In 2002 Nate Dorward, the young editor of a little magazine in Toronto
called The Gig and an authority on contemporary British poetry, asked me to
contribute to the special Tom Raworth issue he was assembling. I’ve always
wanted to write more on Raworth, to my mind one of the most exciting but
also most difficult of contemporary poets. I had a chance recently to review
his Collected Poems (Carcanet, 2003) for the Times Literary Supplement and
believed I was beginning to sort things out. For the Dorward collection, I
chose a little-known Raworth text, “Letters from Yaddo,” an epistolary memoir
(or, more accurately, anti-memoir) that opens up new possibilities for poetic
prose. Unlike the “Concrete prose” of Haroldo de Campos or Rosmarie
Waldrop, Raworth’s mode here is assemblage, his letters to Ed Dorn being
constantly interrupted by “extraneous” material—some of it verse, some of it
found text. Dorward turned out to be a most exacting editor. Draft 1 elicited
thirty-five pages of e-mail commentary and correction, draft 2 another ten or
so. Finally, Dorward felt I got it more or less right. Himself one of Raworth’s
best readers, he certainly taught me a great deal about Raworth’s poetics.
12
Filling the Space with Trace
Tom Raworth’s “Letters from Yaddo”
The more formless I try to be, the more objects push themselves into a
shape.Yes, the wheel turns full circle: but the ®aw in the rim touches the ground
each time in a different place.
Tom Raworth, “Letters from Yaddo”“Letters from Yaddo,” the ¤rst text in Visible Shivers,^1 was written in April–
May 1971 when Tom Raworth was on fellowship at the Yaddo writers’ colony
in Saratoga Springs, New York. The piece was originally to be published by
Frontier Press in a book called Cancer, together with the two texts “Log-
book” and “Notebook.” But Cancer never materialized, and the appearance
of “Letters from Yaddo” was delayed for some ¤fteen years. In Visible Shivers