Tom Raworth's "Hands"

dsmith — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 19:18:33 +0000

Tom Raworth, a British poet who is often associated with American Black Mountain and New York School traditions of writing, created this compelling visual document some months ago. I find it visually provocative, the extended hand leading viewers through diverse environments around the U. K. I showed this last spring, however, to a poetry class I was teaching, and most of my students responded with a more polite version of, “what the fuck?”

I pointed out that there was very little visual mediation in the video, and that viewers were therefore asked to think about the potential arguments therein. I also pointed out that “Hands” documented visual space by framing the author’s hand, thereby establishing a narrative device by which meaning could be generated, and thereby argued.

In a poem called “Tracking (notes)” Raworth argues for a vision of art that is generative, expansive—linked as interlinear environments wherein thought and sensation commingle. Art, if I understand him correctly, let’s us make connections, expanding capacities of perception to include diverse modalities of public and private experience. “[T]hings of your time,” he writes, “are influenced by the past. the artist can / only go on from there and use the situation as it is: anything /else is distortion.” This attention to “the situation as it is” brings art into a rhetorical realm, for in it Raworth attends the phenomenal event as dramatic aperture—an experience of time and of being is elaborated in the details of the world around us. “[I] stick with deKooning saying 'i influence the past,’” continues Raworth, “and it is / not important for the work of a time to be available in the / mass media of its time: think of dickens on film, dostoevsky / on radio.”

It is curious to note, however, similarities between Raworth’s “Hands” and a McDonald’s commercial that came out over the summer. Here’s the ad:

I doubt my students would drop their jaws with “WTF” comments if I presented them with these commercial images, although they are weirdly similar to Raworth’s. Perhaps we can accept avant-garde imagery and technique if mediated by forces of technology that reinforce our understanding of a visual commonplace. Work like Raworth’s, by contrast, challenges the stock assumptions we hold, asking us to look at the world with new eyes—and to see ourselves in it through other perspectives. McDonald’s, by contrast, wants to limit perspective, and thereby increase control, if briefly, over our sense of things. It’s not news that commercials work as propaganda—limiting perspectives in order to orient attention to products. But there is a kind of violent invasion into the trove of our collective symbolic imagery when such is manipulated to devalue experience in order to sell shit. And it isn’t just a new coffee drink that’s being sold either. McDonald’s reinforces visio-cultural habits that can prevent us from more carefully apprehending the nature of visual experience.

viz. - Anglophone Poetry

Tom Raworth's "Hands"