Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy

The “thought” that Raworth still “runs through” (see line 9 in the long para-
graph above) is that “this is taking a long time to work.” In his memory, this
thought has continuity: indeed, it is all he remembers, for the operation itself
is a total blank: it is not a part of the poet’s experience. “Somewhere,” accord-
ingly, “there must be a ®aw in it.” The “it” may be the step-by-step account
of the operation recorded in his ¤le, on which he bases his own narrative. Or
again it may be his memory, which has transformed the whole affair into
someone else’s “story.” Or “it” may be the process of trying to remember just
what happened. In any case, that story “tastes of technology” and can thus
only be relayed in the third person. In Rimbaldian terms: not Je pense but On
me pense, or Je est un autre. “When I wrote ‘I feel like an android’ I knew
what I was writing.”
The inability to have access to one’s own experience colors much of Ra-
worth’s poetry and gives it its peculiar poignancy. The opening pages of
“Letters from Yaddo” explore this perception from a different angle. The se-
quence begins matter-of-factly, “Dear Ed: sorry to have missed you when I
called, but I was happy to hear Jenny [Ed’s wife] and to learn that you are all
o.k. I got here yesterday on the bus from New York: now it’s a bright spring
morning” (1). But then the ®at diaristic style gives way to a “joke poem,”
written back home in Colchester, with the punning title “Sonnet Daze”:

I watch myself grow larger in her eyes

and clutch a yellow feather near its tip

as if to mark with ink that never dries

the yet uncharted voyage of my ship

those two ®at images project and form

the looming solid that contains my mind

whilst independently the quill writes “warm”

dreaming its tip still in the bird’s behind

since those two stanzas many days have passed

now percy thrower speaks of roses on t.v.

morecambe and wise with full supporting cast

will soon be on—I call for val to see

the ¤re is red the cat licks down her tail

i close my eyes and read the rest in braille

England—the England still feeding on its Elizabethan heritage: Sir Thomas
Wyatt’s “lover, [who] compareth his state to a ship in a perilous storm tossed

230 Chapter 12