Pinks #3: In the Evening Printed Two Pages

Tom Raworth: poet and typesetter / Terrance Hayes' critical prose

Sep 07, 2023

Cover text in red enclosing three identical photographs of Tom Raworth in a light jacket and dark polo neck, looking downwards — Tom Raworth, *A Serial Biography* (1969), cover image

Welcome back to Pinks. I began these short round-ups of poetry bits and pieces in July and then almost immediately went quiet for the school holidays in August. But I’ve now checked the Some Flowers Soon offices for crumbling concrete poetry and decided it’s safe to move the Pinks team back in.

The plan now is to send future Pinks out mid-weekly, with essays for paid subscribers arriving in time for the weekend. Thanks to everyone who subscribed over August — it was an encouraging first month. Every new subscriber gives me hope that this experiment in writing about poetry one day a week will continue beyond its trial year. But, as ever, if you’re a student / precariously-employed academic / poet / reader who’d like to read the essays, please let me know and I’ll sign you up for free.

Fragment of the 1966 poem Message Clear by Edwin Morgan, in which each line is a phrase made by removing letters from the words 'i am the resurrection and the life' — Some crumbling concrete poetry

When poets die, it often feels as though — without them to read it or add to it — their work goes quiet too, until the appearance of a new edition or appreciation. So I was cheered recently to see a project dedicated to the work of the late Tom Raworth (1938—2017), one of my favourite poets associated with the British Poetry Revival.

Early on, Raworth was important as both as a writer and a publisher: he taught himself to set type in 1959 and over the next five years printed the magazine Outburst and ran Matrix Press. After that, he founded Goliard Press with the artist Barry Hall, publishing his own debut — and classic of Sixties poetry — The Relation Ship in 1966.

Here’s how Raworth remembered that period of intense activity in his book A Serial Biography (1969):

Worked, came home, set type, put type back in the case, went to bed at three, got up at six, carried the type to work with me, in the evening printed two pages.

Now, his double life as a poet and a printer is being remembered. The Tom Raworth Project is based at Bodney Road Studios, Hackney, and is dedicated to displaying a Raworth poem, on the street and online, in a format that makes visible the spacing of words and letters for printing. Two poems have appeared so far, and I hope there will be more: https://www.bodneyroadstudios.com/tom-raworth-project/

Words set as individual letters in rows on a wall by a window covered with a grille — from Tom Raworth, “My Face Is My Own, I Thought” (1966), Bodney Road Studios, London

Terrance Hayes’s American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (Penguin, 2018) was one of the best books of American poetry to find a British publisher in the last five years. So it was good to see his latest collection, So To Speak (2023), appear from Penguin UK last month. Unfortunately, they don’t yet seem to be publishing his new critical book, Watch Your Language: Visual and Literary Reflections on a Century of American Poetry (Penguin USA) — but at the moment at least, it’s possible to find imported copies online for less than half price, which are well worth snapping up.

Compiled with much more imagination than most poets’ collections of critical prose, Watch Your Language features a recurring “Twentieth Century Examination” section (“Do you think Whitman is considered the father of the last hundred years of American poetry because he was innovative, or because he was a white man?”; “Did you know Ezra Pound met Emmett Till’s father in prison?”). There’s also a set of playful miniature biographies of Black American poets. Here is Hayes’s portrait of the poet and Langston Hughes “superfan” Margaret Danner, who recorded her work alongside Hughes on a Motown record subtitled Writers of the Revolution (1964):

When Margaret Danner is on her way to record with Langston Hughes in 1964, she stops in the park to read her bundle of letters from Hughes, smelling possibly like his wrist. Danner includes all of her poems for Hughes in The Down of a Thistle: Selected Poems, Prose Poems, and Songs, published in 1976, eight years before her death in 1984. Margaret Esse Danner, born in 1915 in Pryorsburg, Kentucky, to Caleb & Naomi Danner, but known to insist she was born in Chicago, holds the distinction of publishing more poems celebrating Langston Hughes than any other poet of the twentieth century.

The total number of Danner poems about Hughes is four. Did any other modern poet pay tribute to a contemporary so often?

NOTES

For an excellent introduction to the poetry of Tom Raworth, see As When: A Selection (Carcanet, 2015), ed. Miles Champion: https://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9781784100339

Last year, Poetry magazine published a portfolio called “‘These Blazing Forms’: The Life and Work of Margaret Danner”: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/issue/157238/march-2022

You can read Terrance Hayes’s 2021 lecture for the Poetry Society, “My Gwendolyn Brooks” — which appears, with different illustrations, in Watch Your Language — here: https://poetrysociety.org.uk/the-poetry-society-annual-lecture-series-terrance-hayes/