After that last asterisk we move into the prose of “turning and turning and
turning it is really scandalous how we jump up and down on the international
date line. I follow the sun—and they call them the backward nations” (3).
John Barrell has talked of the “refusal of all affect,” in Raworth’s poetry
(performed orally, as it is by Raworth, at high speed with little change in
emphasis), “a refusal which seems to offer the words of the poem as an
empty succession of empty signs.”^4 But when we remember the narrator’s
fear that “Somewhere there must be a ®aw in it,” the fragmentary lines begin
to fall into place. The shift from prose to verse, to begin with, represents a
refusal not of affect but of continuity with the diaristic passage about “char-
acter” that precedes it. The minimalist couplets invert reader expectation: if
something is “almost round,” there might be a “very profound” meaning at
stake, but as an afterthought the second line is absurd. Again, “the story of
the three verbs / light time and space” has its own “®aw,” since this could just
as well be the story of the three nouns “light,” “time,” and “space,” and in
any case, the items are not parallel. “Their coast / isn’t my coast” is an over-
heard snatch of a larger conversation in which the principals argue about
geographic preferences. The following tercet contains a pastiche of popular
song—“I am worn away by your kisses”—and plays on various meanings of
“good” and the sonic linking of “good” and “god.” “That song / that you re-
member” then modulates into “turning and turning and turning,” which re-
calls both Yeats’s “Turning and turning in the widening gyre” (“The Second
Coming”) and, closer to home, the song “Turn, Turn, Turn,” recorded by the
Byrds. Early British rock is a motif throughout: the notebook entry on the
preceding page refers to “jimi hendrix castles made of sand” as pointing to
“the separation of character and life.” Raworth now shifts to the Beatles—“I
follow the sun”—and modulates into a droll send-up of the narcissism of
British pop, “another pretentious English group / thinking the audience is
a mirror” (4). But “that song that you remember” is also Raworth’s own
“song,” which begins so tunefully and then makes the linguistic turn by con-
templating such ordinary words as “that.”
By now we can understand how Raworth’s poetic mode works. First,
presentation must replace representation (“too perfect to be human”); the
“truth” of experience is always elusive. Hence, continuity is always mislead-
ing: the present of Yaddo consistently gives way to incidents from the past,
poems recorded in earlier notebooks, memories, allusions. Disconnected as
these fragments, whether verse or prose, seem to be, they are by no means
random or chaotic, for the same metonymic threads come up again and
again, whether in the poet’s past or his present, whether in pop song or Eliza-
bethan sonnet. Thus, when we come to a passage like “it is really scandalous
234 Chapter 12