Eternal Sections

by Tom Raworth

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1991

About the author

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)

Reviews

[Pablo López Astudillo]

un tipo muy extraño de intervención
llevó a concluir
el tiempo también es finito
aún más lejos
cuando restas el infinito
aunque esta técnica es bastante dudosa
viajando en cierta dirección
un sistema aislado siempre aumenta
la materia que las partículas adquieren
desde el punto de vista del intento
entonces pasa la memoria
más rapida que la luz
demasiado rápido como para unir
arreglos desordenados

///

a very strange kind of intervention
led to the conclusion
time is also finite
further apart
when you subtract infinity
although this technique is rather dubious
travelling in a certain direction
an isolated system always increases
the matter particles get
from the point of view of trying
thus memory passes
faster than light
too rapidly to join up
disordered arrangements