Can words become a part of you?
I found Tom Raworth’s “South America” published in Keith Tuma’s Anthology of Twentieth-Century British & Irish Poetry (Oxford, 2001) and have always looked back.
Listen to Raworth read it. It asks us to hunt much of the big game that is compelling and maddening in poetry: complex, searching narratives that are too ambitious to go down easily; the ephemeralness of writing; a treacherous landscape of ineffability; the overvaluing of consumption at the expense of making; self-deceit; and the constant, derailing necessity to use media to regulate mood. Through it all, desire: to forge a string of words that weigh enough to leave a mark somewhere, indelibly. Stanzas and typography be damned. Choose where to try and put these words: memory, paper, the body.
The poem is way more than this, and also way less. There is enough idiosyncracy here to build a novel out of, and enough gaps to let one fall apart.
I imagine the subject as a proto-revolutionary on the verge of failure, in Lima or Caracas, far from pillows and pleasure. He comes from a family sophisticated enough to use the word “sybaritic” (and in the context of a home accident, no less), but here, power is subverbal, extraverbal. Is he fashioning the right dream or unspooling the wrong one? Is poetry a gambit that mostly leads through blind alleys of memory, away from where we need to be, on the verge of self-sublimation? The event of a making one can be something of an exhausting folly. What do we expect would happen? The words evaporate. We end up changing our mind, not changing the world.
“South America” feels like it might be at the threshold of liberty. Waking up from dream or stupor, what if we actually did find our words printed on the bedding? Glancing around, the phrases scuttle in a trail over the side, onto the floor, out of the room, into the street, and onwards to a more authentic somewhere else.
Listen to the poem, transcribe it, then see what words show up, and where. Perhaps it will be written on you, too.
