recounting the quarrel as to the authenticity of his ¤rst poem, the poet sets
down these lines (25):
timber truck vibrates
my s pine
is how I’d write it
now, I suppose.Here is the aesthetic of reduction and paragrammaticality that animates Ra-
worth’s mature poetry. Indeed, the insistence that “I did write it!” is precisely
one that Raworth knows the poet must avoid in the move beyond individual
ego. In Raworth’s two-line passage, “timber” and “truck,” separate in the
prose section that precedes it, come together phonemically, whereas “vi-
brates” is now transferred from chair to truck. The detachment of “s” from
“spine” gives us a tree to go with timber—“pine”—but the layout also makes
it possible to read the passage as “my trucks pine.” Poetry is not the linear “I
teach my soldiers to ¤ght / and my lions to bite” but language construed as
re®exive, multiple.
How this process works is shown in the short poems reproduced on the
next four pages. Here Raworth gives us a string of playful punning poems,
culminating in
blur blur coming up fast
it overtakes him as they blend into the window
play with marked watches the set
is switched off the images deviate life
goes on in the album for the record
our noises are off (29)If “the set / is switched off,” how can the images that we ¤rst see as “blur
blur” and “blend into the window,” “deviate”? Deviate from what? Well, in
the punning “for the record,” “life / goes on in the album,” even though the
“noises” of the sound track are “off.” But the passage also refers to sporting
events, probably horse races (“blur blur coming up fast,”), in which those
with “marked watches” time the players. And there are a number of other
ways of construing this dense lyric passage.
Lyric, I remarked earlier, oscillates throughout “Letters from Yaddo” with
the sort of sober ®at description of his room that Tom produces for Ed in his
next letter.
240 Chapter 12