Dear Nick (Raworth; Ray Johnson)
A belated thank you and some Mail Art
Dear Nick,
Hope you’re really well.
Emily and I had the best time seeing you in Paris, and I wanted to say thank you, properly, belatedly, but truly for that dinner. The rum baba was a game-changer. I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to write—partly it’s because I wanted to do so here. It seemed fitting, given what we talked about.
I was telling you about my favourite poet, Tom Raworth—whose ‘Letters from Yaddo’ (some collected in this new book Cancer—I’ve ordered you a copy) gives this little project (Letters from Godot) its name. Raworth wrote them while on a residency at Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY. They were all sent to his friend, Ed Dorn—a poet who studied under the greats at Black Mountain College. They’re warm and present and quick, but in a way that feels natural, unpretentious.
‘Well, everyone you punch at is the same shape. Maybe that, in some perverted way, is why I keep the dead mouse on my windowsill.’
Always on the verge of non-sequitur, and affirming that life is just the same.
Speaking of not-quite-non-sequitur, I have LOVED discovering Ray Johnson. I just read that ‘Johnson named many of his artworks moticos, an anagram of osmotic and a word which, like the word koan, connotes a paradoxical state of fleetingness and concreteness’. You were so right I’d be into it. Safe to say I’m now life-long-obsessed. I was particularly interested in the 1969 Hot Dog Drop...
….thinking it would be great at the Venice Biennale—could be the first time a frankfurter has hit Italian soil.
Turns out there’s a Ray Johnson letter on display in London right now, at the Postal Museum. I made the pilgrimage, but the letter didn’t look right as an artefact in a display table like some great dead moth. As Johnson would have it, ‘Mail Art is not square, a rectangle, or a photo, or a book, or a slide. It is a river.’
What a delight it would be to pluck something like that out of the stream.
I also said I’d link you to the piece on friendship I wrote for GQ, and—can you remind me of the name of your favourite living poet? I knew I’d forget it.
Anyway, huge thanks again. Frankfurters on me next time you’re in London? Just need to find a helicopter…
Hope to cross paths soon.
Very best,
Sammi