Clean and Well Lit

Selected Poems, 1987-1995

By Tom Raworth

1996

First Published

4.58

Average Rating

106

Number of Pages

3H14M

Audio Length

Poetry. Tom Raworth is a native of London, England, however during the seventies he traveled and worked in the United States and Mexico. He returned to England in 1977 to be Resident Poet at King's College in Cambridge where he still resides. Since 1966 he has published more than forty books and pamphlets of poetry, prose, and translation in several countries. His graphic work has been shown in France and Italy and he has collaborated performed with musicians like Steve Lacy and Joelle Leandre, painters like Giovanni D'Agostino and Micaela Henich, and other poets like Franco Beltrametti, Corrado Costa, and Dario Villa. Fellow poet Charles Bernstein stated that "For more than thirty years, Tom Raworth has been at the forefront of English language writing. With the fastest line in the west, Raworth's flickering, disconsolate, syntactically restless, lifting, often angry, almost balletic poems resist habitual thought at every break, rekindling animate social consciousness. There is no better

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4.58

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Author

Tom Raworth

Author · 8 books

Early poetry showed the influences of the Black Mountain and New York School poets, particularly Robert Creeley and John Ashbery together with strands from European poetry (Apollinaire), Dada, and Surrealism. His 1974 book Ace saw Raworth move to a more disjunctive style, built from short, unpunctuated lines that entice the reader into following multiple syntactic possibilities, as they knit together everything from observations of the everyday to self-reflexive commentary on the acts of thinking and writing, to affectionate lifts from pulp fiction and film noir, to political satire. A series of long poems in this mode followed—after Ace came Writing (composed 1975-77; published 1982), Catacoustics (composed 1978-81; published 1991) and West Wind (composed 1982-83; published 1984). Subsequent projects have extended this mode into a kaleidoscopic sequence of 14-line poems (not exactly "sonnets") that extended through "Sentenced to Death" (in Visible Shivers, 1987), Eternal Sections (1993) and Survival (1994). Later collections include Clean & Well Lit (1996), Meadow (1999), Caller and Other Pieces (2007) and Let Baby Fall (2008). Raworth's 650-page Collected Poems was published in 2003, though a number of major works remain uncollected, including his uncategorizable prose-work A Serial Biography (1969), a uniquely vertiginous patchwork of autobiography and fiction. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom\_Raworth)