An obituary for Tom
Raworth appeared in this Sunday's issue of The Guardian. His
website at present appears to have been taken down: consigned maybe to the transitory dissolution of
language, its entropy, to which his poetry was so closely attentive. He had
died in early February, but I was either busy or
distracted, or likely both, and I missed any notice. The last I had heard from
him was a mass-emailed season's greeting in December, 2015. He was brilliant
and under-recognized. His writing has played a sizeable part in my scholarly
and teaching life, and his poetry has strongly impacted my own practice.
Some years
ago, I mistook at first reading the last text in his 2010 collection Windmill in Flames —
an "Errata to Collected Poems (2003)" — for a poem itself, a
misprision that I think Raworth might have encouraged. What might or might not
constitute a poem, and who might do that constituting, remained a playfully and
vitally provocative question for him. In 2012, I was working on a set of still-unseen
visual-typographical poems, which I want to call Typos, and one
of them is a reworking of this errata page, and my goofy error. I'd like to
offer it up here as a tribute to Tom Raworth.
