Tom Raworth

Tom Raworth (Thomas Moore Raworth) (born 1938) is a London-born poet and visual artist who has published over 40 books of poetry and prose since 1966. Raworth is a key figure in the British Poetry Revival. He lives in Cambridge, England.

Development as a Poet

His first book, The Relation Ship (1966) won the Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize. Donald Davie admired the book and encouraged Raworth to resume his formal education. Raworth studied Spanish for a year and then translated the work of Vincente Huidobro and other Latin American poets for his M.A..

Related Topics:
1966 - Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize - Donald Davie - Spanish - Vincente Huidobro - M.A.

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In the 1970s, he worked in the United States and Mexico, teaching in a number of universities. After six years abroad he returned with his family to England in 1977 to take up the post of resident poet in King's College, Cambridge for a year. He continues to live in that city.

Related Topics:
United States - Mexico - England - 1977 - King's College, Cambridge

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His early 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) and Meadow (1999). 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.

Related Topics:
Black Mountain - New York School - Robert Creeley - John Ashbery - European - Apollinaire - Dada - Surrealism - 1974 - 2003

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