The appearance of a new book by the late Tom Raworth is cause for celebration. Cancer, meticulously prepared by Miles Champion, brings together prose experiments, journal entries, poems and letters written between September 1970 and May 1971. It is my favourite kind of book: an outlier, unclassifiable, flickering with intensity and doubt. Though in a literal sense this is ‘lost’ work – the original typescript turned up some years ago in a box of books in storage – the separate parts have long been available to those inclined to seek them out. ‘Logbook’ is available in Raworth’s Collected Poems; ‘Letters from Yaddo’ in his Collected Prose. Only the middle piece, ‘Journal’, would require sniffing around in the little magazines section of the library. Yet restored to order, placed in sequence as the author intended, we see a great poet in full flight at a pivotal moment.

By the time of his death in 2017, Raworth’s hostility to careerism was legendary. For my generation of poets he exemplified a certain code of conduct. It was better, all told, to learn how to print your own books than let someone else fuck them up. The world of literary prizes was meaningless. The idea of having an agent was laughable. Friendship was more important than fame; solidarity was better than success. As he writes in ‘Letters from Yaddo’, ‘If it’s done with truth and love and no wish to profit, in any sense, then it will take shape’. If that sounds sentimental, how about this: ‘now a sneak attack / i kick poetry in the face’.

It could have been different. Born in Bexleyheath in 1938, Raworth emerged fully-formed in the 1960s as an irreverent, brilliant poet. His first books are like cubist pinball machines, all intuition and rapid detail. He printed The Relation Ship (1966) himself, and worked closely with Asa Benveniste on The Big Green Day (1968) and Lion Lion (1970). He was prolific, bold and inventive. In retrospect, at least by some measures, he fits a mould of youthful success and promise. He won the Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize from the Poetry Society and received a Cholmondeley Award. He was selected for the prestigious Penguin Modern Poets series and headed to Yaddo, an artists’ community in upstate New York, on a writer’s retreat. He even released an LP. It’s not impossible to imagine some alternative universe where Raworth cooled down a little, churned out some mild-mannered surrealism, maybe dabbled in middlebrow translation, sucked up to the right people and wandered off into mediocrity.

In 1972 Raworth moved with his family to the United States, taking on precarious teaching jobs in Ohio, Chicago and San Francisco. They stayed, with a brief sojourn in Mexico, until 1977. Cancer seems decisive in that trajectory, a mysterious act of self-criticism and redoubling of vows. ‘Art is for making games’, he writes, ‘that’s the message for today’. But even among his admirers it feels as if there’s a lingering misconception about Raworth: that because his work is funny, sometimes ephemeral, he must have written it in a state of distraction, didn’t try too hard or care too much. But this is incorrect. Playfulness might be a prominent and important seam, but there’s also concentration so relentless it’s almost vicious. It’s like the story about Billy the Kid hitting a target while turning on a dime. How’d you do it without aiming? asks his nephew. I’m always aiming, says Billy.

The first section of Cancer, ‘Logbook’, is ten pages of disjunctive but tonally cohesive prose. It’s a pastiche of colonial narratives and adventure stories, like reading Tintin stoned or The Conquest of New Spain on methedrine. Originally published by Poltroon Press in 1976, with mesmerising illustrations by Frances Butler, it’s hard to excerpt. The conceit – or better, the game – is that pages 106, 291, 298, 301, 345, 356, 372, 399, 444, and 453 are all that have survived from the ship’s logbook of a journey to ‘the countryside of Whimsy’. Or is it Atlantis? Maine? History and pop culture keep intruding, whether in the form of Cliff Richard in Scandinavia or the death of Rosa Luxemburg. By the end the author is ‘sweeping up the last few words in a country without an ear’. It’s a leave-taking gesture, part shrug part waving goodbye. It signals his impatience, his disenchantment with the orthodoxies of any one literary scene.

Among the jokes flying in every direction, I can’t help but take the appearance, early on, of the stowaway author of ‘The Incredible Max’ as a dig at the American poet Charles Olson, author of The Maximus Poems. Raworth had been one of the first to publish Olson’s work in Britain, and by the time of his death in January 1970 he was a reigning influence on experimental poetry. Olson’s wild speculations about Mayan glyphs and the Vinland map make good grist for Raworth’s satirical mill, but I suspect the real swipe is at Olson’s more leaden-footed followers, who risked making poetry something too close to homework. As Raworth put it in a rare interview in 1972: ‘I liked to talk to [Olson]. But I never for instance sat down and read all through Maximus. I really have no sense of questing for knowledge. At all. My idea is to go the other way, you know. And to be completely empty and then see what sounds.’

I suspect the main influence on ‘Logbook’ is the work of Vicente Huidobro, whose ‘exemplary novels’, written in collaboration with Hans Arp in the early 1930s, Raworth had translated while at the University of Essex in 1969-70. Another ‘lost’ book, Raworth’s versions, titled Save Your Eyes, were discovered in a cupboard at the university and published posthumously in 2017. Huidobro and Arp’s dada paragraphs are like a slowly effervescing shell game: the subject keeps switching until it dissolves, and the reader dissolves too, into laughter. As Huidobro writes in a letter to Arp: ‘Many people might say, on reading these pages, that we are only able to laugh. They do not know the power of laughter, or the promise of escape it holds.’ This is the utopian wager of Raworth’s work as a whole, the most real thing there is.

The second section of Cancer, ‘Journal’, consists of aphorisms, overheard snippets of dialogue on TV (‘4,000 throats can be cut in a single night by a running man – (Star Trek)’) and short poems and poem-fragments. Since such notational thinking aloud has become the bread and butter of social media, this feels at once the most proximate and most distant section of the book. It looks easy, and maybe it is. But nobody has yet matched the speed of Raworth’s thought, where ‘any piece of language / will fuse with any other piece’. The dozen or so times I was in a room with him, everything seemed quicker by simple dint of his presence. I remember hearing him read for the first time, in 2007, yet another lost sequence of the early 1970s, There are few people who put on any clothes (starring it). He read it from back to front and it wasn’t gimmicky or a party trick, but somehow a graceful acknowledgement of the temporal distance, a way of closing it without forcing it shut. Another time, on a very warm summer’s evening, we stood in the corridor outside a room too crowded to get into, listening to Fanny Howe, her voice muffled through the wall, and Tom just happily nodded his approval.

All these lost books are evidence of Raworth’s itineracy in the 1970s. He had his share of bad luck: all but 35 copies of Ace (1974) were destroyed in a flood. Frontier Press, who were meant to issue Cancer – along with Raworth and David Ball’s translation of René Char, Provence Point Omega – went bust. Even after his return from the States, Raworth spent much of his time travelling, giving readings in Europe and further afield. It was a precarious existence. But it meant that he was continually meeting new poets and artists. His xeroxed Infolio magazine, published daily and then weekly from 1986-87, involved contributions from over a dozen countries. These wide-reaching friendships sustained him. There is no lull in his bibliography; no real slack or easing off.  

One of the paradoxes of Raworth’s work is that boredom fascinates him almost as much as it repels him. Boredom stimulates him to make art; making art gets boring; the cycle begins again. As he writes in ‘Logbook’: ‘a form can be used only once’. But boredom never became Raworth’s theme, still less his method, in the way it was, say, for Warhol. Art should be a means to combat boredom rather than reproduce it. He writes in the journal entry for 19 March: ‘the object of art is no longer to be outside and to be thought about ­– but to put the electric wires in the dead dog of language and get a twitch.’ I get such a twitch from an isolated sentence nearby: ‘A cartoon film of jewellery sparkling.’ When I read this I don’t grasp at an image but instead find myself moving in the interior of the language, the gaps and links between the words. I decide what’s hooked me must be how the sounds of car and toon flip and echo in ‘jewellery sparkling’. Raworth knows when to get out of the way and let the reader wander around.

This is reminiscent of one of the first entries in Kafka’s diaries, where he records someone saying ‘If he should forever ahsk me’. Kafka writes: ‘The ah, released from the sentence, flew off like a ball on the meadow.’ Raworth is always chasing this release, trying to find strategies and methods for making language bounce about. In theoretical terms, this is close to what Viktor Shklovsky would call ostranenie, variously translated as ‘defamiliarization’, ‘making strange’, or ‘enstrangement’. Art, says Shklovsky, can ‘return sensation to our limbs’ because it interrupts and intensifies our ordinary processes of perception. Formal experiment can produce an enlivening self-consciousness in the reader, and so art becomes ‘a means of experiencing the process of creativity’. In the constituent parts of Cancer Raworth lays bare his devices, his workings, shows us where the wires go.

Part of the inscrutability of Raworth’s work is that it both invites and disavows this kind of speculation. If boredom is to be avoided, so too is getting over-excited. Just be cool, okay? But ‘Letters from Yaddo’ is a serious work of poetics – in fact reminiscent of Shklovsky – offering a combination of biographical detail, descriptive exercises and offhand allegories about art. It’s almost obligatory, in writing about Raworth, to acknowledge that he thought most literary criticism was boring and irrelevant. ‘Just read the fucking book’, as he put it in a blurb for his friend Ted Greenwald. The best poetry, Raworth seems to demonstrate over and over again, is never subordinate or beholden, doesn’t require explication or second-guessing.

Raworth evidently arrived at Yaddo with no grand project or plan. The form arrives, ecstatically, midway through a letter to the American poet Edward Dorn: ‘shit… why don’t I just write a book and send it? … OK. We’re in the book. So easy. Like being alive. I can’t stop laughing.’ It’s the best description I know of those rare moments when it all clicks into place and all you have to do as a writer is see it through. You can practically see the lightbulb coming on above his head. He proceeds to type out the contents of a recent notebook, describes going for a run in the snow, seeing an owl, getting high at breakfast time and feeling paranoid among the other writers in residence, before typing out a long letter from his father.

What makes this so compelling? On the one hand, it’s that we’re observing Raworth in the act of ‘building the muscles of mind’s legs’, all the activity that goes on alongside writing, that contributes to ‘the adjustment from things outer to things inner’. It’s also because, in addressing his longstanding friend Dorn, the reader is granted a position of trust and intimacy. There’s no fanfare to his writing about falling in love at first sight with his wife, Val (‘she just changed the whole machine from mono to stereo’), or in describing the surgery he had to repair a hole in his heart when he was a teenager. The hijinks of ‘Logbook’ fall away, and we’re left with something more vulnerable and complex. It comes back to survival, mortality: ‘i scream it out through this maze of pines. i love you (all of you i love, that is).’

Ultimately, Cancer is a book of crisis and resolve. At one point, after quoting from Trelawny’s memoirs of Byron and Shelley, Raworth writes:

…And for ten years all I have done has been an adolescent’s game, like the bright feathers some male birds grow during the mating season. I look at the poems and they make up a museum of fragments of truth. And they smell of vanity, like a hunter’s trophies on the wall (‘I shot that poem in ’64, in France.’). I have never reached the true centre, where art is pure politics.

I have tilted my head at that last sentence ever since the I first read it. What would art as pure politics look like? Is it even desirable? In There are few people who put on any clothes, we find a different kind of frustration: ‘This morning I wrote a political poem: all right / I agree with you’. Raworth says this ‘seems to express everything those who shout about political poetry expect it to.’ This kind of dumbing down and blank utility is surely impure politics, no truth about it. What Raworth seems to hate most of all is being patronised, for the poem’s destination to be decided in advance.

There are plenty of political references in Cancer, including ‘the white paper on the hola camp deaths’, ‘The deaths of all Brazilian natives by 1980’, and an extract from a speech given in surrender by Chief Joseph of the Nimíipuu. Raworth was a socialist, and had translated speeches by the Colombian guerrilla leader Fabio Vásquez Castaño while at Essex. One of his supervisors there had been T.J. Clark, and it makes sense to think of Raworth in conjunction with the Situationist International, who Clark had been involved with in the mid-1960s. When the SI write that ‘fake, officially tolerated poetry is no longer the poetic adventure of its era’, it’s Raworth’s example I think of as an alternative, his formal experiments always subversive, always motivated by critique, never complacent or smug.

I used to sometimes say, flippantly, that Raworth should be the poet laureate. For the avoidance of doubt, I don’t think anyone should be the poet laureate, and in any case, Raworth held an Irish passport after 1990. But it was hard to think of his financial hardship and lifelong ill-health and not feel bitter, dream of a culture that wouldn’t so flagrantly overlook such a major body of work. The last time I saw him read, at the London Poetry Festival in 2014 – I think it was his last public reading – he had a hero’s welcome. Did he read the late long poem, ‘Got On’ (2011), with the great opening line ‘fuck the friendly image / seen from destruction / and decay’? I don’t remember anymore. All I recall is an audience of poets on the edge of our seats.

There are better introductions than Cancer out there: the selection As When (2015), also edited by Champion is probably the best starting point. But Raworth wrote several masterpieces that anyone interested in the poetic adventure of the era should track down, not least his long poems Ace (1974), Writing (1982), and his blankly crushing sequence from the later Thatcher years, collected as XIV Liners (2014). Each makes a collage of sensory data with the news, the flotsam and jetsam of language, at once sceptical of poetry and completely submerged in it. Much of that now seems to unfold and stretch out from Cancer. What we need is a lavish Collected Works, in two volumes or more, to see the whole arc from the beginning.

Read on: Luke Roberts, ‘Broken Voices’, Sidecar.