Logbook: against prose

Tom Raworth’s Logbook (1976) is considered as the central poetic text of a period of experimentation with prose which ran from 1969–1972, but which had a dispersed publication history. Through consideration of Raworth’s role in a parodic issue of the late Sixties avant-garde magazine, The English Intelligencer, Logbook is shown to satirise prose itself as the formal medium of both academic discourse and imperial power, giving it affinities with the Language poetics of the ‘New Sentence’ in North America. Raworth’s dissatisfaction with the limitations of prose as a medium emerges through close-reading of the sequence’s comic and fragmentary rapidity.