I never did describe this room, though I gave you the measurements.
The ®oor is wooden, painted grey, as is the skirting board. The walls
and ceilings (high, pointed) are white. The door is in the centre of the
wall to my right. It is wooden, stained, as are all the window frames.
There is a window either side of the door, two windows in the wall
opposite me, two in the wall to my left (between which is the stove),
and four behind me. I sit at my desk, facing the centre of the room, on
a wooden chair. Slightly behind me, to my left, is a tall metal lamp.
Beside it are the log-rack and cardboard boxes of kindling. Between
the kindling and the stove are a white metal and plastic chair and a
bucket ¤lled with ashes. The stove stands in a wooden tray full of sand,
and there is a bent brown metal re®ecting screen behind it. (31–32)What is the point of this obsessive description—description that occurs
again, now distanced in the next paragraph by the third-person pronoun,
which details the poet’s cardiac catheterization, probably performed in 1956
in preparation for the open-heart surgery? The ¤rst step in the search for
“truth,” Raworth suggests, is the close, patient observation found in the two
passages in question. But as we know from the ¤nal page, with its account of
the operation itself, “Somewhere there must be a ®aw in it. Somehow I must
¤nd the weak point and snap it” (34). There is always a point when literal
description breaks down, and ghosts people the scene “As if all those who
have been here have ¤lled the space with trace” (6).
One such ghost, as we have seen, is the poet’s father, whose letter raises
interesting questions about the status of realism. The text reproduces the real
letter and yet, in the context of the poet’s ruminations throughout, its “re-
ality” often shades into the absurd, as when Tom’s father remarks, “Valarie
[Tom’s wife, Val], I expect, will be back in Colchester in time to cope with
the census form,” or, “Your mother is at present absorbed in Treasure island.
She is truly omnivorous” (7). Again, the father, mostly very down-to-earth,
is given to pompous ®owery locutions like “I am in no hurry to exchange my
lease of life for a freehold in eternity.” Even he, then, does not become a
“character,” a consistent, coherent self. And in keeping with the shifting lin-
guistic registers we ¤nd in this letter, the lyric poems refuse to “cohere” in
normal imagistic or syntactic ways.
The most surprising thing about “Letters from Yaddo” is that they really
are letters to be mailed and that they were really sent to Ed Dorn. Because
“we are the product of people’s battles inside our heads” (4), the letters do
not serve as conduit from A to B; on the contrary, Ed’s chief role in this
Raworth’s “Letters from Yaddo” 241