the right note
John Higgins
The silence was broken by a series of fragile notes from the bared mechanism of an old, abandoned musical-box. Some 80 people – crammed into a room meant to hold 50 – sat or stood in rapt attention as the British poet, Tom Raworth, fed a sheet of card through the mechanism, producing, as he turned the handle, a flow of delicate and surprisingly beautiful tones.
”I found this [the old music-box mechanism] in a shop in Paris … You can buy strips of special card, gridded out as a musical stave, and perforate the card with an X at whatever note you want played. Children use them to help learn music: you can compose your own tunes, or buy pieces by Bach or Mozart to play,” he explained.
”I wondered what would happen if you wrote words on the card, and punched out their shape, ignoring the stave as such – how that would come out. I tried it with a few sections from a text I wrote in 1970, Stag Skull Mounted … This is what those two lines sound like.”
What they sounded like was magic: the meeting of chance occasion with specific attention. This sonorous moment marked an interlude in a reading given by Tom Raworth at the University of Cape Town. Here, Raworth, the author of some 30-odd books, including two volumes of selected poems- Tottering State (1984) and Clean and Well-Lit (1996) – startled the audience with a torrent of images and ideas reflecting the reality of postmodern global society.
Widely regarded as one of the leading figures of the global avant-garde, Raworth’s work has been translated into 13 languages, and includes collaborations with visual artists such as Jim Dine and Barry Flanagan, photographer Jean-Yves Cousseau, and jazz and classical musicians like Steve Lacy and Esther Roth.
The range of tone and material selected for the reading was impressive. The first half drew from Raworth’s early work; the second, from more recent work, including poems from the soon-to-be-published collection Meadow.
The casual wit of poems such as Taxonomy and Reference was balanced by the elegiac Out of a Sudden, a poem written on the death of a friend (”the alphabet wonders/what it should do/paper feels useless/colours lose hue … in the grass standing still/by the path no one walks”).
Raworth is sceptical of the received ideas and categories of poetry, and works to challenge the certainties of voice, vision and expression which gather round our usual sense of poetic expression. In its place, he offers a writing which faces the facts: the facts of a global world of mass media and advertising, of CNN, of music video and the commodification of experience in a world of mass consumption.
It is difficult, playful, and challenging, urging us to produce rather than consume meaning: a poetry of resistance to received ideas, important in an age where a republican- led assault on a democratically elected president can seek to bring an end to his term of office (or, more importantly, its renewal) through the weaving of a public web of lurid and prurient testimony about his – no doubt dismal – sex life.
Raworth offers us the phenomenon of live language. And, just as no one goes to a rock or jazz concert expecting to grasp every nuance of play and intention, but rather for the buzz or hit that live music alone can provide, so the audience came away stimulated in ways that may have been hard to grasp, but were impossible to deny.
Raworth’s reading presented that rare sound of surprise: the fragmentary, the elliptic, the humorous, the connecting. Live language, for one night only, at the University of Cape Town.