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Caller and Other Pieces
Poetry. CALLER AND OTHER PIECES is Raworth's first collection since his COLLECTED POEMS of 2003. Comprised of 14 pieces with the long poem "Caller" at its center, this book evinces a striking formal and tonal variety--from the classic Raworth Rhythmic and roving perceptual matrix, to the comedic one-liner, to the parodic end-rhyme, the visual, and even a bit of nouveau-zaum. CALLER AND OTHER PIECES again demonstrates that Tom Raworth's accomplishment is essential to the poetry of our time.
48 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2007
About the author
Tom Raworth
72 books16 followersEarly poetry showed the influences of the Black Mountain and New York School poets, particularly Robert Creeley and John Ashbery together with strands from European poetry (Apollinaire), Dada, and Surrealism. His 1974 book Ace saw Raworth move to a more disjunctive style, built from short, unpunctuated lines that entice the reader into following multiple syntactic possibilities, as they knit together everything from observations of the everyday to self-reflexive commentary on the acts of thinking and writing, to affectionate lifts from pulp fiction and film noir, to political satire. A series of long poems in this mode followed--after Ace came Writing (composed 1975-77; published 1982), Catacoustics (composed 1978-81; published 1991) and West Wind (composed 1982-83; published 1984). Subsequent projects have extended this mode into a kaleidoscopic sequence of 14-line poems (not exactly "sonnets") that extended through "Sentenced to Death" (in Visible Shivers, 1987), Eternal Sections (1993) and Survival (1994). Later collections include Clean & Well Lit (1996), Meadow (1999), Caller and Other Pieces (2007) and Let Baby Fall (2008). Raworth's 650-page Collected Poems was published in 2003, though a number of major works remain uncollected, including his uncategorizable prose-work A Serial Biography (1969), a uniquely vertiginous patchwork of autobiography and fiction.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Raworth)
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Raworth)
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February 24, 2017Synaeshetically (I suppose that's what I'm getting at?) or proprioceptively (?) I experience Tom Raworth's lineation sometimes as a physical mode of spatial extension, specifically as a wideness, and a wideness I'm not used to matching as a reader. I know this won't make too much sense to some. Wide in the way a shoe size may be too big, your foot clumsily knocks around. I feel the same reading Husserl: his sentences create a linguistic mental space that initially exceeds the width of my capacities to match that width. I need to deliberately make a "width" adjustment to how I measure peception and intellection, and it can take awhile to recalibrate. I experience this with parts of Tom Raworth's long poem "Caller." I wonder if this experience relates to fact I can only see what's directly in front of me within less than five degrees of the fovea centralis. The sense of wideness is paradoxical though, given how short his lines are. Vertical drive-through, down the page. Raworth would read, famously, very quickly. Ted Greenwald, in his own conception of what he was doing, would seem to have favoured the same speed devotion, his lines driving down a centred axis on the page in many books. I don't have a width problem with Greenwald. Greenwald's syntax isn't wide. Raworth's syntactical fragment is a fragment from a much vaster-proportioned sentence that was not included in the poem; perhaps that's it. But the sense of width I'm trying to get at is conceptual, not length per se of sentence. That book that is one sentence long, for instance, I think it's called Dies, is not wide at all, even though the poet who wrote it is considered a conceptual poet. I don't mean width is conceptual in that conceptual poetry sense. "Mind expanding, man," maybe (I'm sorry to say). David Bromige and Steve McCaffery have written about and have enacted in some of their writing (Bromige's Peace, McCaffery's The Black Debt) a contrast between length of sentence and reader's short-term memory capacity to recall the beginning of the sentence. Not quite what I mean either by a challenging width. "Width" may have something to do with the proportion set up in a text between shaped expectations for the amount of linguistic information needed as cues for grasping it and apparent actual amount of information available in the written language of the poet. One grasps, but one is stretched as one grasps, like a cartoon figure where the legs need to expand tenfold in order to cover the same ground.
Come to think of it some more, the term I really want is phonaesthetics, and relatedly, sound symbolism. I think many of us who came of age in the era of aesthetic and ideology critique would not be able to seriously entertain at face value pre-modernist critics and poets writing about qualities a poem "should" display, without some effort. We'd only see class interests in those aesthetic moves. "Width" is a quantity, not a quality, and so its value is ambiguous or, better, beside the point of how I use it. (As Sartre would say, it is what it is.) Width is part of a physiognomy of sound symbolism; and I think I can say that, however-much one might want to (as I certainly do) qualify phsysiognomy with cultural, not with biological, quasi-determinants. Cognitive poetics arrives here. My mention of pre-modernist poets and critics, however, is to suggest that what they're actually writing about is the cultural physiognomy of their response to aestheticized texts. Such response is not disinterested, in Kant's formulation, but is ostensibly somewhat objective in that the presumption is that the experience is replicable for others: the way I respond can be known to you as an experience too. I like the cultural poetics that can get very specific and rigourous about aesthetic response. Reuven Tsur does a great analysis, for instance, of Rimbaud's "Voyelles" poem. Anyway, let me show you how it is perhaps the case that when someone like the great Parnassian poet Théodore de Banville (admired by Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, who are all so different from him) writes about the sonnet, he's not only invoking aesthetic standards of social distinction, imbricated with the ideology of an ascendant bourgeoisie (even though when he wrote his Petit traité de poésie française, he was in the midst of the Paris commune uprising—which seemed to foretell a continued class levelling, hence bourgeois decline), he's also articulating how that taste standard intimately cues his bodily sensorium as poet-maker. The standard of taste is historically formed, a complex interlay of social conventions. The bodily cues of sound symbolism are where the active attentions of the poet encounter her language, or in plain terms, walking with legs involves movement through space (yep). This encounter—clash or harmonious melding—is inevitably historical, and Banville is writing a school manual on how to read and evaluate poetry of his time (circa 1871). Now let me get to it.
As great as the sonnet form is, the way Banville defines its French version, there is a formal problem the poet must address, apparently. Banville defines the sonnet as consisting of four stanzas, two quatrains followed by two tercets. The “problem” is that the tercets create an aesthetic imbalance, as the reading speed through them is quicker due to there being three instead of four lines. “The sonnet resembles a figure whose torso is too long and whose legs are too skinny and short,” says Banville in his Petit traité. (The torse consists of the two quatrains; the legs it stands on, the two tercets.) He continues: “It must be said that the sonnet would resemble such a figure were it not for the artifice of the poet who puts it in good order.” How does the poet do that? Not by physically altering the tercet form—that’s a no-no. The poet has to compensate for the physical failings of the sonnet form, with use of some high-quality language-effects. Banville’s words: with pomp, amplitude, force, and magnificence. Now my whole point here is that such words, qualities though they evidently are (values, in other words), may actually also describe processes of sound symbolism for Banville. The pre and post modernism eras may lie in the switch from quality to quantity, from qualities like "pomp" to quantities like "width" (I don't at all mean to imply a parallel between these terms, of course). "Amplitude" and particularly "force" would seem to be only partly qualitative, and so perhaps, by 1871 or so, Banville is struggling to sustain his Parnassian formation, or the textbook task? What would the science students reading his textbook think?
Come to think of it some more, the term I really want is phonaesthetics, and relatedly, sound symbolism. I think many of us who came of age in the era of aesthetic and ideology critique would not be able to seriously entertain at face value pre-modernist critics and poets writing about qualities a poem "should" display, without some effort. We'd only see class interests in those aesthetic moves. "Width" is a quantity, not a quality, and so its value is ambiguous or, better, beside the point of how I use it. (As Sartre would say, it is what it is.) Width is part of a physiognomy of sound symbolism; and I think I can say that, however-much one might want to (as I certainly do) qualify phsysiognomy with cultural, not with biological, quasi-determinants. Cognitive poetics arrives here. My mention of pre-modernist poets and critics, however, is to suggest that what they're actually writing about is the cultural physiognomy of their response to aestheticized texts. Such response is not disinterested, in Kant's formulation, but is ostensibly somewhat objective in that the presumption is that the experience is replicable for others: the way I respond can be known to you as an experience too. I like the cultural poetics that can get very specific and rigourous about aesthetic response. Reuven Tsur does a great analysis, for instance, of Rimbaud's "Voyelles" poem. Anyway, let me show you how it is perhaps the case that when someone like the great Parnassian poet Théodore de Banville (admired by Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, who are all so different from him) writes about the sonnet, he's not only invoking aesthetic standards of social distinction, imbricated with the ideology of an ascendant bourgeoisie (even though when he wrote his Petit traité de poésie française, he was in the midst of the Paris commune uprising—which seemed to foretell a continued class levelling, hence bourgeois decline), he's also articulating how that taste standard intimately cues his bodily sensorium as poet-maker. The standard of taste is historically formed, a complex interlay of social conventions. The bodily cues of sound symbolism are where the active attentions of the poet encounter her language, or in plain terms, walking with legs involves movement through space (yep). This encounter—clash or harmonious melding—is inevitably historical, and Banville is writing a school manual on how to read and evaluate poetry of his time (circa 1871). Now let me get to it.
As great as the sonnet form is, the way Banville defines its French version, there is a formal problem the poet must address, apparently. Banville defines the sonnet as consisting of four stanzas, two quatrains followed by two tercets. The “problem” is that the tercets create an aesthetic imbalance, as the reading speed through them is quicker due to there being three instead of four lines. “The sonnet resembles a figure whose torso is too long and whose legs are too skinny and short,” says Banville in his Petit traité. (The torse consists of the two quatrains; the legs it stands on, the two tercets.) He continues: “It must be said that the sonnet would resemble such a figure were it not for the artifice of the poet who puts it in good order.” How does the poet do that? Not by physically altering the tercet form—that’s a no-no. The poet has to compensate for the physical failings of the sonnet form, with use of some high-quality language-effects. Banville’s words: with pomp, amplitude, force, and magnificence. Now my whole point here is that such words, qualities though they evidently are (values, in other words), may actually also describe processes of sound symbolism for Banville. The pre and post modernism eras may lie in the switch from quality to quantity, from qualities like "pomp" to quantities like "width" (I don't at all mean to imply a parallel between these terms, of course). "Amplitude" and particularly "force" would seem to be only partly qualitative, and so perhaps, by 1871 or so, Banville is struggling to sustain his Parnassian formation, or the textbook task? What would the science students reading his textbook think?
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