Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy

of the poetry itself. The one exception is a recent special issue of Nate Dor-
ward’s excellent but little known Canadian journal The Gig (summer 2003),
and even Dorward has remarked, in an essay for the Chicago Review, that in
the case of a poetry like Raworth’s, “any act of ‘close reading’—of ‘reading
for content’—would either be willfully synthetic or merely document the
trace of private associations (mine) that are both unstable and of doubtful
value to another reader.” To submit a poem or short passage to “a quick and
contained ‘close reading’ before extrapolating to a larger poetic entity,” Dor-
ward argues, suggests that any other text by the poet in question would do
just as well—that they are all the same. Moreover, “close reading is... prob-
lematic in dealing with highly open-ended poetry, since close reading often
carries within it ideals of a ‘complete’ reading that are at odds with poetries
that emphasize open-endedness and arbitrariness.” Indeed, as in the case of
John Ashbery, it is a mistake to expect that “every detail in the poem can or
should be justi¤ed.”^10
This is an appealing argument: why shouldn’t open-ended poetry be sub-
ject to open-ended, more free-wheeling readings? Why submit an Ashbery
or Raworth poem to a “close reading” that may distort the larger parameters
of the poet’s oeuvre? Dorward inadvertently answers his own question when
he admits, “In proportion to the length of Raworth’s career [the Collected Po-
ems covers the period 1966 to the present] and the evident importance of his
work to several generations of poets from the UK, North America, and Eu-
rope, there has been remarkably little substantial criticism about his poetry,”
a poetry, Dorward admits, that remains largely “elusive” (“On Raworth’s
Sonnets” 18). If, af ter more than three decades of publication, a poet’s oeuvre
continues to be little known and largely “elusive,” surely something must be
wrong. For either Raworth’s work really is tediously obscure, as his detractors
think, or there must be a way of accounting for the strong appeal of his po-
etry, especially to a younger generation.
Suppose, then, that we take a stab at reading an early (1968), little-known
Raworth poem called “These Are Not Catastrophes I Went out of my Way to
Look for”:^11

corners of my mouth sore

i keep licking them, drying them with the back of my hand

bitten nails but three i am growing

skin frayed round the others white ®ecks on them all

no post today, newspapers and the childrens’

comic, i sit

xx Introduction