The Onion, Memory, 1978,
A Martian Sends a Postcard Home, 1979,
A Free Translation, 1981,
Rich, 1984,
The Electrification of the Soviet Union, 1986;
History: The Home Movie, 1994;
Clay. Whereabouts Unknown, 1996;
In Defence of T. S. Eliot (essays), 2000
And he wrote novels--
Heartbreak, 2010; and The Divine Comedy, 2012;
The Divine Comedy is blurbed as "a voyeuristic meditation on sex and insecurity, God and the nature of the human body—its capacity for pleasure and pain, its desires, disappointments, and its many mortifying betrayals." Along these lines is the fact men do not have a bone in their penises. Other animals do. Raine says "the raccoon, gorillas, chimpanzees, the walrus, polar bears, rats, gerbils, jerboas, seals – cats as well as dogs" all have bones in their penises. Ted Hughes was wrong then to assert as he did, that only dogs had this anatomical feature, and Raine gleefully points out the gaffe.
In a change of tempo, here is a lovely statement by Raine on what it is he does:
'What the poet does is as ordinary and mysterious as digesting. I question. I break life down. I impose chaos on order. For instance, we think we know how food is ingested, digested, divided into energy and excrement. The neat theory, however, is one thing; control of the process is another; consciousness of the process yet another. Are we aware of protein in the stomach being acted on by pepsin, the appropriate enzyme? Digestion, thinking and breathing are all functions we perform without knowing how we perform them. The body is a dark continent. The mind is another. So I can say very little about what I do. I accept nothing as read. I attack the pretence that we know how things work, whether they happen to be the action of saliva or sexual love from adolescence to old age. This is John Donne on prayer, but prayer as a dissipation rather than single-minded devotion: 'a memory of yesterdays pleasures, a feare of tomorrows dangers, a straw under my knee, a noise in mine eare, a light in mine eye, an any thing, a nothing, a fancy, a Chimera in my braine, troubles me in my prayer.' This sermon was preached in December 1626 and is still a valid prescription for the art I like - art which pays attention, which remembers, which records, which prefers what is actually true to what is merely ideal, which imposes chaos on order.'
And he wrote novels--
Heartbreak, 2010; and The Divine Comedy, 2012;
The Divine Comedy is blurbed as "a voyeuristic meditation on sex and insecurity, God and the nature of the human body—its capacity for pleasure and pain, its desires, disappointments, and its many mortifying betrayals." Along these lines is the fact men do not have a bone in their penises. Other animals do. Raine says "the raccoon, gorillas, chimpanzees, the walrus, polar bears, rats, gerbils, jerboas, seals – cats as well as dogs" all have bones in their penises. Ted Hughes was wrong then to assert as he did, that only dogs had this anatomical feature, and Raine gleefully points out the gaffe.
In a change of tempo, here is a lovely statement by Raine on what it is he does:
'What the poet does is as ordinary and mysterious as digesting. I question. I break life down. I impose chaos on order. For instance, we think we know how food is ingested, digested, divided into energy and excrement. The neat theory, however, is one thing; control of the process is another; consciousness of the process yet another. Are we aware of protein in the stomach being acted on by pepsin, the appropriate enzyme? Digestion, thinking and breathing are all functions we perform without knowing how we perform them. The body is a dark continent. The mind is another. So I can say very little about what I do. I accept nothing as read. I attack the pretence that we know how things work, whether they happen to be the action of saliva or sexual love from adolescence to old age. This is John Donne on prayer, but prayer as a dissipation rather than single-minded devotion: 'a memory of yesterdays pleasures, a feare of tomorrows dangers, a straw under my knee, a noise in mine eare, a light in mine eye, an any thing, a nothing, a fancy, a Chimera in my braine, troubles me in my prayer.' This sermon was preached in December 1626 and is still a valid prescription for the art I like - art which pays attention, which remembers, which records, which prefers what is actually true to what is merely ideal, which imposes chaos on order.'
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