Geometries of Attention

Introduction

“…3 Joan Retallack made the following comparison: 'To fully accept the pattern of dissipation and get on with it anyway is a modus operandi familiar to readers of Samuel Beckett … Raworth, like Beckett, refuses to explain himself.' 4 Or, as John Wilkinson says of Ace, 'any excerpt wriggles free of the grasp; what it appears to say (or support) will be compromised by what precedes and follows, regardless of where the inclusions are made. But this has its compensations, since, like a cut worm, any section of the poem achieves independent life.'…”