"I wish i were my / self – mexican": Tom Raworth and Mexico

Abstract

This article is the first analysis of the importance of Mexico for the postwar neo-avant-garde British poet Tom Raworth (1938–2017). Focusing on his poetry of the late 1960s and early 1970s, it traces the centrality of Mexico, Latin America, and Spanish to Raworth's work, beginning with connections forged in the internationalist intellectual milieu at the University of Essex in 1967 and concluding with his brief residence in Mexico City in the summer of 1973. Drawing on extensive new archival material, it centers on Raworth's friendship and correspondence with the Mexican writer José Emilio Pacheco (1939–2014). The article demonstrates how these exchanges gave political impetus to Raworth's experiments with the institutional forms of language-learning and how Raworth's critical engagement with Nahuatl in 1968 enabled the temporary reconciliation of linguistic experiment with decolonial politics through a critique of state violence and imperial time. Lastly, it argues that Raworth's interrogation of writing itself in the early 1970s was articulated through the "Mexican" tropes of the mirror and the mask, which provided Mesoamerican analogues for his concern with linguistic instability and the limits of expressive selfhood.