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ISBN # 1-882022-38-6. 2000
TITLE: Tottering State
AUTHOR: Tom Raworth
$15.00
ExcerptDescription: Tottering State, Tom Raworth. 240 pages.
Tom Raworth’s lines are “passing near the black hole/in ordinary flat space” radically estranging the visual field by jumping time. This new edition of Tottering State contains additional early poems, and includes the complete text of Writing, long out of print. Robert Creeley has said about Raworth’s poetry: “Tom Raworth is the one who’s truly most interesting to me in England at the moment. I’m fascinated by what he’s doing. He’s an extraordinary poet.”
“The writings in this Tottering State are ardent, wry, wise, brilliant — they are subtle and momentous. They are responsive to the minute as to the massive pressures that language and life exert. They are explorations, not outcomes. And yet they make demands, and consequences continually occur. Some of these consequences are funny (Tom Raworth has a tragedian’s sense of the comic as one of life’s fated inevitabilities), some are frightening or sad. These are among the greatest writings of our times.” — Lyn Hejinian
“In the permanent trouble of postmodern the glassblown lucky striking into the doped heart of the time bomb bar tab royal pardoning handlewithcare gestures of a little/out side that’s mine are the fierce loving exquisiteness of Tom Raworth. The work is a comasyouare ritual reengagement with the music of those crystals set/in joints of syntax never administered or bullied or mediated but instantaneously politic in a civil war ahead of the traffic.” — Heather Fuller.
“Single-handedly, Tom Raworth has restored the value of quickness to English poetry. His is the alacrity of Shelley, of Byron, of Gerard Manley Hopkins, reinforced to meet a modern urgency. It is poetry of sensation, intelligence flashing down the spillway, faster than thought.” — Bill Berkson
“Brides in the source nail the soap-opera out of doowops? And then the parnassians for milfoils without floor-leaders. The Raworth loves to hum them toward the endeavor.”— Clark Coolidge
“Tom Raworth wants to get all the way round the railroad earth before the bell rings, one of the few who even try, & we get these tottering states, equal parts light and dark of mind, lavished on us when he does, & he often does— Anselm Berrigan
“Stretched tight across Life while allowing both mind & eye to breathe, this writing orients reading on the set where the action is. The backcloth is limitless/polychromatic (& no, the walls of the ego are not the walls of the set). As Shorty Fleming noticed while out picking plums: ‘Tom Raworth’s ( )ed through that fence.’” — Miles Champion
Several days ago I happened to tell a friend something I rarely tell anyone, because it’s so hard to justify: if there is a work I really enjoy, I will frequently own more than one copy. I have, for instance, three separate publications of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons. Furthermore (and I swear this is true) each one reads differently. Each has a different feel. The paper, the print, the binding, the cover design, it all makes a significant difference to my reading experience. Likewise Tom Raworth: I now own two copies of Tottering State. The first was published in 1984 by Geoffrey Young’s The Figures. The second, just published, is from Leslie Scalapino’s O Books. Both editions present work dating from 1963 and retain 1984 as a cut-off date. Raworth notes that a third, British edition, issued in 1988 by Paladin Books, includes poems written after 1984.
This most recent O Books edition of Tottering State is slightly larger in size than the Figures edition and a few of the poems have been changed. So far as I can tell, the typography of the two books is identical. A few earlier poems have been added to the O Books edition “The Others,” “Morning,” “Three,” “The Dublin Zurich Express,,” “Orrery,” “Lemures,” “Dear Sir, Flying Saucers! Flying Saucers! Flying Saucers!,” Blue Pig,” “Taxonomy” and “Piety”) but the major change is the omission of Ace and Bolivia, Another End of Ace (which are being republished as a single volume by Rod Smith’s Aerial/Edge concurrently with this book), and the inclusion of Writing, long out of print.
It took me a long time to read Writing, not just because of its length (40 pages) but because of the way it is structured. There are two columns of short phrases on each page. One is invited to read each column vertically, beginning with the first, then moving back up to the second, or read horizontally, from column to column. Reading vertically, the phrases cohere more or less logically in a way that builds sense, but only in periodic bundles, or phrases. For instance,
From screen to drawing balances a slice
no matter of clear sky cut
what by three black cables
is a sudden change by the frame
for in this area our object glimmers back
that cannot be we imagine at
called a landscape page on the title
as anything may happen
i turn to write
instead of read
waking this morning
with a sore head
Meaning squirms, squirts, slips and slides from phrase to phrase. But the real fun, the real fascination, is in reading across, from column to column. Doing so, one can yield a boundless field of association and unintentional meaning: “from screen to drawing balances a slice of clear sky cut no matter what is a sudden change by three black cables for in this area our object glimmers back.” I’m taking liberties here; I’m scrambling the lines a little to arrive at something that can only be my own creation, or a collaboration with the author. But I believe that’s what Raworth has intended: a process in which reading and writing are simultaneous activities.
Raworth avoids majuscles and this gives his lines a humbler, non-hierarchical, welcoming feel. There is also a simplicity, a quirky charm, to Raworth’s lines, a blithe felicitous angle that inclines the mind toward unearthing splendid winds and quantum truffles from the most secret and imaginative domain of our being. Some would call it the unconscious. I call it a fabric, a volume of feeling woven in “clear water and ice.” Words and lines are highly compressed: one perception immediately and directly slides to a further perception, and these perceptions accrue, multiply, ricochet and expand into a domain of accelerated cognition protean and variable as cumulonimbus, or gouache. Humor is a prominent element to the mobile architecture of Raworth’s poetry, and adds to the cumulative combustion a piquancy of indeterminate pepper, giddy discontinuities and dissociative metonymies. It’s a joy to find all this work together again, under a different cover, “hiding jokes in mud bricks” and “listening watching waiting.”
John Olson
Given the many Tom Raworth books currently out-of-print, it is cheering to see this reprint of one of his best collections, Tottering State: Selected Early Poems 1963-1983. Originally published by The Figures in 1984, the republication will give new readers access to Raworth’s subtle observations, subversive sense of humor, and restless intelligence.
Raworth does not date these poems or name their original publications, so the desire to read Tottering State as twenty years worth of artistic development is unfortunately hindered. Still, close reading and familiarity with some of Raworth’s other work should allow the reader to presume a vaguely chronological order.
In any case, this is the only disappointment in an otherwise stunning book. The art of concerns it reveals, the range of poetic possibility, strikes me as not only the perfect way to begin reading Raworth but also an abiding source of intellectual energy.
One source of this energy is Raworth’s resolve to keep his work from reproducing the falsehoods and artistic conventions. The complexity of such a task borders on the self-contradictory: “as in the progress of art the aim is finally / to make rules the next generation can break more cleverly” (“South America”). Formerly, progress is the eternal repetition of a single “aim,” but in its actual engagement it relies on cleverness, inventiveness, newness.
Such an approach to artistic stagnation frequently implies a critique of disinterested social system, a state “tottering” forward, automated, reproducing established clichés and forms. “Whose lives / does the government / affect?” writes Raworth in “West Wind,” the final poem. Since so many truth claims have been subverted in this book, the reader naturally understands that whoever the government is affecting must be different from whoever they are claiming to affect.
Some might argue that Raworth’s obsession with immediate perception produces his mistrust of automatized perception, but I find it the opposite. His struggle against all forms of mere reproduction (of forms, of presumptions, of expectations) leads him to the “authenticity” of immediately observed scenes and objects, an authenticity he is equally capable of mistrusting.
This becomes especially evident in a poem like “Pratheoryctice.” After undermining the presumptions of thought by evoking immediate perception, Raworth uses the last line to undermine the immediate itself: “sometimes i wonder / what is introspection / red white and blue / or through mud and blood / to the green fields beyond / which were the colours on a tie.”
What is the point, one might ask, of all this mistrust and undermining? Ultimately, as in the last line of the poem “Writing,” Raworth aims at bringing human life into at least a temporary equilibrium with its self-mythology: “at last / the sun / is level with our eyes.” Brent Cunningham (Traffic, Fall 2000)
YOU’VE RUINED MY EVENING/ YOU’VE RUINED MY LIFE
i would be eight people and then the difficulties vanish
only as one i contain the complications
in a warm house roofed with the rib-cage of an elephant
i pass my grey mornings re-running the reels
and the images are the same but the emphasis shifts
the actors bow gently to me and i envy them
their repeated parts, their constant presence in that world
i would be eight people each inhabiting the others’ dreams
walking through corridors of glass framed pages
telling each other the final lines of letters
picking fruit in one dream and storing it in another
only as one i contain the complications
and the images are the same, their constant presence in that world
the actors bow gently to each other and envy my grey mornings
i would be eight people with the rib-cage of an elephant
picking fruit in a warm house above actors bowing
re-running the reels of my presence in this world
the difficulties vanish and the images are the same
eight people, glass corridors, page lines repeated
inhabiting grey mornings roofed with my complications
only as one walking gently storing my dream
NO IDEA AT ALL
business makes profits
painting showed what people did
we have the brain specially for you
as far as possible from your feet
you really. need, to, be, a man
painting the forth bridge
could be
(greasently)
their hobby was playing as children
lucently
the first clock with arabic numerals
(dapache)
NOCTURNE
or is life cold?
in the early hours as the fire is dying
dance
take another bottle
bunch up the pillow
to sit staring with only a blanket
it’s time the flying saucer left
my thoughts like grease around you
as you swim across
VARIATIONS
do you remember a hill, miranda?
and the times we’d sit on the cool veranda
talking of films was it bande a
part from you there is no-one miranda
and just about here i had planned to
change the rhyme
just one more time
a reverse. last line
miranda. a hill. i remember. do you?
HAIKU
now the melody
in the pattern of shadows
one shadow behind
slow cello music
pushing the velvet armchair
as the rain comes down
time under pressure
dawn, and the green butterflies
crossing the ice-cap
tracked down by process
inside the dentist’s peephole
, but i fixed him good
spinnets of silver
one hair caught between my teeth
whose? i’ve been away
the wax filtered sounds
earth where imagination
spreads a boned circle
a mould of eyelids
under the singing emblem
cough, and he dropped them
the problem of form
within this limitation
he drops a sylla
Copyright © 2002 O Books
