Philip Terry (2017), whose father Arthur had served as Raworth's examiner at Essex.

7. The events of October 2, 1968 were documented by Elena Poniatowska's oral history La noche de Tlatelolco [The Night of Tlatelolco, 1971] and Pacheco's "Manuscrito de Tlatelolco (2 de octubre 1968)" ["Tlatelolco Manuscript (October 2, 1968)"].

8. See "omelette, n." OED Online. Oxford: Oxford University Press www.oed.com/view/Entry/131187. For instance, Bill Maudlin's 1960 cartoon, "You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs," depicts Nikita Khrushchev and Mao Tse-Tung standing beneath the globe, which is a bomb whose fuse Mao is about to light.

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