Raworth does away with—on the contrary—but he does avoid those causal
networks to which readers of magazine verse and popular anthologies are
still accustomed. Why is the speaker letting three of his ¤ngernails grow
rather than two or four? There can be no rational answer to such a question.
And why doesn’t he have any thing better to do than to ®ick ash into the tub’s
plughole? Again, we cannot point to a “cause”; the condition simply is, and
the poem’s aim is to de¤ne it as accurately as possible.
“Accuracy”—what Pound called “constatation of fact”—is re®ected in the
very rhy thms of “These Are Not Catastrophes.” The poem’s nineteen seem-
ingly diaristic lines are grouped into stanzas as follows: 4, 4, 3, 2, 1 (3 half
lines)—2. The poem’s forward push seems to be toward this fragment (ll. 15–
17), whose epiphany is no more than the truncated recitation of the designer
label “Levi Strauss / original / quality clothes.” But it is after this “discovery”
that the poet can lean forward “into the patch of sunlight”—a phrase highly
¤gured in its alliteration of t’s—and discharge his duty. The anticipated “ca-
tastrophe” would seem to be behind him.
Raworth’s later poems develop this mode with increasing complexity and
resonance; many take their cue from the long columnar poem (between one
and four words per column) of more than two thousand lines called Ace,^14
whose four sections are suggestively titled “in think,” “in mind,” “in mo-
tion,” and “in place,” and whose coda, “Bolivia: another end of ace,” has
shorter sections called “in transit,” “in part”, “in consideration,” and “in
love.” The challenge is to see how these parts relate: is “in think” the same as
“in mind”? And how does “in love” relate to being “in transit”? Within the
poem itself, these syntactic conundrums are worked out.
When Raworth performs Ace orally, he recites it at top speed, no change
of in®ection, and no pause for breath—a bravura performance that has been
imitated by a score of younger poets. The even tone has often been inter-
preted as the absence of affect: every thing seems to be as important as every-
thing else. But when one reads Ace a few times, it reveals itself as curiously
emotional in that its forward thrust, its drive toward change, is every where
short-circuited by refrain (e.g., “SHOCK SHOCK”), repetition, rhyme, echo-
lalia, and double entendre so that the asserted continuity is increasingly dif¤-
cult to maintain. Accordingly, the poem’s meditation on identity, time, and
memory, varied in myriad ways, becomes a complex process in which the
Ace never trumps for long. Raworth’s pronouns shift from “I” to “you” to
“he,” the referents never being speci¤ed; and the language oscillates between
straightforward abstract phrase to found text, citation, allusion to ¤lm plots
and pop recordings, and every manner of cliché. Ace opens with a rhyme for
Introduction xxiii