on the sea,” and Sidney’s Astrophel, who woos his Stella, “biting my trewand
pen”—is parodied in the poet’s “uncharted voyage,” in which the “quill” is
“dreaming its tip still in the bird’s behind.” By the third stanza the Petrar-
chan tradition has given way to burlesque Romantic nostalgia—“since those
two stanzas many days have passed”—leaving the poet somewhere in the
drab seventies TV world of Percy Thrower’s gardening show and the More-
cambe & Wise comedy hour.^3 The ¤nal rhyme, “tail”/“braille,” suggests that
the only way to tolerate the Percy Throwers of the TV scene is to practice
some form of sensory deprivation. So the poet closes his eyes and “read[s]
the rest in braille,” which is to say that he tries to see what happens when we
don’t look at the screen but merely hear what is being said. To do this is to
defamiliarize the talk of roses by means of a new language game.
Such sensory experimentation is central to Raworth’s aesthetic: on the
next page he recalls an earlier moment when “talking to someone—or, rather,
listening to someone talk” becomes a double exercise, ¤rst in “making mental
notes of what was being said to write up later” and, conversely, in blocking
out the talk so as “to catch the name of a record that was playing [on the
radio] and the voice was drowning it out.” In a neat reversal in which back-
ground noise trumps individual speech, “I scribbled it all down as it was be-
cause I realised that’s what a writer is, and you can only use yourself in the
most truthful way possible at the time.” And he adds the proviso that “I’m
not going to sublimate it by putting it into the mouths of ‘characters’...
or/and letting them take over. If you can’t give it straight, there’s no point in
being a radio” (2). A few pages later the poet adds, “Fighting off ‘characters’
is taking time. The words form themselves into speeches and project faces to
say them.... Treacherous bastards I’m going to cork you in until you under-
stand you’re plot not character” (9).
This is an important statement of poetics. “Character,” for this poet, is
always a threat, because it posits a coherent, identi¤able self, interacting with
other such selves in a plausible ¤ctional universe. For Raworth, it is ¤ction-
ality that is the ¤ction—the notion that one can write a novel that places
identi¤able characters in particular “plots,” that one can create “character”
out of the bits and pieces of overheard conversation, whether in the “real”
world or on the radio. Realism, after all, is just a convention: the realistic
narrative depends on a high degree of selectivity. “To give it straight,” on the
other hand, is to refuse to discriminate between fore and background. Like
John Cage’s Roaratorio, Raworth’s is a construct where noise is just as impor-
tant as the “information” ostensibly conveyed. Fidelity to the actual texture
of experience means sensitivity to the complex interplay of foreground and
background, information and noise.
This is by no means to say, as many of Raworth’s critics have complained,
Raworth’s “Letters from Yaddo” 231