Clean & Well Lit

by Tom Raworth

Tom Raworth's lines are flecks "reflecting light/from an implied viewpoint," as not from the setting sun but towards it. His lines appear to refer to other narratives and to be also their own sources only. Source of events as "assumptions about history." As apparent reflections from themselves (not from the implied 'larger narrative') the lines are "passing near the black hole/in ordinary flat space." If the lines are "coincidences/moving relative...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0937804649
• ISBN13: 9780937804643
• Release Date: September 1996
• Publisher: Roof Books
• Length: 106 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.7" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

Crashing through layer after layer

Tom Raworth is one of the most widely respected British experimental poets: he's as fine a poet as JH Prynne, Allen Fisher, John Wilkinson & c but has got more visibility in the US, Canada & Europe. He's often loosely associated with Language Poetry but that's only a very rough indication of his style: Raworth's work is indeed sui generis. His earlier work showed a kind of pop-modernist sensibility, similar to that in the work of his friends Ed Dorn & Ted Berrigan. In the 1970s his work moved from minimalist lyric to long-form work, written in a pared-down line (often no more than a word or two to a line) with an extended, multidirectional syntax. Its apotheosis was in the fine _Writing_, a book-length poem published in an uncannily beautiful format by The Figures in the early 1980s._Clean & Well Lit_ collects more recent work that represents several of Raworth's styles. There are many short poems, but the most important poems here are either in the long strip-of-words format--"Blue Screen", "The Vein", "Out of the Picture"--or in modular sequences--the quasi-sonnet sequence "Survival" or the syllable-count stanzas of "Emptily". What's most noticeable is how the poetry has since _Writing_ shed the perceiving "i" (Raworth prefers to put the pronoun in lowercase), for a panoramic, constantly shifting view of contemporary culture. Its wiredness & sense of everything-connected-to-everything can suggest Burroughs or Pynchon ( & indeed Raworth's fondness for pulp fiction & spy stories can often suggest Burroughs), though their hot paranoiac vision is cooled down to a more oblique take on postmodernity:no image concealedfrom the realm of materialaccumulation and circulationin part as would be trueenduring timeby herself he touches hersurrounded by modelsable to pass unrecognisedin the stream of moneyimplied by a photographwhere the sun never seencan be constructedcrashing through layer after layeron a depthless screenThis is one of the essential poetry books of the 1990s. Those further interested in Raworth's work should also consult his _Tottering State_, his selected poems, just out in a new edition with the entirety of _Writing_ included in it.