More on Tom Raworth

With reference to Tom Raworth in the post two below, I’ve found a better link to the All Fours poem I discuss, in which Raworth reads the poem. He does read it slightly differently from what I imagined, and the speed at which he reads some of the lines surprised me.

I also found another two articles on Raworth. One in Stride, which contains 23 reasons to read Raworth, basically 23 short quotes from his poems. These are quite good, I think. For example:

she came in laughing his
shit's blue and red today those
wax crayons he ate last night
(from 'Morning')

and:

trust marginal thoughts
some like shoes will fit
(from 'How Can You Throw it all Away on This Ragtime')

and:

the albatross drawer
this is where we keep the albatrosses
('Taxonomy', entire)

and finally:

'a semiotic gorilla named boko
was thought by its keeper quite loco
when it claimed that the farthes
it released in the barthes
clearly signified "two cups of cocoa" '
(from 'Catacoustics')

These reveals a playful wit that I didn’t detect in All Fours. Perhaps I’ve chosen the wrong poem to analyse. The cynic in me protests that it shouldn’t be hard to come out with 23 quotable quips in a career as long as Raworth’s, and with 600 pages of a Collected Poems to choose from. But maybe there’s a lot of good stuff in those 600 pages.

Also, a longer article at http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/perloff/articles/raworth.pdf (you'll have to cut and paste it into your surf bar if you want to read it. I tried a hyperlink but couldn't get it to work), which analyses a couple of Raworth pieces. I felt that the reviewer, Marjorie Perloff, read too much into the first poem, These Are Not Catastrophes I went out of my Way to Look For, but I guess (post-) modernist poets invite more imaginative participation on the part of the reader to provide meaning than in traditional poetry. Some of her observations were thought-provoking, but not all were convincing. I found it hard to get interested in the discussion of Ace.