how we jump up and down on the international date line,” we realize that
the poet’s own movements, memories, and tall tale, as recorded here, present
precisely such a “jumping up and down,” there being, in fact, no way to get
off that line and stay ¤xed in one familiar place.
“Letters from Yaddo” proceeds not in any sort of linear fashion nor by the
creation of “character” but by a “plot” consisting of telling juxtapositions
and displacements. Consider the passage on pages 6–8 that begins with a
Yaddo conversation, evidently over breakfast, with “a Korean novelist here
named Kim whose eyes are good to look through”:
He was telling how he’d learned English from old movies. Like Shirley
Temple’s “You have to ess em eye el ee / to be aitch ay double-pee why.”
Then the ¤rst time he left Korea and landed in America he saw a news-
paper with enormous headlines saying shirley temple divorced and
thought “Ohhhhh... these people blind!” The only problem with the
movies was that kissing was never shown, so the plots suddenly jumped.Here again, the technique is to “give it straight” by refusing to make Kim any
sort of “character.” In using himself “in the most truthful way possible,” Ra-
worth focuses not on the individual but on the delicious absurdity and ir-
relevancy of discourse. “The plot suddenly jumped,” as someone else in the
room starts to talk about “an SDS girl saying, ‘Communism good/Capitalism
is bad’.... and a novelist from the South said ‘What tahm of deh was it?” Oh
... mahnin’.... I thought it was the ahfternoon she math hev bin hah on
some o that marijooahna” (6). One non sequitur leads to another, the vapid
conversation sending Tom, who had smoked his last joint before breakfast,
right back to his cabin, where he writes picture postcards to his children.
From “literary” conversation at Yaddo to the silence of Tom’s cabin to an-
other “literary” document: this time a long letter to “Tommy” from the poet’s
father. This letter within a letter is perhaps the centerpiece—or should I say
“offcenterpiece”?—of the sequence. For in the context, the “real” letter, with
its reference to “real” people and incidents, seems more fantastic than the
mock-Petrarchan “Sonnet Daze” or the gnomic “very profound / and almost
round.” It begins as follows:
Dear Tommy, Wherever you are when you read this, we hope all goes
well. We were very pleased to get your letter, and it was kind to send
the book so carefully packed (I almost threw away the letter written on
the cardboard). We read it with interest (including the laudatory words
on the back of the jacket) and hope it will add to your reputation. IRaworth’s “Letters from Yaddo” 235