[4] His family maintained its strong Irish connections while he was growing up, something which would leave an impression on Raworth's sense of himself as a poet.

His mother's family lived in the same house in Dublin as Seán O'Casey at the time that the playwright was working on Juno and the Paycock.

According to Raworth: Between leaving school in 1954 and going to the University of Essex in 1967 I had a variety of jobs, including insurance clerk, builders' labourer, packer, assistant transport manager, and continental telephonist.

In 1959 I taught myself how to set type and to print, and between then and 1964 I produced three issues of a magazine (outburst) and a series of small books.

He also founded Matrix Press at this time,[6] publishing small books by Dorn, David Ball, Piero Heliczer, and others.

[7] In 1965, while working as an operator at the international telephone exchange, Raworth and Barry Hall set up Goliard Press,[6] which published, amongst others, Charles Olson's first British collection.

[3] These ventures into publishing made an important contribution to a new found British interest in the New American Poetry movement of the 1960s.

[3] In the 1970s, he worked in the United States and Mexico,[13] first teaching in universities in Ohio, Chicago and Texas, and later living in San Francisco where he was involved with the Zephyrus Image press.

This style was reflected in short, unpunctuated lines that lead the reader into following multiple syntactic possibilities, and where it is "increasingly impossible to keep track of the profusion of meanings on offer.

"[17] Raworth's "poetic line" can knit together anything from observations of the everyday to self-reflexive commentary on the acts of thinking and writing, to lifts from pulp fiction and film noir, to political satire:Those looking for a sustained, linear narrative or argument are to be disappointed, but the themes interlock and repeat with an uncanny frequency that nonetheless gives the poem a grim feeling of progress – in the sense that tracing a finger along the side of a Möbius strip is progress.

Kaufmann writes that when Raworth "gives live readings, he runs roughshod over the line breaks, thus making it impossible for the reader to rest with what she has just heard.

This was reflected in the many performance events and texts he created in collaboration with musicians such as Steve Lacy, Joëlle Léandre, Giancarlo Locatelli, Peter Brötzmann and Steve Nelson-Raney; other poets, including Jim Koller, Anselm Hollo, Gregory Corso, Dario Villa and Franco Beltrametti [it];[16] and painters including Joe Brainard, Jim Dine, Giovanni D'Agostino and Micaëla Henich.

Last Friday after two days of tests, scans, bone-marrow extraction and so on, our Doctor came in the evening to say the cancer had badly metastsized [sic] ... to bone marrow, liver, right lung, kidney and small bowel.