the unpaginated (34–page) text of “Letters” is followed by a twenty-¤ve-page
set of shorter poems and the sonnet sequence “Sentenced to Death,” both
from the mid-eighties. Meanwhile, the aphoristic “Notebook” had appeared
in David Levi-Strauss’s journal Acts (No. 5, 1985), and Logbook, one of Ra-
worth’s most intricate and carefully structured sequences—a poetics in the
form of a parodic travel narrative—was published in 1976 by Poltroon Press
in Berkeley.
Given this publication history, it is not surprising that “Letters from Yaddo”
seems to have fallen through the cracks: it is little known, even among Ra-
worth’s admirers. Perhaps genre has been a stumbling block. The title and
standard letter format place “Letters from Yaddo” in the tradition of such
short volumes of correspondence as Charles Olson’s Letters for Origin. But
whereas Olson’s letters, however wild their typography and syntax, are writ-
ten to convey particular information, ideas, and desires to their recipient, Cid
Corman, “Letters from Yaddo” subordinates conversation with Ed Dorn to
the intricate collage structure of what is essentially a poetic text. “Letters”
incorporates poems and found texts from various decades; it includes letters
from Tom’s father and son as well as documentary fragments like the legends
on the photographs found in a nest of drawers in the main house at Yaddo
(Visible Shivers 17–18). The narrative itself, moreover, moves imperceptibly
from sober reportage to hyperreal list making, from expository comment to
dream sequence and complex time shift, where visual memory and present
sound are interlaced. The text has passages as oblique and “dif¤cult” as those
in the long poetic sequences Writing or Ace, but on the whole, “Letters from
Yaddo” is surprisingly readable—even suspenseful. As such, it may be a good
place to begin to understand Raworth’s highly individual poetic ethos.
I want to begin with the ¤nal pages of “Letters from Yaddo,” which de-
scribe, in the third person, Raworth’s own experience of undergoing open-
heart surgery, performed to repair the hole in his heart (actually atrial septal
defect).^2 We know from an earlier incident that when, in 1955, at the age of
seventeen the poet tried to enlist in the armed forces, he learned that he had
been born with “a hole in [his] heart” (Visible Shivers 21). Indeed, there are
oblique references throughout the text to that hole and to the accompany-
ing leakage of the heart valve. In the original Cancer manuscript, “Letters
from Yaddo” had as its epigraph a sentence taken from Edward Crankshaw’s
much-cited “Interview with Mao”: “He was, he said, just a lone monk walk-
ing the world with a leaky umbrella.”
Cardiac arrhy thmia, moreover, plays a role not only thematically but for-
mally as well. The dislocation of rhy thm is hardly unique to Tom Raworth—
indeed it is a staple of experimental poetries today—but in comparison to
228 Chapter 12