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Article Excerpt
For forty years, Tom Raworth's poetry has refused to be still, attending to the loose networks of language, signal, and sign that shape his and our media-saturated lives. This kinesis derives from his commitment to textual performance, to sounding his work aloud. Asked about his influences in an interview in the mid-1980s, Raworth demurs against naming anyone particular, then suggests, "I hear my poetry as a sort of music, though I don't think of it as music. I think of it as language" (Bartlett 150). His poems emerge from a practice of careful, micrological audition, although he is cautious about falling into any aesthetical mire (such as the fallacy that all art aspires "toward the condition of music," as Walter Pater famously announced in 1888 [106]). Raworth's poetry is inherently linguistic, of course, but as performative language it partakes of the irresolution between the auditory and the graphical (Raworth is also a visual artist): "I suppose I hear graphics as well, though that sounds impossible, doesn't it? I'm talking about my own graphics now. [...] As far as I can see poems I need to hear them" (Bartlett 155). Raworth is not so much being coy here as attempting to frame his work as semiosis, informed by the process of meaning-making rather than by the securities of sanctioned meanings. His poems do not declaim so much as move through the tensions between seeing and listening, between score and utterance, graphe and phone.
His books are hard to find and inherently temporary, so the appearance in 2003 of his Collected Poems, from the established poetry press Carcanet, presents Raworth's readers with a conundrum, because its monumentality brakes his texts' deliberately fleeting velocities. In an extended review in the London Review of Books, Iain Sinclair praises Raworth's life's work, mixing sonic and visual tropes in his response to the poems' high-speed unfolding: "The excitement, looking through Raworth's Collected Poems, comes from recognising that, despite everything, somebody is paying attention. Staying on the case like a disenfranchised private eye. Listening, actually listening, to the hiss of the radio, translating noise into picture, making it readable" (29). Sinclair overflows with impressionistic enthusiasm, but he nonetheless points up Raworth's audio-visual duplicity. I want to address this verbal tension by investigating the composition of a brief lyric in the mid-1990s, Raworth's elegy "Out of a Sudden," alongside its musical setting by composer-improviser Steve Lacy. If Raworth's texts are "actually listening," his language has to take up form and texture answerable to this close audition--to its actuality, whether temporary or monumental. The collaborative dynamic between Lacy and Raworth not only impacts on the poem's realization but also speaks to the complex intersections of the auditory and the visual, of sound and sense, of time and texture, that shape Raworth's writing practice.
Raworth closes his 1996 selection, Clean & Well Lit, with "Out of a Sudden," a brief poem that surprised reviewers with its formality and overt lyricism. John Kerrigan describes what Raworth's readers came to know as his "busily disjunctive" style, characterized by "rapid textuality, catching phenomena in process, recycling scraps of discourse from the whole field of social experience," but also notes a new musicality in a number of Raworth's poems: "there is a counter-pressure toward musicality and form. [...] Almost incredibly for Raworth, the selection concludes with a lyric about absence which uses regular, alternate-rhymed stanzas" (13). This surprise emerges from the dichotomy Kerrigan sets up between lyric and discursive modes; Raworth regularly exploits slippages between these modes, and his poems might be characterized as negotiations with the work of shaping. "Out of a Sudden" is particularly musical in its inception; the endpapers of Clean & Well Lit reproduce a score of the poem (re-titled "Absence") by Steve Lacy; Lacy also recorded a version of the poem in 1996, sung by Irene Aebi and accompanied by his trio.
Lacy's score enables an initial decoding of the text's intent. Raworth's poem is dated "Riva san Vitale, August 30th 1995" (Clean 106), but until we see the photo and dedication in the bottom corner of the second page of Lacy's score it is not clear why the time and location are significant:
TO FRANCO BELTRAMETTI
WORDS: TOM RAWORTH
MUSIC: STEVE LACY
19 OCT. '95
Raworth's poem is not abstractly about absence; it offers a reflexive elegy for the Swiss writer Franco Beltrametti, a testimonial of loss, poet to poet. The sleeve notes to Lacy's recorded version of the setting (on the disc Bye-ya) confirm this mutual dedication: '"Absence' is dedicated to poet Franco Beltrametti, a dear friend of all of us, departed last summer. Irene sings the words that Tom Raworth wrote in August 1995 at Franco's Funeral." Beltrametti and Raworth had collaborated on a number of texts, performances, and publishing projects. In a reminiscence written in 1990 for the Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, Beltrametti recounts his first meeting with Raworth in the autumn of 1978, and their subsequent relationship: "At a break fast Ted [Berrigan] introduced me to a shy, very sharp-looking British poet: Tom Raworth. Tom has become so much part of my concerns; we continue meeting, reading, and doing things together" (Beltrametti). From their meeting on, both poets find themselves loosely allied, with a number of other graphic artists, musicians, and writers (including Lacy), in an artistic counter-movement in Europe, whose collaborative work tended to test the limits of the singular authorial voice, often disturbing notions of who can sign whose work, of who speaks for whom. (It is worth noting that Italian improviser Giancarlo Locatelli also recorded a version of the song in 1996, this time sung by a lyric soprano and including a recitation of the poem by Raworth himself; the album including "Out of a Sudden," II Grande Quarto D'Ora, is a tribute to Beltrametti, containing settings of nine of his poems, along with Raworth's text.)
"Out of a Sudden" was written, at Lacy's request, as a memorial song for Beltrametti. In an e-mail exchange with me, Raworth describes its genesis:
Because of the suddenness things were confused and hectic when Franco died. I got to Switzerland I think the following day, and...
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