Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy

linked the East Berlin operator to the West Berlin operator (there was

no direct link then) and left them connected all evening. (23)

Here Tom is already practicing what will be his poetic mode, the accidental
“connect” and “disconnect” between overheard utterances that comes to-
gether to “¤ll the space with trace” (6). It is a poetic challenge that takes years
of discipline. As a ¤ve-year-old, writing his ¤rst poem in 1943, Tom produced
the “following little lyric”:

o what fun

to be a boy

and have a toy

i teach my soldiers to ¤ght

and my lions to bite

o what fun

to be a boy

and have a toy (25)

This “cry from the heart,” to use Yeats’s phrase, is immediately de®ated by
Uncle Arthur’s charge that young Tom must have copied his poem from
somewhere:

“Copied,” he said, continuing downstairs, “you must have copied it

from somewhere—you couldn’t have written it.” The valves that blew

out in my head then are still dead. I shine the torch around over them

but they can’t be repaired. I feel the wall under my hands, the roughness

of the stippled distemper. I taste the powder in my mouth as I bite

my nails and try to tell him “I did write it!” And so I lose my faith in

truth. (25)

But the irony is that in a larger sense, Tom’s “o what fun / to be a boy” is in
fact “copied”—not from a particular poet but from the conventions of lyric
mastered by the young at the time and taken as the law. When, on the con-
trary, the poet de¤es convention so as to “tell it straight,” as Tom does in the
letter to Ed in which “o what fun” is embedded, he notes ®atly, “It’s so grey
here. Five days of rain, mist in the mornings.... Trucks pass on the highway
I can barely make out through the trees, but my chair vibrates.” And after

Raworth’s “Letters from Yaddo” 239